Shock pings through me. “Excuse me?”
She shows me her phone. Sure enough, next to my name, there’s a winning bid of ten thousand dollars for a date.
And it’s anonymous.
Sarah takes her phone back. “I don’t get it. Why would you bid anonymously on a date with someone? You can’t even collect it if you don’t reveal your identity, right?”
My mind immediately goes to one person.
But no. He wouldn’t.
I mean, I did tell him he could bid remotely. But that was a joke.
“Maybe it was a mistake and they meant to do a general donation and just clicked on my name or something,” I say.
She shrugs. “Whatever, girl.”
I try to keep my mind off it all morning, and I sort of succeed. It’s almost noon, a perfect sunny fall Montana day, and I take a moment to appreciate the dry heat and golden light of the West. It’s so different than the grey dreary East Coast weather I grew up with, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop taking my new home for granted.
I’ve bounced around the country, from Los Angeles to Austin to Charleston, trying out different places to hang my hat, but I knew the second I landed in Marble Falls that this place would be my home.
I instantly fell in love with the towering mountains and limitless plains of sweetgrass cut through with powerful rivers. The cottonwood trees that fade to gold in the autumn. The chameleonic sky, some days a clear sapphire, other days cloaked in storm clouds. The charming downtown with its old brick buildings and storefronts that bedeck themselves in epic Halloween and Christmas and Fourth of July finery.
Plus, there’s a healthy tourist population, along with a clientele base of wealthy full-time residents and even wealthier vacation home owners. So for a small town, the interior design business is excellent.
I’m up on a ladder stacking pillows on a display case when the bell above the door jingles.
“Be right with you!” I say, not looking, concentrating on my place on the ladder.
“Take your time,” comes a deep, rough, sexy voice.
It’s a voice that’s quite familiar now, since I’ve been replaying it in my head constantly over the last twelve hours.
It’s Slade Rhodes.
Chapter 4
Still Waters
LILA
My head whips around and I nearly miss the next rung of the ladder. Slade is standing beneath me, looking up at me from beneath the brim of his black cowboy hat.
From up here I get a view I didn’t have last night, the full width of those shoulders filling out a worn grey plaid flannel, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms corded with muscle and dusted with dark hair. His Wranglers fit his athlete’s body breathtakingly well. He’s got his chin tipped up to look at me and the brim of his hat is pushed back just enough that I can see his face clearly, can see those deep green eyes trained on me.
It’s the second time I’ve met him and I’m still not used to the size of him, that height that puts us eye-to-eye when I’m halfway up a ladder. My research last night taught me he’s been throwing other enormous athletes into boards for fifteen years and he looks every bitof it.
That same rabbit hole also led me to the pregame stretching videos and, yeah. I was not prepared for that. The rolling hip thrust into the ice? My jaw dropped. I’m sure there’s a very good sports medicine explanation behind it, but the move looksintenselysexual.
I think of the comments underneath so many of those videos, usually some mixture of awestruck or thirsty. Or both. Like:Slade Rhodes is a beast.
Yes, indeed.
As I take careful steps down the ladder, he holds out a hand to help me on the last step. His palm is warm and calloused, a working man’s hands. So unlike the soft hands of the boys I’ve known before, who only ever used theirs to swing a golf club or sign papers with Daddy’s Montblanc pen.
My feet hit the floor and he doesn’t immediately let go, and now I’m standing close enough to count the dark flecks in his green eyes.
“Hi,” I say, a little breathlessly.
