Everyone had a past. Whatever she was holding back, she had her reasons, and he needed to respect them.
It wasn't like he didn't have one of his own. Or maybe it was lack of a past. No real relationships to speak of. No lost love. No one who’d broken his heart. That alone was kind of pathetic.
He wished he hadn't mentioned his feelings for Juniper to his mom because she hadn't stopped asking about when she might get to meet Juniper, and that might get awkward at Dove and Trent's wedding since his parents would be attending.
Sterling yanked open her door.
"What's wrong?" she asked as he took her hand.
"Nothing. Why?"
"Your face." She waved a finger over her own. "It's all contorted like you ate an entire bag of sour candy."
"Oh. Now this is going to sound really strange, but I was thinking about my parents, which made me think about asking you to officially attend Dove and Trent's wedding with me."
"Later, you're going to have to explain how you got from one thought to the next, but I'd love to."
"Great." He looped his arm around her waist. "Now, how about we go inside and have a drink."
They went up the crushed-shell path toward the dark shape of the bungalow on its cinder blocks, the porch a deeper black against the night.
"I wasn't planning on a night-cap." She turned, fisted his shirt, and kissed him. It wasn't tentative. It was hard. So hard, she might have bruised his lips. But he didn't care. Not at all.
He walked her backward up the steps, one at a time, mouth on hers, his hand spread across the small of her back. She tasted like the wine from dinner—sweet with a hint of pear. Her fingers found the buttons of his shirt and unfastened two of them. He helped her with the rest, shrugging his shirt down his shoulders, off his arms, letting it drop to the ground. The warm night air hit his skin, and he didn't care about anything that wasn't her.
A sound from the dark of the porch hit his ears. A low hiss like a long exhale that didn't come from any throat he knew, and then a heavy, dragging thump against the boards that he felt through his boots.
He turned his head, and there, at the edge of his vision, against the deeper black by the porch rail he saw a shadow. A shape too long and too low to be anything that belonged on a person's porch, swung toward them, and the dark resolved into the flat wedge of a head and a pale flash of an open mouth with way too many teeth.
Sterling wrapped his hand in her shirt and hauled every pound of her against his arm, throwing them both sideways into the porch rail as jaws came through the space where her leg had been. The alligator's mouth closed on air with a crack like a slammed car door, an inch—less—from her shin, as the whole animal slammed past them into the rail. The old wood shuddered and held.
"Shit," she said, half out of his arms, twisting, her right hand dropping to her hip, slapping flat against denim where there was nothing. "That's a fucking alligator."
"It sure is." He didn't have time to deal with how quickly Juniper had moved her hand. Just because it slapped her hip where a sidearm might not mean anything. "We have to get inside." He scanned the porch, making a digital map in his brain, which included an alligator who decided to block their passageway to the front door.
"Don't you have a gun strapped to your ankle? Can't you just shoot it?"
"That's a big gator. A body shot will only piss it off even more," he said. "Our best bet is to get inside the house and then have Trent deal with it." He pulled out his cell and quickly sent Trent a text. Trent immediately sent a response with an ETA. Thank God. Hopefully they wouldn't be gator feed in the next ten to fifteen minutes.
"And how do you propose we do that?" she whispered as she clutched his shoulders.
The door was dead center, eight, ten feet down the porch, and the angry gator was between them and it.
Sterling had been in some dangerous situations. He'd even been in a few that included alligators. But Trent had been around. Or Cullen. Or both. They were the experts. They actually liked the damn prehistoric beasts. Sterling barely tolerated them.
"I assume the door's locked?" Sterling kept his body between her and the animal, one hand flat against her sternum, walking her back toward the end wall.
"Of course." Her voice had gone flat and even, the panic drained right out of it. "Key's in my bag."
Her bag was on the boards down by the steps. Other side of the gator.
It had recoiled after it hit the rail and now sat low against the floor, body cocked in a long S, mouth open on that pale gullet, hissing in a way that vibrated in Sterling's muscles.
"How big is he, do you think?" Juniper asked.
"Eight, ten feet? But I'm thinking it's injured."
"Why?" Juniper asked. "And more importantly, why do we care?"
