Eighteen.
My palms were sweating, and my grip was going. My back screamed, but I managed two more.
Twenty.
I dropped, landing clean, and turned around.
“Tibby” had his arms crossed and his head tilted, but his expression had shifted. The easy grin was still there, but underneath it was something more focused, unsettling even, like he was zeroed in on me and I had nowhere to go.
“Twenty,” Tanner announced helpfully from the bartop. “That’s—yeah, very impressive.”
“Your turn.” I arched a brow at “Tibby.”
He unfolded from where he was leaning, took off the shark tooth necklace he was wearing, and put it in his pocket before jumping up to the bar in one effortless motion.
He did the first ten like I’d done mine, clean and effortless.
Then he did ten more.
His gaze never left mine as he pulled up again, then again. Then five more. They weren’t as easy by the end. His jaw was set, and I watched his shoulders and the veins in his forearms and the flex of the tattoo across his biceps with an attention that had nothing to do with the contest.
He dropped at twenty-eight.
Neither of us said anything for a second.
“Best of three.”
“That wasn’t in the terms,” he drawled, though his voice held no annoyance.
“The terms have been amended.”
“Don’t like to lose, do you?”
He had no idea.
He studied me with that same focused look beneath the cocky performance.
“All right. Best of three.”
Tanner made a sound from the bar. We both looked at him.
“I’m not here,” he said. “I’m a plant. Proceed.”
Round two I pushed to twenty-three. The burn had moved past good and into humbling, my grip starting to argue with me around rep fifteen this time, but I held form, hit twenty-three, and dropped, breathing harder than I wanted him to see.
He did twenty-three and a half.
Hung there at the top of the last one, chin barely over the bar, holding it for a beat longer than necessary before dropping.
“Half reps don’t count.”
He grinned up at me from the sand. “Half reps absolutely count.”
“In what competition?—”
“In this one, Selena.” He flashed me a devastating wink.
It landed somewhere in my sternum and shot straight downward.
