Page 61 of Tracking Wolfe

“Walk me through the last time you saw the notebook.” Though he kept his voice calm, his shoulders straightened.

I took him through my afternoon—the visit from Jake and Shay, how Brennan had stopped by, where I’d looked afterward.

“Did you ask Jake tonight if he remembered seeing it earlier?” Trace asked.

I shook my head and hesitated before explaining why. “I think I was afraid of saying it out loud and making it real. Also… I don’t want anyone to know how important it is to me. Which is ridiculous because all someone would have to do is read it to know.”

I pressed my lips together to keep from saying anything else, but Trace wasn’t stupid.

“Were you writing something important, Wolfe?”

“What, like… like a diary?” I wasn’t a great liar, so this was torture. I flicked my eyes up at him and down to the hands in my lap. “You think I wrote about… what, you?”

Trace’s face turned from focused concern to heated curiosity. “Did you write about me?”

I felt the blood rush to my face. “Of course. I gave our hookup today a chili pepper rating. One and a half chili peppers.”

His mouth opened in an O shape before I let out a laugh and clapped a hand over my mouth. “Your face!”

Trace’s eyes were wide in shock. “That was only one and a half chili peppers? What the fuck have you been doing with other people?” He sucked in a breath. “You know what? Don’t answer that. I don’t want to hear about you with other men. Christ.”

My chest expanded. Was Trace… jealous? That was unexpected.

And exciting.

I took a chance and crawled over to straddle his lap, putting my hands on his bare chest before moving them up to cup his neck. His late-day stubble turned me the fuck on, and so did the scent of him. Dried sweat. Campfire smoke. Clean mountain air.

My sheets.

“Maybe we could try again. Go for a better score this time,” I suggested, smirking at him enough to let him know the whole thing had been a joke.

I had written about him, but I hadn’t used his name. And I’d sure as hell not given him a chili pepper rating. The Scoville scale didn’t go that high anyway.

Trace’s hands moved up my thighs to my hips and pulled me closer. “Yeah? You want me to pull out my fancy tricks?”

I leaned in to press a kiss to his sandpaper cheek. “You have tricks? Thought old dogs didn’t have those.”

He squeezed his arms around me and flipped us so I was on my back with him propped above. “Brat.”

My laughter felt free, like a balloon escaping the helium tank and slipping up-up-up into a bright blue sky. “I may have given you an unfair rating,” I admitted.

“Ya think?” He tilted his head down to kiss my neck.

I hadn’t thought it was possible, but my stress over the journal slid away with every brush of his lips against my skin.

“You’ll have to work very hard to impress me.” My voice was breathy and not at all convincing.

“Mm.” The deep thrum of his voice vibrated against my throat as he moved down to kiss my collarbones. “I’ll take that under advisement, Marian.”

I curled my arms around his head, enjoying the woodsmoke scent of his hair. It brought back memories of camping trips with him. Times spent exchanging stories around a fire with Trace, my dad, Rosie, and Lennon.

Back then, Trace had seemed larger than life. The younger guy who was ten times cooler than my dads and always had stories of intrigue from his job as a bodyguard, and then later, his search and rescue adventures.

Trace Bishop had always been fit and energetic, but also calm and capable. For years, I’d tried to explain away my attraction to him as a simple desire to be him.

But it had become harder and harder over the years to ignore the way my body reacted to thoughts of him.

A memory snuck its way between us. “When I was sixteen, I jerked off to the sight of you rock climbing.”