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“Yay!” Arden bounced on her toes and clapped. She gave Rowan and Frankie quick hugs. Over Arden’s shoulder, Frankie grinned at Harry and bobbed her eyebrows up and down.
Rowan sighed with a sideways smile, gathering her hair into a quick bun. “You Bradys sure do love your games.”
“Thank yousomuch for coming,” Arden said.
“Don’t thank me.” Rowan pushed up the sleeves of her sweater. “Frankie insisted.”
Each race was a heat. Losing teams were disqualified each round, and the final two teams would face off in a game of tug-of-war. The first round would require two people to get a beach ball down and back across the field, with no hands on the ball or on each other. Frankie quickly declared herself Arden’s partner by claiming Rowan and Harry were too tall for her, even though she was nearly the same height as Rowan.
Pairs moved to the starting line. Rowan propped the beach ball on one cocked hip, sizing him up. “What’s our strategy, partner? Front-to-front, or back-to-back?” Smudges of color lit her cheeks. There were two little tooth-shaped dents in her bottom lip where she’d clamped down in eager anticipation.
Harry really hadn’t wanted to get up close and personal with strangers for these games, butthishe could do.
“Thirty seconds!” the voice on the loudspeaker called.
Harry knew from that first night of Team Tag how competitive Rowan was. He looked around to the other teams along the edge of the field. Some practiced sandwiching the ball between bellies, some were back-to-back. “Front to front, I think. Easier if we can see each other.”
Rowan nodded. She moved close and compressed the ball between them. Wiggled. Rolled it up and down. Bounced against it. “This feel okay?”
Tension flooded his groin. There were other things he wanted to feel, front to front with her. “Yep.”
The blaring classic rock faded. They waddled sideways to a line spray-painted in the grass. “On your marks!” cried a voice over the speakers.
She locked her gaze to his. “Ready?”
“Let’s do this.”
“Get set! Go!”
Jaunty circus music suddenly blasted from the speakers, tinny and overloud. A wacky trumpet melody and a plodding tuba bass line created an air of intentional absurdity, and when the duo next to them tripped and fell to the ridiculous beat, Rowan nearly lost it. A laugh burst from her that made the ball between them squeeze sideways. “Oh!” she said. When she pushed her belly against the ball to keep it from popping free, Harry stumbled backward and had to windmill his arms to keep upright. They spun in a circle, arms flailing, bending and contorting to try to get the ball securely between them again.
“Don’t touch it!” Rowan laughed. Her hair sagged out of its bun and hung suspended from the side of her head like a huge, disorderly bird’s nest.
She was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen.
“Keep it together, Dr. McKinnon,” Harry chuckled.
From the sideline, Frankie and Arden alternated between shouts of encouragement and refrains of “What the hell are youdoing?” It only made Rowan laugh harder.
They were securely in third place. They quickly passed the ball to Frankie and Arden for the second heat. As they sped away, Rowan raised her hand for a high-five, breathing fast. “Nice job, partner.”
Harry wanted to thrust his hands into her messy hair and kiss her hard. He studied her profile, memorizing. The tiniest upward tilt of her nose, and the curve of her cheekbones. The dip of her deep bottom lip, and the lazy lift of loose curls in the warm wind. Her chest, and the slim outline of her shoulders, still rising and falling rapidly under her thin sweater.
“Kind of fun when we’re on the same team,” he said.
“It is.” Rowan fanned her face with her hand and turned herattention to the chaos on the field. Her expression settled into practiced neutrality, but her eyes remained glossy with excitement.
It was incredible, really, how easily she could flip that interior switch. Fiery intensity to remote coolness, in a single heartbeat. Every time he sensed a scrap of reciprocated attraction from her, she snuffed it out so quickly it felt like he’d manufactured it with his loneliness. His hormones and his heart had teamed up to sabotage his mind.
The next game was a three-legged race. Arden helped pull a burlap sack over Harry’s left leg and Rowan’s right leg, bundling them together to form a single center limb. To maintain balance, he had to wrap an arm around her waist. Rowan did the same, hooking a thumb through a belt loop of his jeans. Her hair tickled his face, and the outer curve of her breast was pressed against his ribs. They gripped the bag tight in the center, keeping their eyes straight ahead.
“Ready?” Rowan said.
“So ready.”
“Middle legs step out first, okay?”
“You’re the boss,” Harry said.
