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“So you’re sometimes the victim of violence and not always the perpetrator?” she asked.
“Ha ha.” I scowled at her.
The smart thing would have been to chuck her out of the jeep, hightail it back to my secluded cabin, and pray I never saw her again. But I still owed her money. I pulled off her hiking sandal, noticing her pretty pink toenails and a tiny heart tattoo on her big toe. She didn’t strike me as the girly type, and I normally never noticed such things. I certainly didn’t have a foot fetish, but this woman’s feet were turning me on. I closed my eyes and swore at myself.
“Did that hurt?” I asked, pointing at the tattoo.
“Only when I remember the jerk I got it for.”
Unlucky in love. I could relate to that. I slid my hand up her foot, feeling for fractures, then wrapped my fingers around her ankle. Her skin was silky soft, and my touch raised goosebumps up her calves. I glanced up the length of her leg to the edge of her shorts, following the smooth expanse back to where I still held onto her ankle. What else could I do to give her goosebumps? Better yet, what kind of sounds could I draw from her with my touch? The urge to slide my hand up her thigh along the route my eyes just traveled made me jerk away from her. That wasn’t ever going to be a good idea.
“I think you’ll walk again,” I said gruffly, acting like I hadn’t just been getting hard thinking about stroking her thighs and making her moan.
I wrapped her ankle and put her shoe back on, and she jumped out of the car, landing neatly on her good foot. “Come on,” she said. “I have to walk that way anyway. It’s dumb to leave the parking lot only to go into a different parking lot fifty yards away.”
“Why are you walking on a bad ankle?” I asked. “Where’s your car?”
“That was my friend’s car. He’s kind of a part of my team, so he lets me use it to go up the mountain.”
“Ah, and you won’t need it for a while since you’re not going up there anymore.”
“What’s the deal with that?” she asked, stopping and blocking my access to the ATM. She looked up at me and there was no friendly sparkle for me in her big, green eyes. Her lip jutted out in a salty frown and all I could think about was kissing that pout away. “I don’t make any noise and I never litter. Are you doing shady stuff up there that you don’t want anyone to find out about? Because if you are, I can keep my mouth shut.”
I moved around her to get her money and get her out of my life before I did something stupid. “Not from what I can see,” I said. She yelped a laugh completely against her will by the way she clamped her lips together afterwards. “I’m not doing anything shady, but I want seclusion. It was advertised as a secluded cabin, not a death wish parade route.”
She looked surprisingly pretty even when she rolled her eyes hard enough for them to cross. “I’m one person, not a parade, and the stunts I do are completely safe.”
“Completely safe?” I wasn’t going to buy that.
“You look close to my age,” she said, throwing me off. “Are you a really well preserved elderly person or do you just not know how to have fun?”
Now it was my turn to laugh against my will. What a brat. I shouldn’t have been enjoying myself, especially when she was going in on me pretty hard. My moment of mirth evaporated when I saw the message on the machine. “Oh, shit.” I thumped the ATM.
“I was only joking,” she said. I turned around to see her biting her lip, her eyes wide.
I sighed. “It’s not you. The ATM is empty. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
“Yes, actually,” she said with a smirk. “Welcome to Keen Arrow, Montana, friend.”
I didn’t want her to have anything to hold over my head, but the very town was working against me. “Friend, huh,” I said. “I don’t even know your name. I seem to remember introducing myself but…”
“Sorry about that,” she said. “I was in shock. Some brute knocked me over out of the blue and I was a flustered mess.” She stopped and smiled, holding out her hand. “I’m Laurel. Do you want to pretend we just met?”
“Yes,” I said, my head spinning.
She was a whirlwind. I grasped her hand and held it until she looked down at it and cleared her throat. When she looked back up, her cheeks were pink. I liked this fresh start of ours.
“Why don’t you make me dinner?” she said. Okay, I didn’t like the fresh start that much, but she barreled over any chance I had at shutting her suggestion down. “I’ve always wanted to see inside that fancy cabin.”
“There’s no food up there and I barely bought enough for myself.”
“You bought two steaks,” she said. Tenacious.
“Yes, for two meals,” I tried to explain, but she only beamed as if I was making her point for her.
“That’s perfect then. Come on, instead of paying me back.” When I couldn’t come up with another excuse and somehow couldn’t flat out tell her no, she grabbed my hand and squeezed. “You owe me and not just money.”
I really looked at her then, pointing to her ankle while she grasped my hand, eager anticipation all over her face. Sure, she was slightly insufferable. She nearly gave me a heart attack once already. But she’d made me laugh and was attractive as all hell, too. It had been way too long since I spent any time with a woman I didn’t work with. I wasn’t a love ‘em and leave ‘em type like my younger brother Eli. One night stands just weren’t my thing. And I wasn’t lucky enough to marry my high school sweetheart like my older brother Will. Not that Will had gotten his happily ever after.
Laurel looked at me expectantly. I came up here to figure things out. I didn’t need a distraction. Or, did I? What if a distraction was the very thing I needed? She crossed her arms under her chest, pushing her full breasts up. I felt like that was the sign I needed. Distraction it was.
