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I want to feel more of this man.
The thought came out of nowhere, and had the kind of shock value only truth can provide. She couldn't deny it, though. She usually worked very hard to keep inappropriate thoughts about him at bay, but for a split second, she let them invade her mind. What would it be like to kiss him? What did he look like naked? What would it feel like to –
She shook her head abruptly and pulled her hand free. Parker was her friend, her ride. Nothing more.
Anything more meant caring too much about him. Caring too much meant losing oneself in another, she firmly believed. It was something she could never,wouldnever do. She'd seen it happen time and time again in her family; she valued her freedom too much to risk it.
“C’mon,” she started, wrapping her arms around her waist. “You gotta admit, I did kinda kick ass.” Parker laughed again, looking at her.
“Paige, you wereamazing. When she grabbed your hair, I thought that was it, she was gonna have you on the ground – she outweighed you by a lot. But you charging her and knocking her to the floor? Epic. I mean, don’t ever do anything that stupid again and I won’t bail you out of jail if you ever do get arrested – butepic,” he laughed. She grinned back at him.
“I told you I could hold my own. C’mon, let’s go back to the motel. I’m starving and I think you still have a bag of Funyans,” she stated before marching off. Parker’s laughter followed behind her.
~5~
“... bad decisions taste worst the day after ...”
Parker stared up atthe ceiling while Paige slept in the other bed, softly snoring. Something he'd learned about her early on – when she drank heavily, she often snored. Not loudly, but enough to dispel any rumors about girls never snoring. He also knew without looking that she was probably laying on her back, spread eagle, with the blankets pulled up around her knees.
He was in trouble.
The first time he'd seen Paige, in that tiny police station in Alabama, he'd thought she was gorgeous. A tall, slender, leggy brunette with a head to toe tan and an amazing rack? Being all hetero male,of coursehe'd been attracted. He would probably never say so out loud to her, but when she'd been seated near him, he'd wondered if she was a model. Her tall height and slim build – not to mention her beautiful face, with its high cheek bones and intense eyes and sharp smile – reminded him of the women on the runways for Victoria’s Secret.
Her bad attitude and lack of any serious amount of money gave away her non-model status quickly, though. It also told him that even though she was smoking hot, she was off limits to him. So he'd made it his mission to hide any sort of attraction he felt towards her.
It was becoming almost impossible. He liked her more and more every day. Sure, sometimes her personality could be described as caustic at best, but he actually kinda liked that about her. He liked her even more when she was alone with him, though, being silly and fun and almost flirty.
Watching her flirt with guys when they were out and about, however, made him want to punch everyone in the face, though, including himself. Seeing her smile at them made him want to throw up. She didn’t smile enough, and random guys in midwestern dive bars certainly weren’t worthy of one.
When she'd climbed out of the pool in Mississippi, soaking wet and staring up at him in the moonlight, he'd almost lost it. Grabbed her and shown her exactly what he was feeling. But he thought a move like that would get him a swift kick in the balls and her exit without so much as a goodbye, so he'd restrained himself.
She was always mentioning how “any day now” she was gonna “get the itch to head out”, and how “unusual” it was for her to spend so much time with one person. He didn’t know whether to be flattered or offended, but he knew he didn’t want to do anything to encourage the “itch”; he didn’t want to scare her off.
And then tonight. Parker had seen Paige in shorts and in her sports bra, and there had even been an incident in a bathroom where he'd seen brief flashes of her in only her leggings and a bra.
But seeing her in a tight mini-skirt and heels, with a shirt that fit her like a second skin, had him barely looking anywhere else. She wasn’t showing any cleavage, and it was true he'd seen her plenty of times in shorts that were probably the same length as the skirt, but it was still different.Sexier. Just being in the same room with her made his blood pressure rise. The tension was becoming so unbearable, he worried he was going to have a heart attack at some point.
