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“Good luck with that,” Shelby said.
“Yeah,” Kit agreed, and she did her best to stop herself from looking at him, but much like her first best, this was not enough. Because she ended up looking at him. And he smiled. And she felt it. Hot and slow as it moved through her.
“If you make my bride upset,” Chance said, looking right at his brother, “it’ll be your head.”
“If your bride can be upset about ribbon curl... I don’t know, man.”
“When was the last time you ever loved anything?” Chance said to his brother.
“I had a pretty damned good cheeseburger at about one o’clock today,” Kit said. “I think I might’ve loved that.”
She couldn’t help it. She found herself laughing. And their eyes clashed again. This time, the electricity sent a shower of sparks through her, settling down between her thighs, and it made her twitchy.
This was the problem. When she had been in middle school, she had been able to write off the things that Kit Carson made her feel, but as she had hurtled toward adulthood, it had been impossible to pretend she didn’t know.
But it was... It was wrong. It had been wrong because he was her enemy—by virtue of his family connection, nothing personal—and then it had been wrong—very wrong—because she was in love with another man.
Married to another man.
She gritted her teeth together. No. She wouldn’t even think about it. She got up from the table, heading over to one of the coolers that were set around their little gathering. They had tables placed all around the yard, where different family members were helping with wedding favor assembly, and all around that were coolers with different beverages, and there was also a table full of snacks. She decided that it was definitely refreshment time.
She felt hot and unwieldy. Lost in the memories of the past, and the debate over ribbon curls, was the double entendre that had passed between herself and Kit. Well, not lost. It was just not the big thing that remained in the forefront. But the slow burn of it was left behind. She was uneasy, and she needed a moment with it.
She reached into the cooler and took out a bottle of beer. And then she heard footsteps, and straightened, looking across the cooler to see none other than Kit himself.
“Anything good in there?”
“They have the kind of beer that you would expect from a couple engaging in this level of wedding frippery. Does that answer your question?”
“Oddly, yes it does.” He grinned, then reached down into the cooler, and took out the first beer his hand closed around.
She felt like saying something sharp. She felt like being mean and making him walk away from her. But the truth of the matter was, all of this stuff... This stuff was one-sided. He didn’t know that she had a long-standing hated attraction for him. And yes, they had clashed on a few occasions. So there was... There was a thing.
Though, she denied it. And had denied it on multiple occasions. In fact, she could remember clearly one time when they had been down at the Thirsty Mule, and he had been goading her, while offering to buy her and her friends a round of drinks—it had been girls’ night out. And Kit had kept on making comments about how Shelby and hedidn’t normally get along. There wasa whole situation with her, and shedidn’t like him. On and on. Until she had screamed at him at the top of her lungs:you and I do not have a situation.
Of course, for the rest of forever, everyone in town had convinced themselves that there was a situation.
Chuck had just laughed about it. Thankfully. And he had written off her umbrage as the normal sort of umbrage that her family felt whenever the Carson name was mentioned. And she had never had to admit that it wasn’t just Kit’s name that made her feel all out of sorts. It was the man himself.
He grabbed one of the bottle openers from the top of the cooler and popped it easily. Then he reached out to grab her beer out of her hand. A few things happened simultaneously. The first was that his fingertips brushed hers. They were hot and rough, the way a man’s hands were when he worked the land.
She didn’t comprehend what was happening in the moment, and she did not release the hold on her beer.
Each of those realizations and moments occurred in one breath, and she found herself being dragged over the cooler into Kit.
“Easy,” he said, taking hold of her arms. And she got an even more intense taste of the roughness of his hands. The heat there.
Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord, save her.
She was being tested, and she was failing. Here, at the preparation for her sister’s wedding, she was having a full-blown attack of lust for a man who was about to be family-by-marriage. The man whom she had spent all these years pretending she had no situation with.
It was a situation.
“What the hell were you doing?” she asked, still clinging to her beer, still being held on to by him.
“I was gonna open your beer, Shelby,” he said, peeling the bottle from her hands, while he set her back onto her feet. “Just a beer. Not a situation.”
That bastard.
