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“Totally,” she said. Somehow it made it worse that she actually agreed with him. “I kept imagining some small furry creatures coming after me and making a nest on my head when they saw how helpless I was.”
She was impossible. She really wasn’t taking this seriously at all. The light from her phone escaped past her hair, showing him where it had fallen. He reached for it, his fingers brushing past her cheek. She stilled, her eyes snapping to his.
He struggled to control his breath when he got caught by her sudden intense scrutiny. He froze. No, no, he hadn’t meant to make her think that he was… uh… well, what did she think?
That he was about to kiss her?
Was he?
He groaned. He’d better not! And then as if in direct rebellion against his every good intention, his gaze was drawn to her full lips.
He knew exactly how they felt against his.
He scrambled back from her, brushing the hay from his arms, seeing that it was all over her too. He turned from her, feeling his tongue twist over itself as he tried to distract his thoughts away from her. “Yeah, glad you tested out the hay chute for the kids. That went great.”
“Farm slide,” she corrected. “And wecouldtweak it a little, make it more childproof.”
His attention shot back to her in his dismay. She smiled up at him from the hay, resting her cheek against her hand. What was she still doing there? The light from the hay haloed her blonde hair with its glow.
His heart dove out of his chest. This was getting ridiculous! His hands went to her wrists and he helped her up, so that she was sitting next to him—anything to get her away from that angelic glow of her phone.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “No Hay Chute or–or… Farm Slide or whatever else you want to call it.”
She clicked her tongue at him like he was the one who’d lost his mind. “Don’t worry. Now that I’ve tested it out, we know what can go wrong. Of course, I’ll try all of our improvements out first.”
“Is it too much to ask that I’m not here for it?”
She let out a guffaw. “Fine, Mommy Doomsday! You win. No farm slide.”
“Mommy Doomsday?”
She was seriously calling him that now? Maybe not. Her sheepish grin under a stream of her tousled hair gave her away. He wasn’t sure how long she’d been teasing him about doing the farm slide after he’d saved her, but it might’ve been from the beginning.
He’d fallen for her joking hook, line, and sinker. It disturbed him that she already knew how to play him. “You’re evil, you know that?”
She reached out to him and patted his arm in her friendly way. “Hey, thanks for helping me out. I guess that was pretty stupid, but…” She arched a brow at him with the same wheeling-and-dealing look that he’d seen on the infamous Devlin Trout during his many political press conferences streamed on the news lately. “At least put in a pony ride or something… or a hay ride…” After getting nothing in the affirmative from him, she sighed. “A petting zoo? Like the one you showed me over the summer?”
Was she really going to remind him about that disastrous day right now? “Yeah, sure… sure.” He’d agree to almost anything, just to stop this conversation.
“Really?” She jumped up with glee. “I came up with an idea that you like?”
“Yeah, of course, I love it.” He ran his hand through his hair, realizing that he’d lost his stocking cap somewhere in the hay, too. He searched around the hay with his hands, and not finding it that way, he reached around her to get her phone for its light.
As soon as he got it into his hands, a message flashed over her screen: “It won’t be too hard to find out where you went for Thanksgiving. I have a few guesses…”
But it didn’t end there. His forehead wrinkled when he read the expletive at the end of that strange message. He quickly read the name of who sent it to her. Stalker.
Stalker?
She snatched her phone away from him. “Oops!” she said. “These texts just keep coming in.”
Chapter Eleven
“It isn’t who you think it is,” Eva said.
It was that horrible TalkieTalk creeper, so it reallywasn’twhat Cole was thinking… if he was thinking anything, except if he wasn’t, now he might be. His head was tilted at her.
Ugh, she was making this worse.
