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“I don’t mind,” he said as he scrubbed at one of the platters. “This place looks like a pink glitter bomb went off inside of it. Besides, it’s not like I had anything else on my schedule.”
“Have you seen any of the sights since you got to town?”
He shrugged and moved on to the next dish, a casserole dish that had been full of brownies earlier that day. “Not really. I’ve just been hanging at the house and the beach.”
“There are a lot of amazing places around here you should visit before you leave. At the very least, you need to see Whisper Falls and the hot springs before your trip ends.”
“Whisper Falls?”
“Yeah. It not really a tourist destination. The locals like to keep it a secret so it’s not overrun during tourist season.”
He shut off the water once the last dish was done and turned to face me, propping his trim hips against the counter and drying his hands on one of my dishtowels. There wasn’t anything the slightest bit sexy about it, yet he still managed to make my stomach flutter just by drying his freaking hands.
“Sawyer?”
His voice jolted me back to reality and my gaze darted up to his to find his eyes shining with mirth. “Sorry. What?”
He didn’t try at all to hide his dimpled smirk. “I asked if you were going to get in trouble for letting me in on a town secret. You know, angry mobs with pitchforks and stuff.”
“Nah, they’ll forgive me. Just as long as you don’t spill the secret to anyone else.”
He made a cross over his chest and lifted his fingers in a Boy Scout salute. “You have my word. I’ll never tell a soul. This is a secret I’ll take to my grave.”
I gave him a squinty, incredulously look. “Were you even a Boy Scout?”
The corners of his mouth creeped upward, a sinful grin slowly unwrapping in the most tempting way. “For a bit. Then they told my mom I didn’t follows the rules and was a troublemaker.”
My eyes went wide, my brows shooting up toward my hairline. “Oh? And what rules did you break?”
“I think the easier question is which ones didn’t I break.”
A light giggle pushed its way from my throat. “And the trouble making?”
He held his hands up in surrender. “I might have drawn a butt on all the patches sewn on one boy’s vest. But in my defense, Bobby Osborne was a little shit. He acted like he was better than everyone else because his dad drove a BMW and he got all his clothes at the mall. And he peed his sleeping bag during a campout and blamed it on his tent buddy.”
“Yep, definitely sounds like a little shit. He deserved every one of those butts.”
“Sure did. And when the rest of the kids started laughing and pointing at them, he cried like a little sissy. Getting kicked out was totally worth it. If I could go back in time, I’d do it all over again.”
Luna chimed in from her prone position in the living room. “If you could go back in time, I’d expect you to up your game and draw penises instead of butts.”
I pointed in her direction. “I’m with her.”
“Valid point.” He pushed off the counter and stalked closer, his thick jean-clad thighs bulging with each step as his long legs ate up the distance. He pressed his palms into the counter, arms spread wide as he leaned in and made all those muscles pop and strain against the sleeves of his gray T-shirt.
“So, about these falls. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to go check them out with me on your next day off.”
A warning siren went off in my head, but it wasn’t because I sensed danger. It was because I knew I was standing at the very edge of a dangerously slippery slope with nothing to hold on to. And yet, instead of making an excuse for why I couldn’t or just flat-out refusing, I found myself nodding, a smile playing at my lips to match his dimpled one. “Yeah. That sounds like fun.”
He hung around a while longer, helping me finish cleaning and giving Luna a hard time for being so dramatic. Once he was gone, I found and dumped the rest of her wine coolers and moved into the living room, plopping down on the love seat and kicking my feet up on the coffee table.
“God, I don’t remember the last time I was this exhausted.” Luna lifted her forearm from off her eyes and gave me a wry look, a low chuckle rolling from her throat. “What? What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. You just didn’t seem all that tired when you and Trent were getting your flirt on.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I insisted, although there was a part of me, the part that questioned if that had really been flirting or if it was all in my head, that was still a little excited to hear Luna say that.
I quickly gagged and hog-tied that part, stuffing her into the back of a closet where she couldn’t cause any more trouble. “We agreed we’d be friends.”
