Because she was lying.
“In fact, if you must know…” She stabbed a finger into his pec for emphasis, “there are so many sparks between me and Nolan that our clothes catch fire every time we’re near each other.”
He registered the abrupt change in the pitch of her voice and her overly defensive stance and grinned. Yeah, he was feeling much better, and leaned in close enough to whisper in her ear. “Liar.”
A low growl of temper escaped her and once again she pushed clear of him, heading toward the pickup counter, bad attitude spilling from her with every swing of her sweet hips and sweeter ass.
Feeling a mixture of amusement, at himself, at her, he let her go.
Stone came up behind him. “You’re supposed to ask them out, not scare them off.”
TJ turned to his brother, standing tall and lean and tanned from long days on the mountain, his stark green eyes flat-out grinning, looking like what TJ knew was his own mirror image. “You think I scared her?”
“No, I think you do something else to her entirely.” Stone shook his head. “Though I have no idea what she sees in you, man. You’re ugly as sin.”
Ignoring that, TJ twisted to look at Harley again.
“You going to run off on yet another long trip to get away from her again?” Stone asked. “’Cause that’s only a temporary fix and we all know it.”
“Stone?”
“Yeah?”
“Shut up.”
Stone clapped a hand to TJ’s shoulder and didn’t shut up. “Face it, man. You’re as drawn to that woman as you’re drawn to the mountains. One guess as to which is more lethal.”
CHAPTER 1
Late the next afternoon, Harley sat at her kitchen table staring at her bank balance, but no matter how long she sat there or how much she squinted, the balance wasn’t going to cover her rent.
That is what happened when one took two part-time jobs, only one of them paying, and not all that well.
She shut her laptop, then thunked her head down on the table a few times, enough to scatter some papers and make her Canon digital bounce, but that didn’t help either. After six years of night school, she’d recently completed her degree in wildlife biology. Six long years of wrenching cars and trucks during the day and staying up all night studying, and she still couldn’t make ends meet.
But there was a silver lining. Thanks to her brand-new shiny degree, she’d been granted a part-time internship as a research biologist for a federal conservation agency, and if she impressed them, she had a shot at the lone full-time research position in their Colorado branch in the spring.
Since that job-unlike her internship-came with an actual paycheck, impressing them had become Harley’s biggest goal.
Her duties involved putting together data and analysis on a species indicator report, which was seeking to answer questions about western coyote populations. It sounded a lot more impressive than it actually was. In truth, there was almost no funding for the project, and the staff consisted of two wildlife biologists located in Colorado, and a few lowly, unpaid interns like herself scattered throughout the states of California, Nevada, Idaho, and Wyoming.
But for Harley, it was a foot in the door, because she intended to get that job in Colorado.
When her belly rumbled, reminding her she’d skipped lunch, she got up to look in the refrigerator. Unfortunately, the food fairy hadn’t paid her a visit, so her choices were questionable cottage cheese, an apple, or the last of her emergency stash of double fudge brownie ice cream. She’d been saving that for an extreme disaster, but the possibility of getting evicted for not paying her rent seemed pretty extreme.
She’d just stuffed a large bite into her mouth, and was moaning over the sweet chocolate melting on her tongue when her phone rang.
She looked at it with the same caution she’d give a piqued rattlesnake. It was probably her landlord. Or maybe it was her mom wanting to bring her some tofu concoction in thanks for helping her meet her mortgage this month. Or her father wanting to crash on her couch, since the fun-loving hippie had probably pissed off his latest lover and had nowhere else to go. It could be her sister Skye wanting to mooch food and/or cash, which-no surprise-was in shockingly low supply. Harley loved her family, she really did, but she couldn’t seem to master their carefree, no- worries attitude.
Not when the worries kept piling up.
The phone stopped ringing before her machine picked up.
Blowing out a relieved sigh, shaking off her sense of impending doom, Harley looked down at her coveralls. It was a good day, relatively speaking, as she had only one grease stain streaked down a thigh and another on her bare arm. Not bad. She could probably get it off with fingernail polish remover. Lifting her spoon, she used it as a mirror. She wasn’t vain. She knew she had an okay shape thanks to a decent metabolism, but seeing as she wasn’t all that into makeup or fashion, she rarely did anything to accent her attributes. She took a quick inventory of her face and realized she’d spoken too soon about not being all that filthy, since she had another grease streak over her forehead.
Good thing she didn’t have a date tonight.
Hey, look at that. Another silver lining to the crap that was her life.
The sorry truth was, she’d had only two dates in recent memory. Both with Nolan, her friend and boss. True, one of those dates had been more of an accident than anything else when she’d had to change out his alternator and drive him into South Shore for a meeting. But still, it was two dates more than she’d had in at least six months.
Tonight would have been their third night out, which would have been great because it was his turn to buy dinner, except he’d gotten stuck in Placerville and wouldn’t be home until too late.
But if things were as really, really hot between them as she’d claimed to TJ, “too late” wouldn’t have been a problem, a little voice inside her said.
There are so many sparks between me and Nolan, our clothes catch fire every time we’re near each other.
God. She’d actually said those words out loud to TJ, who’d smiled that smile, the one that gave her goose bumps, as he’d whispered “liar.”
Arrogant, cocky ass.
But he was one gorgeous arrogant, cocky ass.
She let out a shuddery sigh, the kind only good chocolate or a good-looking guy could cause and continued to eat her ice cream. When the knock came, she stared at her door, then slowly moved to look through the peephole.
Damn.
It was the gorgeous ass in person, looking a little hot and tired, as if, like her, he’d just come in from a long day. She remained still in indecision, blowing out a sigh when he merely arched a brow at her.
She said nothing when she opened the door, which wasn’t polite, but she wasn’t feeling polite. She was feeling out of control, unnerved, and off balance-three things that TJ Wilder probably never felt.
Something else he apparently didn’t feel-the need to fill a silence. Instead he stood there, well over six feet of hard muscle and testosterone, doing what he’d been doing all her life without even trying-affecting her brain cells, turning them to mush.
Yes, just looking at him turned her from an educated biologist into a drooling imbecile. It wasn’t her fault he’d been blessed by the gene gods. He had a lot of sun-kissed brown hair, wavy and unruly, falling over his forehead, and deep-set, assessing, sharp green eyes that missed exactly nothing. He was tanned from long days in the high- altitude sun spent trekking and guiding across trails that would make a city guy’s bowels go weak. And then there was his body, honed to solid, ungiving sinew wrapped in a healthy dose of male.
“Why are you here?” she asked. Not exactly as friendly a greeting as Nolan would have received, but her reasons for not being comfortable with TJ were as complicated as everything else in her life at the moment.
