Her head whipped around so fast for a moment he thought she’d turned into the little girl in The Exorcist. “Don’t you dare laugh.” She paused and drew a breath. “Okay. I realize that there’s possibly an etiquette here.” She eyeballed his crotch and grimaced in guilt. “After all, you gave me an, um…”
He arched a brow. “Orgasm?”
“Yes.” She blushed. “That. And I didn’t…” She gestured with her finger in the general direction of his button fly.
“Do me in return?” he finished for her.
She closed her eyes. “I…owe you.”
“Are you offering?”
Her mouth fell open, and he let out a low laugh. Her eyes narrowed and she shoved a toothbrush into her mouth, vanishing into the woods.
He shook his head, grabbed his own toothbrush, and made his way into the woods in the opposite direction.
By the time he got back, Harley was peeling an orange. She looked up at him, for a single beat, her gaze both soft and unguarded, and he felt an odd catch deep inside.
Then she blinked and the moment was gone. She handed him half of the orange.
“Thanks.” He had no idea what she was thinking. “You okay?”
“Don’t worry, TJ. I know what that was. Or rather, what it wasn’t.”
“Okay, good. Maybe you can explain it to me.”
She shoved a piece of orange in her mouth. “We’re going to be okay. All we have to do is get back to where we were.”
“You mean home?”
“No.” She gave him a duh look. “I mean metaphorically. We need to get back to basics. Back to ignoring each other. And/or bickering.”
“I see,” he said, when he really didn’t see at all.
“I mean something real between us would never work,” she said. “Knowing that makes it easier. Right?”
“Right.” Christ, she was making him dizzy. Or maybe that was because most of his blood was still drained out of his brain and in his-
“It’s not like you’re even around to be a boyfriend,” she said, still talking, still under the apparent illusion that he was following her logic. “You’re gone all the time. You like women in your bed but not your life. Et cetera, et cetera.” She sucked on a piece of orange and blew a few of his brain cells.
“So trust me,” she continued. “I don’t look at you and think relationship. Mostly I look at you and think I wish I had something to hit you over the head with.”
He blinked. “So I should stay at arm’s length then?”
“Eight to ten inches should do it.”
She’d walked away by the time the laugh tumbled out of him, but he didn’t remain amused. He’d just been thoroughly put in his place, dumped before he could even think about doing the dumping.
Even more disconcerting, he got it. He got her. Because he knew her better than she wanted to admit. He knew that thanks to her sweet, hippy-throwback parents, she’d grown up with an utter lack of tradition, and he knew she secretly yearned for exactly that.
She wanted a solid, stand-up guy, with a white picket fence and two point four kids. Which is what had drawn her to Nolan. Nolan was one of those solid, stand-up guys, one who’d absolutely give her what she needed.
Unlike him. “Harley-”
“Ignoring each other,” she said. “Remember?”
Yeah.
Her eyes drifted to his bare chest, then darted away, but not before he caught the flare of heat.
“I’m going to have a hard time ignoring you when you’re looking at me like I’m lunch,” he said, reaching for his shirt.
“I’ll work on that. Maybe you could get fat or ugly or something.” Ignoring his laugh, she sat on the edge of the ridge as dawn rode in, banishing the last of the dark, bringing first a deep violet, then a lighter purple, and finally pink into the sky. TJ sat with her, and in silence they watched Mother Nature do her glorious thing.
As the sky lightened, far below a handful of coyotes moved through the meadow, looking for breakfast. TJ counted four coyotes and…“What the hell? That looks like”-he sat up straighter-“a badger?”
“You’ve never seen that?” Harley asked, looking through her camera lens. “The two breeds have a sort of symbiotic relationship when they need to. The coyote can run, but they’re not good diggers. And the badger-”
“Can dig but not run.” He grinned. “They’re working together for breakfast. Amazing.”
The only sound was the hum of insects and early morning bird chatter, since Harley’s long-lens digital camera snapped silently. “Look,” she murmured, leaning into him to show him her LED screen and a gorgeous shot of one of the coyotes up close, nose quivering in the air as the animals caught their scent on the morning air.
“You’re good,” he murmured, turning his face into her hair.
“It’s the camera.”
“It’s more than the camera.” He pulled back and looked at her. “Hell, Harley, you really should come work for us.”
“Why?”
“Well, for money, for one thing. Our clients would pay big bucks for you to document their trips.”
Standing, she pulled on her pack. “I’m going to try to fix the equipment on that west ridge.”
He pulled on his pack also, and they headed out. Normally, being on the mountain in the morning was his favorite time. The air was crisp with a hint of the warmth the day would bring, and the residual dew made everything sparkle. Far above, the majestic peaks were still snow-tipped. The ground beneath their feet was soft and spongy from the rain, everything around them bursting with fall colors.
“So,” he said after a few minutes. “Why exactly aren’t we going to follow through with this thing between us?”
“There is no thing, TJ.”
“Really? ’Cause it felt like a thing this morning when I made you come.”
She tripped, and sent him a glare. “No-talking zone.”
He grinned. She was walking with attitude, and she was sexy as hell. “You want me,” he said.
“No talking.”
“I want you back,” he told her. “I think I’ve proved that. So what’s the problem?”
“My problem?” She stopped so abruptly he nearly plowed her over when she whipped around to gape at him. “It’s you! It’s always been you!”
He raised a brow.
She blew out a breath and pushed him in front of her to walk in the lead. “You drive me crazy,” he heard her mutter.
“Maybe, but you’re watching my ass as I walk.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a great ass,” she admitted, surprising a laugh out of him. After about five minutes, she sighed. “Okay, it’s possible I overreacted back there.”
“No. Really?”
“My problem isn’t you, per se,” she said. “But more the way I seem to react to you.”
“Is that an apology?”
“For what?”
“For molesting me in my sleep.”
“I was kind of hoping we could forget about that.”
Normally that would be fine with him. After all, he never begged a woman to want him, and he didn’t plan to start now. If she hadn’t been interested, he would have let it go.
But she was interested. Interested enough to come all over him, panting his name as she did. It’d been erotic as hell.
Which left him confused. He glanced back at her. She was small and curvy, and walking with an attitude that was making him hot.
Oh, wait.
