“I was hoping the next booking would start tomorrow,” she murmured.
The hope on her voice had faded to an almost indiscernible trail and I felt the usual flare of irritation that deadlines gave me. We were something like a week away from needing to make payments. While I had a few aces up the sleeve, they were absolute-disaster-only aces and I had to exhaust every avenue before I even looked that way. All desperate chances aside, we still had a few days to scrounge something up.
“I had some ideas,” I said slowly. That sentence wasn't the kind of thing I could just spring on someone, I'd learned, so I monitored her reaction. She lifted her eyebrows in silent question. Uncertain she really wanted to hear them, I scoured her expression, but saw no evidence to the contrary.
“You ready?” I drawled.
“Hit me.”
“Okay.” I leaned back a little. “What about an RV park?”
She blinked, but no scoff came right away so I went with it. “RV Park?”
“In the winter, for a small fee, RV's can park out here. It's surprisingly hard to find good places to park in the wild.”
“What about hook-ups?”
I scowled. “We couldn't offer too much. I do have a water hook-up for boondocking. I mean, JJ and I lived out of an RV for almost two years before it fell apart. Maybe we could provide electric, but I'd have to see . . .”
“Literally lived in an RV?”
“Oh yeah.” I nodded with a grin. “That was after the bus, so I freaking loved the RV in comparison. Traveled the US, hit every state in a year. We set the RV on fire in a desert in New Mexico and said our farewells once it died. The point is, I think we could carve out some 'private' spaces here.”
She tilted her head to the side, eyes narrowed. “You and JJ were really close, weren't you?”
A pang in my chest took me by surprise when I nodded. “Yeah. Brothers. Twins. That whole shared-a-womb-thing. But more than that. We were the Bailey brothers.”
She hummed low in her throat, then patted my chest. “I don't hate the RV idea, but what would you even charge?”
“Great! And I don’t know. I'll put feelers out. Also, about horses—”
She immediately shook her head. “No horses.”
I threw my hands in the air. “Why is everyone so against horses?”
“It's not the animal, it's the man.”
Before I could puzzle that one together, she distracted me by touching my bicep and forcing me to look at her. I blinked away the haze that came over my thoughts when I could smell her.
“I trust us to figure it out, Mark.”
The easy words, spoken as a no-doubt-intentionally-sexy whisper in my ear while she slipped behind me toward the kitchen, slammed into me with all the force of a sucker punch.
Well . . . that was a first.
Friends, dates, girlfriends, acquaintances—whatever all those other women had been—had never said the T-word before, and definitely not where my business was concerned. Certainly, there had been no us in the picture. I had so many loose strings of business in my life at any given time, most of the women I dated didn't even try to catch up. They heard the word entrepreneur and dropped interest, or listened politely with a tight smile and glazed eyes that begged to be put out of their misery. When ideas flowed from me, they became anxious, even more bored, or convinced I had ADHD.
Stella's sexy little comment had either helped my confidence, or paralyzed it. At this point, I was just trying to stop my racing mind from reacting to her proximity and get back to the point at hand: saving Adventura.
Blinking, I jerked myself from those thoughts and spun to face her. After the shower, she'd changed into an oversized pair of sweatpants, a pair of fuzzy slippers, and an old shirt. A black jacket covered her arms from the chilly air through the windows. While I'd been lost in thought about my hands on her body again, she'd thrown her hair into a messy barrette that made my stomach do funny things.
The business-professional accountant, Marie, must have been a joke. Stella was all casual ease and smoky glances, like warm honey.
I prowled over to her again with another low growl. She laughed as I buried my face in her neck. Then I stayed there, because it felt entirely too nice to be the one held.
“Say it'll be okay?” I whispered.
She put her arms around me, hands splayed across my back. “It's going to be fine, Mark. We'll make some dinner and get to work on it first thing tonight, okay? Once we have a plan, we'll get to work finding our second booking. Then we'll curl up, pretend to watch 007, and make out.”
My eyelashes brushed her neck when I closed my eyes and let out a long breath.
“I thought you'd never say it.”
The sound of her laugh bounced through the cabin as I pulled in another breath, all wound up in her. Apricots. Lavender. Peach. Each scent wound through my mind and settled the fireworks that exploded like warnings. Technically, her cabin lay empty tonight. She could slip back over and sleep on her own again once we cleaned it, but she hadn't mentioned it and I wasn't about to bring it up.
Stella was right. She had to be right. We'd figure something out.
Because if we didn't figure this out, Maverick would give up on it. He was a friend, but not a fool, and no fool held onto a bad investment.
Then I'd lose everything.
A pair of chattering teeth and a panicked voice woke me out of a dead sleep that night. I bolted up, startled further awake by a wash of bitter cold air.
“M-mark,” Stella whispered. “It's s-so c-cold in here.”
She crouched next to the couch where'd I'd racked
