Her fingers wrestled with each other and she gnawed on her bottom lip.
“When you came out of the water and I dragged you up onto the shore…”
She looked me in the eye and turned away again.
I drifted closer.
“What?”
“I felt something, something pass between us…”
I couldn’t believe it.
Had she felt the same electricity I had when I first laid eyes on her?
That powerful coursing river that hadn’t abated a single iota since that moment?
“Forget it,” she said. “I’m being stupid.”
“No,” I said, pushing even closer.
She didn’t back down, although she looked on the verge of doing so.
She met my eyes again and her pert breasts almost grazed my chest.
She seemed to take some confidence from us being so close.
“I felt a link like we were meant to meet,” she said. “I don’t know what it means or if it even means anything at all. But that’s the truth of it. I know it sounds ridiculous—”
“It doesn’t sound ridiculous. I felt it too. But not there by the side of the lake. It was in the hospital. When I first saw you. When I was conscious, I mean.”
It wasn’t the best, clearest way I could have expressed myself but there it was.
Out in the open.
Her eyes searched my face and she smiled at what she saw there.
“I guess situations like this bring people together,” she said.
I took her hand in mine.
She was shaking.
“Or maybe it means something more,” I said.
Her mask of confidence had been exactly that, I realized.
An act.
“I’m scared,” she said, her voice quivering.
“I am too,” I admitted.
My heart raced, thudding so hard and fast I felt certain she could feel it through my palms.
“Do you ever get the feeling sometimes things happen because they’re meant to?” I said.
“Like fate?”
“Me crashing like that. Where I did. And you being there to rescue me from the lake. None of it feels like a mistake.”
“It wasn’t a mistake.”
Our hands interwove, wrestling for supremacy.
But there was no need to battle.
She would beat me every time.
She always would.
“So… what happens now?” Isabella said.
“I think you know what happens now.”
I placed one of her hands on my waist and the other on my cheek.
She didn’t pull back but her hand froze when she touched me.
“I… I thought about touching you like this so many times,” she said. “And now… Now I’m really doing it.”
I placed my hand on her hip.
To reach my face, she had to reach up, and her jacket rose with it, exposing the skin beneath my fingers.
It was as soft as I thought it would be.
I was desperate to grab that ass that’d taunted me for so long…
But I sensed it was too soon for that.
I would be patient, as hard as it was.
I lowered my lips toward hers.
She went up on her tiptoes to close the distance further…
Clang!
We started back but remained touching.
Small feathered animals Benjamin referred to as chickens clucked and strutted about the barn.
They must have knocked something loose and sent it clattering.
Isabella snorted and shook her head.
I pressed my forehead to hers.
“I guess we should get on with our chores,” Isabella said.
“I guess we should.”
I ran a thumb down her cheek and her broken smile returned to her wide lips.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she said.
My thumb paused in stroking her skin.
“I would never hurt you. Why would you say that?”
“I… had a bad experience. That’s why I returned home. My friend… She… She disappeared. I convinced her to speak with a stranger in a coffee shop and he… Well, I don’t know what he did, but I never saw my friend again. It was all my fault.”
Her lips wobbled and she lowered her face so she didn’t have to show me her tears.
“Hey,” I said, lifting her chin. “I’m sorry something like that happened to you but I’m sure it’s not your fault.”
“It is. It is all my fault. She never would have spoken to him if I hadn’t said anything.”
“You don’t know that.”
The strangest feeling came over me at that point, a sense of somehow knowing nothing bad had happened to her friend.
The same way I knew I was meant to be with Isabella.
The same way I knew she wanted me to touch her.
I couldn’t explain where that sense came from or if it was even real, so I didn’t even try to explain it to her.
“I’m sure she’s somewhere safe,” I said. “And you don’t need to worry about me hurting you. I don’t know much, but I know that is the very last thing I would ever do.”
She smiled distantly, not entirely convinced.
She wrapped her arms around me and hugged me close.
I did the same, enveloping her completely.
There was no way I could hurt her.
I would rather die first.
And that sensation was more real than anything I knew to be true.
I would bring a swift end to anyone who so much as laid a finger on her.
Isabella backed away and wiped her nose.
“I’ll get us some lemonade.”
She scooped up an empty bucket.
“And some feed for these pesky chickens!”
She grinned at me with that same cheeky smile before turning and heading back to the farmhouse.
She’d been in my arms, just for a moment, but it was enough to know things were never going to be the same between us again.
I was so enrapt in my thoughts about her—as well as watching that sexy ass sashay across the farm—that I didn’t hear the footsteps approach me from behind until it was too late.
Isabella
Would wonders never cease?
I’d admired him the entire time we got the cows milked, and enjoyed teasing him with my little innuendoes, but I never ever thought he would make a pass at me!
I was pleasantly surprised when he had.
Forget pleasantly—ecstatically surprised!
I was on cloud nine and walked with a literal hop in my step, humming a happy adlibbed tune as I swung my empty bucket and headed for the chicken feed stores around back.
For the first time since returning home, a ray of light pierced the dark clouds overhead and illuminated a path I might traverse.
To distant
