“Watching your back.”
“Just my back?”
“I’ll watch whatever you want me to.” His eyes were smiling but his mouth was not. He was done playing. “Harley.”
“Let me guess. You’re sticking to me like glue.”
At that, his smile did meet his eyes. “The better to watch your back.”
They’d put their packs back on and had gone a few hundred yards when he spoke. “You still owe me a story.”
“Once upon a time there was this big, bad wolf who-”
“You know which story, smart-ass.”
Yeah. She knew. What she didn’t know was how to tell it to him.
TJ waited, but Harley walked in silence. He gave in to her silence because he could see that she wasn’t ignoring him on purpose. She was thinking.
“Why now?” she eventually asked. “Why did you kiss me now after all this time?”
The truth was easy enough. She was warm, funny, attractive. But she was also scary as hell. So though he’d wanted her, and had for as long as he could remember, it’d also been far easier on him to stay away.
Something he was going to have a hard time remembering now that he’d had a taste of her.
“TJ?”
“You want to play twenty questions, Harley? Because I believe you’re up on deck first.”
He took her next silence to mean a resounding “no thanks.” His cell phone vibrated, and he pulled it out of his pocket.
“What’s up?” Cam asked him.
“You called to ask me what’s up?”
“No,” Cam said. “I called to see if there’s anything you want to tell me.”
“About?”
“I don’t know. The weather. The Angels game. Or wait, I know. How about the client you cancelled on to follow a certain sexy blonde? Want to talk about that?”
TJ moved away from said sexy blonde for privacy. “No.”
“Everything okay?” Cam asked after a moment of contemplative silence.
“Yes.”
“You haven’t done anything stupid with the one woman in town that hasn’t fallen under your charms or between your sheets, have you?”
TJ gritted his teeth. Define stupid, he thought “No.”
“Do I need to come up there and show you how to catch her, then?”
More gritting of his teeth.
“Okay, then, glad we could clear all this all up.”
TJ shook his head. “Do you have a real reason for calling, or are you just running up the minutes for the hell of it?”
“We switched over to unlimited. And yeah, I have a reason. I wanted to see which of us back here at base have won the bet. See, we’re divided on whether you’ll come back with a just-laid expression on your face or if you’ll be bleeding.”
“Since clearly you don’t have enough to do to keep busy,” TJ said over Cam’s soft laugh. “Do the research on that new climbing gear we were looking at. And I need a detailed mapping for that Yosemite trip Stone wants to pass off on me. Oh, and then there’s a stack of paperwork on my desk-”
Cam stopped laughing, but the smile remained in his voice. “Ah, man, it’s been a long time since you’ve resorted to pu**y threats to shut me up. So…you ready to admit you’re crazy about her or what? Inquiring minds need to know.”
TJ closed his eyes. The rain had stopped, and he tipped his head at the quickly clearing sky. “What you need to know is that I’m going to kick your ass when I get back.”
“Admit it. You’re gone over her. You’ve got it bad.”
“Fuck you.”
“Hey, it’s your own fault,” Cam said. “You laughed at love. Like Annie said, you tempted karma.”
“Sideways,” TJ told him.
Unperturbed about his impending death, Cam laughed out loud.
TJ disconnected, shoving the phone back in his pocket as he turned and came face-to-face with Harley.
“What was that about?” she asked as he pulled off his shell, rolled it up, and stuck it through an outside webbed pocket of his pack-because suddenly he felt quite warm.
“A question for a question, Harley. One hundred percent honesty at all times, no exceptions.” He was fairly confident she wouldn’t dare.
She looked at him for a long beat. “Fine.”
Well, if that didn’t surprise the hell out of him. He dropped his pack and she did the same. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me why you’re always mad at me.”
She drew a deep breath. “Maybe it’s because you talk to me in that voice, that low, husky, sexy voice that makes me feel like you’d like to sleep with me.”
“I would.”
Shoving her fingers in her damp hair, she turned in a slow circle. She couldn’t be more drenched, and she couldn’t be more beautiful, with her small, tight little body so perfectly outlined in nothing but that white tee and thin cargoes, both plastered to her like a second skin. “Harley-”
“See, that!” She pointed at him. “That voice right there, the one that says you want nothing more than to be inside me.” She turned away from him and so softly he could barely hear her, murmured, “When you already were.”
He couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d hauled off and hit him.
She let out a low sound that might have been a laugh but also sounded dangerously close to a sob. He recovered enough to grab her, turn her to face him, and haul her in close.