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“What’s it from?” I ask, needing her to keep talking to drown out my heavy breaths.
“When I was a kid, I fell out of a tree.” She chuckles with a small shake of her head. “My dad was so mad at me. He always told me to stay off this specific branch. He warned me it was dead and wouldn’t be able to hold my weight.” As she gets lost in her story, I keep searching, grateful for the distraction. “I was more mad at him, saying he was calling me fat, and I wanted to prove him wrong. That didn’t go well.” She laughs.
“Sounds like my dad,” I remark, scanning each leg. “The first time I shot a shotgun, he told me how to hold it, but I didn’t listen to him. I was a stubborn kid. By then, I’d shot a gun plenty of times and knew what I was doing. So I thought. Let’s just say the recoil was more than I was expecting. Walked around with two black eyes for a week.”
“Ouch,” she empathizes.
I grab her clothes off the floor after finishing checking her over. Other than the fresh scars on her knuckles, knees, and elbows, I found nothing else.
“It hurt my ego more,” I confess, standing in front of her. My laugh dies down as the naked space between us fills with a charged silence. My grip tightens around her clothes.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
“You’re welcome.”
Her eyes fill with need. Every part of me screams to reach for her. But I can’t. I don’t want a quick fling, and if we take it there tonight, that’s all it’ll be. She’ll leave here with regret and never call me again. When I don’t move, her cheeks redden, and she reaches for her clothes. Fuck. I’d be an asshole if I pulled her into my bedroom. A satisfied asshole, but a major asshole, nonetheless.
“Ahh… I’m going to go take that shower,” she murmurs.
Our fingers brush against each other, and I swallow back the temptation.
“Oh, wait,” I say, my brain finally working as I jog to the hallway linen closet. I pull out a towel and walk over to her. “You might need this.”
“Thanks.” She grabs it and turns, heading to the bathroom.
My eyes linger on her heart-shaped ass. “Kali, will you go out on a date with me?”
She glances over her shoulder and scrunches her nose adorably while nodding.
“That a yes?”
She chuckles. It’s such a welcome sound. I thought I messed everything up when she overheard me on the phone with Pete earlier. Could there have been someone over there? Possibly. People hike all around these parts.
“It’s a yes. Thanks for not letting me think it was just me. You like me, Officer Turner,” she says as if there were ever a question. She walks into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.
A half-strangled laugh comes out because my desire for her has been a relentless force since I laid eyes on her. She’s defiant. I like it. She’s determined to prove to the world that she’s fine. Even lying in the empty grave that threatened to take her life was an act of defiance, a statement to herself that it wouldn’t. She probably hated showing her vulnerability earlier. I’m glad she did it with me. Me. I was the one person she shared that moment with. When I got her call, I canceled meeting up with Liam at the gym and canceled my dinner plans with a few buddies. I would’ve canceled dinner with the president for her.
Of course, I like her.
I mean, finders keepers, right?
And I found you.
CHAPTER 19
Paxton
“How’s the kid?” Liam asks the moment he catches sight of Riggs and me walking into the training center. Liam is close to joining the K-9 unit with Bear, the largest bloodhound I’ve ever seen.
“Shaken, but alive. Learned a valuable lesson. Fuck around and find out. He won’t ever run away again.” Some tween—a term for a preteen I hadn’t heard before—was pissed at his parents for taking away his Xbox for grades, so he ran away. Dumbass should’ve gone to a friend’s house, but instead took a walk through hill country and got lost.
“You ready to get some training on?” I ask Riggs, walking over to sign us in at the front desk.
“You rappelling today?”
“Heck yeah,” I say, pumped and ready to rappel off a thirty-foot building, Riggs strapped to my back. I’m not certain what Riggs will think about it, but we’re about to find out.
“I’m going to stick around and watch.”
