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The day had started oddly anyway. He’d needed to stop at his place to double-check that the promo video was running properly, now that the festival was actually here. And despite the effort it took, Britt had insisted on coming inside to say hello to Ry, who was taking advantage of Mom’s absence to swipe some leftover pizza for lunch, since Kaitlyn was in town taking photos for The Defender.
When he’d verified everything was fine and came back out, Britt and Ry were looking at something on a sheet of heavy paper. A sketch of something, maybe his newest project. And Britt was talking quietly but rather intensely to his brother, and Ry had that resistant look on his face that he hadn’t seen in a while. Not since he’d been denying he was an artist, insisting he was only a craftsman as if it were something less.
When they heard him, Cody would have sworn both she and Ry gave a little start. Ry quickly rolled up the sketch, as if it were one of the projects he wasn’t ready to have seen yet.
But he’d shown it to Britt. And she wasn’t talking.
“Sworn to secrecy,” she said brightly.
The couple of hours spent in town was both amusing and embarrassing. They’d never quite realized that the Rafferty-Roth feud had been so widely famous, but between the startled glances and the downright shocked stares when people spotted them together, they were learning fast. And once they’d encountered Mr. Diaz from the feed store, they knew anybody who hadn’t seen them here together would know before the sun set anyway.
When she’d stopped for a while to sit on one of the benches scattered among the booths and tourists, he sat down beside her.
“How do you feel?”
She gave him an eye roll. “Like we should change our names.”
He blinked. “To what?”
“Hatfield and McCoy.”
He laughed. As he had often in the past few days. Something else he’d never known about her, that that sarcasm that had stung so often had been born in a quick wit that he could more than appreciate.
“You told me once you remember everything.”
He wondered what had brought that on. “Yeah. Most of the time it’s handy, sometimes it’s a pain.”
“So, you can’t ever forget all the angry things I’ve said to you.”
“No.” He heard the undertone in her voice and shifted on the bench to face her. “I can’t forget. But I can forgive, if you can. And I can decide it doesn’t matter.”
“Seems this was the path we had to follow,” she said.
“Why, Ms. Roth, that was almost philosophical,” he drawled, echoing her earlier words and tone. She laughed, and the moment of worry had passed.
And then she turned him inside out by holding his gaze and saying simply, “I love you, Cody.”
His heart slammed in his chest. She’d never actually said the words before. How like Britt to choose here, in front of half of Last Stand gathered in the park, to do it.
“Back at you,” he said, his throat so tight he could barely get it out.
After that, everything seemed anticlimactic. At least until that evening when, after all the exertion, she had longingly expressed the wish for a nice soak in the tub. Which, she’d said with a look at him, she could do, thanks to the new cast, although she still kept it elevated on the edge most of the time.
It wasn’t until they were home that he realized that her mother, who usually helped her with that process, was with his mother, at the festival. And would be for the rest of the day and evening. And all day tomorrow, until the celebration’s conclusion.
And Britt couldn’t get out of that tub on her own.
The visions that tumbled through his head then were vivid, erotic, and more arousing than they should be, given she was injured. It was difficult enough to shut down the urging of his body when he stood at the bathroom door while she showered. Fortunately, by the time she called him in to help her get out and back on her crutches she was wrapped in a big towel.
A bath would be different. She’d be naked, wet, alluring, and just thinking about it had him calculating whether two could fit in that tub.
He watched her work her way inside, hoping it would remind him—and his body—that right now he was an assistant, not a lover.
It almost worked.
As if she’d read his mind, and with a teasing edge in her voice, she said, “Scared, Coder?”
“That,” he said, “is not the word for it.”
