Page 28 of Knot the Plan
And then I kiss her.
It is supposed to be practice. I told myself, two seconds ago, that it was practice. It is not practice. Her scent's all around me now, brown sugar and warm oat gone soft at the edges, an omega scent doing something to the back of my brain that no amount of telling myself otherwise is going to fix.
It's her mouth soft and startled and then not startled at all. Her hand fisting in the wet front of my good shirt. The little sound she makes that I'll hear in my sleep for a week.
She opens for me on a gasp and I have to lock every muscle I own not to haul her into my lap right here in four feet of lake water and find out what other sounds she's got. And every smug, deflecting wall I've ever built comes down, quietly, like a boat going over in the shallows. Lazy and total and always going to.
And underneath it, something older wakes up in me.
Because this close, kissing her, I finally get her scent with nothing in the way. Brown sugar and warm toasted oat, the smell of somewhere you'd want to come home to. It goes straight past every reasonable thought I've got and lights the part of me I keep on a short leash.
There's a sound trying to start low in my throat, a purr I have not given anyone permission to make. I clamp down on it. A purr is a alpha telling on himself, and I am nowhere near ready for her to know how far gone I already am.
But I feel it sitting there, wanting out, every instinct I've got lit because she's kissing me back like she means it, her hand twisted in my shirt, pulling me in. And I understand for the first time, really understand, why everyone keeps warning each other about this. It isn't the kissing that's dangerous. It's the part underneath that doesn't care what we agreed to.
When we break apart she stays close for a second, forehead nearly to mine, both of us breathing like we just surfaced from somewhere cold. Then she pulls back, and I watch the walls come up behind her eyes, fast and practiced, and she reaches for the safe thing before I can.
“Okay,” she says, a little unsteady. “Okay. That was, that was good. That'll really sell it.” She's nodding too much, not quite meeting my eye. “Good practice.”
And there's the part I don't say. That I walked into this thinking it was a favor and a good time, that I have made a whole personality out of not catching feelings, and that somewhere between a capsized kayak and a loaf of bread I appear to have caught one anyway, hard, with no idea when it happened.
But her walls are up, and she's looking at me like she needs me to hand her the easy version back, like the whole afternoon is balanced on me agreeing it was nothing.
So I agree it was nothing. “Real good practice,” I say, easy, grinning like my chest isn't doing something complicated. “Your aunt won't know what hit her.”
She laughs, relieved, and the moment closes over like water, and I let it, because she needs me to, and because a man's allowed to keep one card to himself.
She nods, fast, grateful, and stands and brushes grass off her legs and announces we should get the boat back, and I get up and help her drag it to the water, and we paddle in, and she does better this time, steadier, goingwithit instead of fighting, and she doesn't look back at me once.
I watch her the whole way in, the set of her shoulders, the loose wet hair, the way she won't turn around.
I told myself this was going to be a fun morning.
I am the world's biggest idiot, and I'm whistling, and Wes is going to take one look at my face when I get back and know everything.
Chapter 9
Josie
Idid not sleep well, and it is entirely Hudson Grant's fault.
I have spent eighteen hours not thinking about the kiss with the focus of a woman thinking about nothing else. I thought about it through dinner. I thought about it while I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. I thought about it at two in the morning, and at four, and again over coffee I held with both hands like it could anchor me to the day.
The conclusion I've reached, after all that rigorous analysis, is that I am not going to think about it. There. Solved.
So when I pull up to the address Logan texted me, a half-built house on a quiet lot at the edge of town, I am calm and unbothered and completely fine, and only thinking about the kiss in the background, like a song stuck behind a door.
He's up on the deck framing when I get out of the car, and he doesn't see me yet, and for a second I just watch him work.
I've watched Logan fix my playground fence all month, which I'll admit I watched more closely than the job strictly required. But I've never seen him on a real site, never seen himbuildsomething instead of mend it, and it turns out his element is something.
He moves through the half-finished frame like he built the concept of right angles personally. There's a pencil behind his ear. He sets a board, checks it against a level, frowns at something only he can see, shaves a hair off the end with a plane in two clean strokes, and sets it again. And this time whatever was wrong is right.
He's rolled his sleeves up. I have decided not to have feelings about Logan's forearms two days in a row, and I am failing, and then he turns and sees me and his whole face does a thing, opens up, goes warm, before he catches it and reels it back to something more contained, and I forget about the forearms because the face was worse.
“Hey.” He pulls the pencil from behind his ear like he needs his hands to have a job. “You found it.”
“One of your directions was 'left at the brown cow.'“
