Page 30 of Screwed

“With your charming personality, I couldn’t imagine why,” he shot back.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I don’t appreciate your sarcasm right now.”

“Sarcasm? It was just an observation,” he said.

I chuckled, rolling my eyes, but then Deacon tilted his head. I couldn’t really look away from him in this tiny little tree hollow. There weren’t any places to run anymore, or any way to separate myself from him. And I think he knew that.

“Ava,” he repeated my name, sounding more serious than I’d ever heard him. I slowly met his gaze, my heart beating wildly against my ribcage. “I know you’re hiding something. I can see it in the way you always look over your shoulder when we’re in town. Or how you never quite seem to relax all the way. And then there’s the fact you’re here at all. No way does anyone with your level of paranoia jump ship randomly to bunk up in Blackwood Lake, of all places.”

“I am not paranoid,” I contested.

He raised an eyebrow at me, his mouth tugging up again and showing off a dimple. “Look, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“Really? Because this felt an awful lot like an interrogation,” I bit back.

“If I wanted to force the truth out of you, trust me, Barden, you’d know the difference,” he said in a voice low enough to make me shudder again. But there was more than just conviction or arrogance in his voice. There was a hint of uncharacteristic softness, too. “Your business is your business. But I thought you should know that I wiped the GPS data from the rental, just in case. I thought at the very least you wouldn’t wanna be found here.”

Tears stung my eyes.

I thought of the coffee order he’d memorized, and now discovering that he’d gone to those lengths to keep me safe even though he didn’t expect me to tell him the truth… it lowered my guard all the way down.

After my phone call with Jules and the near-month of stress and worrying, I was tired. I was alone. I wanted to lay the burden down. And beneath all the bravado and devil-may-care vibes, Deacon had a heart. A real one that bled. So I did the one thing I never thought I would, at least not with him.

I told him the truth.

“I found a secondary ledger at the firm where I worked. They weren’t just low-balling environmental impact studies for federal land bids; they were actively bribing Bureau of Land Management officials to clear-cut protected tribal watersheds in Idaho. It’s massive, multi-million dollar corporate racketeering, Deacon.” I paused, feeling like a balloon rapidly deflating on the cusp of that confession. I hadn’t spoken to anyone about this since I discovered it, with the obvious exception of Julia. And hearing myself say it out loud again only made me realize once more just how much trouble I was in.

Deacon’s eyes widened as he processed the words, but he didn’t interrupt, just looked intently at me.

I took a deep breath and carried on. “Julia and I found the encrypted files hidden on a dummy server while auditing a project pipeline. We knew if we both vanished, the firm’s security team would lock down the network and wipe the evidence instantly. So we made a pact.” My voice broke, and I forced myself to continue. “Jules stayed behind to act as the inside woman, keeping her head down and feeding me internal updates so they wouldn’t suspect a leak. I took the downloaded data, transferred my savings into an anonymous LLC, and bought this place blind. I’m here while I draft the formal whistleblower filing. But if they track me here… this whole thing falls apart. They’ll figure out it’s not just me, but they’ll trace it back to her too.”

By the time I’d finished the confession, I felt as hollow as the tree we were standing in. Deacon said nothing for a few long moments, his dark eyes flashing with understanding. “So that’s why you’re here.”

“Please don’t tell the others,” I begged, hating how small my voice sounded. “Please. Especially Nate. If he finds out and tries to take this to the cops before it’s time, it blows everything out of the water.”

He nodded. “I swear. I won’t say anything. But Ava… you’ve been carrying this on your own the whole time?”

I made a sound that was half laugh and half sob. “Yeah, I guess so.”

All the fear and anxiety I’d been burying suddenly bubbled to the surface. I just needed relief.

“Well, now you don’t have to,” he said, his eyes dropping to my lips. “I’ve got you.”

There was a single beat of stillness before our mouths met. My whole body sagged against his, the taste of him driving away those heavy emotions until all I could feel was hunger. He deepened the kiss with a low sound in the back of his throat, and I wrapped my hands around the back of his neck, my fingers tangling up in his hair as I pulled him closer towards me.

The raw dampness of the storm faded, replaced by the suffocating, gritty heat of him trapped inside the ancient wood with me. He didn’t just take the kiss, he devoured it, his tongue warm and demanding, claiming my mouth with a desperate, pent-up force that made my knees give out. If his hands hadn’t been gripped to my waist, crushing my hips flush against the hard ridge of his thighs, I would have slid straight down the rotted bark to the dirt.

A ragged breath shuddered between us. “Ava.”

My name was nothing more than a fractured sign of his restraint. He didn’t say anything else—he couldn’t—but the weight of his palm sliding up under the hem of my damp shirt spoke for him. His calluses were beautifully abrasive against the bare, sensitive skin of my ribs, his large fingers splaying wide, branding me.

Every single hypervigilant defense I’d spent months building crumbled. I arched into the touch, a helpless whimper catching in my chest when his mouth left mine to trace a fierce, biting line down the column of my throat, pinning me to the solid, living pulse of the tree.

For just a second, I allowed myself to forget everything else outside of Deacon Matthews.

18

Nate