CHAPTER 24
BLAIRE
R uby’s laughter rang out around us as she clutched her cards tightly in her small fists.
She bounced from one side to the other, cross-legged on the living room floor, and she was wearing my Duke sweatshirt I’d let her borrow the day she was sick.
It hung past her knees, the sleeves rolled up six times to free her hands, but she refused to give it back.
“Go fish!” she shouted, nearly knocking over her pink plastic cup in her excitement.
I barely caught it before her water spilled all over us and the cards.
“Hey now!” I gasped, sending her into another fit of giggles. “Are you cheating? How are you so good at this game?”
Ruby grinned and stuck out her chin. “I’m just really awesome, and you’re not.”
“How dare you?” I clutched at my chest as if she’d wounded me. “I used to be the reigning Go Fish Champion of Willow Grove, two years running. No one could beat me.”
She squinted at me over her cards. “You’re lying.” She watched me carefully before she attempted to peek over at my cards.
I made a shocked show of shielding my hand, but she lunged forward and tried to see them. This sparked a flurry of shrieks and giggles, cards scattering everywhere as Ruby tried to wrestle them from my hands, her little fingers surprisingly strong.
“Oh my gosh.” I laughed. “You really are cheating!”
Ruby squealed, scrambling onto her knees, abandoning her own cards entirely, and tried to slap a hand over my mouth to silence me. I let her, feigning defeat, before darting my tongue out and licking her palm.
She recoiled in horror. “Ewww!” Her screech reverberated through the house, and she pulled her hand away from me. “That’s gross!”
She grabbed a pillow from the couch, hurling it at me, but she missed, barely hitting my hip. But I let the impact throw me sideways onto the floor, and I lay in a puddle of defeat and shielded my eyes with my arm as she continued laughing. “You’re the one who put your hand over my mouth.”
“You didn’t have to lick me!” She pounced, pinning me beneath her and tickling my ribs. I surrendered instantly, squirming and wheezing with laughter, and both of us lay there amid a blizzard of bent playing cards as we smiled at one another.
We were still catching our breaths when I noticed Colt leaning over the back of the couch.
His hair was damp and slightly curled from his shower, and I could see a patch of his bare chest above the collar of the old T-shirt he wore.
He looked like he’d just stepped out of a Levi’s ad with his tanned arms and muscles that only came from ranch work. And that damned mustache.
My mouth went dry as I remembered how those arms had caged me against the kitchen counter this morning, his body a solid wall of muscle that left me nowhere to run.
I was tired of running from him.
He looked at Ruby, his gaze traveling over her face, before he smiled down at me, slow and so damn confusing, and I was so caught up in watching him, in trying to figure out what was going through his head.
After Ruby got home this morning, we’d moved around each other in careful, practiced avoidance, or at least, I had.
Every time Colt passed me, he found a way to touch me. When he reached for a glass in the cabinet above my head, his chest pressed hard against my back until I could feel his heartbeat thudding between my shoulder blades, his breath scorching the sensitive spot behind my ear.
Each touch was a calculated torture until I felt like I was going crazy with how badly I needed him.
Ruby had told us all about her night with Lou and June before she turned those innocent eyes on us. “What did y’all do when I was gone?”
My cheeks burned as I mumbled something about swimming, then going to bed early. I couldn’t exactly tell her we had defiled her dock while I begged her daddy dearest for things I had no business asking for.
I’d spent the rest of the day hiding in my bedroom before I snuck out to take a shower.
I’d let the scalding water run over me until my skin turned pink, scrubbing at the phantom fingerprints still burning across my neck, my hips, and my knees.
But the water couldn’t wash away how my body still hummed for him, how every brush of the loofah made me shiver with the memory of his callused hands.
I lathered my body in lotion, the slide of my palms over my skin a maddening echo of his.
I dried my hair, painted mine and Ruby’s nails, and did anything else to keep my hands busy and my mind from wandering down the hall to where he was.
Then we went to Sunday dinner at his parents’, and my skin had been too tight, my breath too shallow, and I couldn’t stop the insistent throbbing ache he’d left behind the night before.
I had slept with other men since him. There had been strangers, a couple boyfriends, and Grant. Sometimes it was good enough to make me gasp, but I’d always been chasing a ghost, my body arching for a memory, my throat swallowing his name before it could escape.
But last night, Colt hadn’t even laid a finger on me, and I’d shattered for him in a way no other man had ever managed.
Sunday dinner had ended over an hour ago and Ruby was bathed, dressed in her pajamas, and fighting with me over a game of Go Fish on Colt’s living room floor, but the cards in my hands might as well have been kindling.
“Daddy!” Ruby climbed to her feet when she noticed him and jabbed a finger in my direction. “Blaire stinks at this game.”
Colt’s gaze cut from me to Ruby, then locked back on me, and a slow grin curled up the left side of his mouth. “Is that so?” he drawled, each word dripping like honey.
I pushed myself up on my elbows, feeling the heat of his attention even from across the room. “I don’t stink,” I huffed. “She’s a cheater. Just like her daddy.”
Ruby gasped. “I was not cheating! It’s strategy. Right, Daddy?” She blinked up at him, waiting for backup, and I snorted.
“That’s what a couple of cheaters would say,” I said under my breath, and Ruby jumped at me like she was going to tickle me again.
Colt grinned, but he only had eyes for me.
“Right,” he said, barely glancing at Ruby as he moved around the couch.
“But, for the record, baby girl, Blaire’s not bad at cards.
” He crouched beside us, ruffling Ruby’s hair before he started scooping up the bent, scattered cards, collecting them into a neat pile.
“She was the smartest one in our whole school.”
I rolled my eyes, but he kept going, laying it on thick. “Seriously. She used to win all those spelling bees, even against the big kids. She was basically a genius.”
“Is that true?” Ruby narrowed her eyes, and a laugh bubbled out of me.
“Hardly. I think your daddy just doesn’t remember all the times I lost.”
He shook his head, and a piece of dark hair fell against his brow. “Nope. I remember you winning and scaring off every boy in Willow Grove because they knew you were smarter than them.” Then he winked at me, and my stomach dropped like I was sixteen again.
Ruby’s gaze bounced between us as she smiled, but then her eyebrows knitted together. “Did she scare you off?”
Colt made a show of flexing his arms, the muscles bulging beneath his shirt as he grinned down at his daughter. “Look at these guns. Do you think I would be scared of Little Miss Smarty-Pants?”
Ruby dissolved into giggles as she reached up and squeezed his biceps.
I started picking up the rest of the cards. “He was terrified of me. He’s lying to himself and trying to make you think he was cooler than he really was in high school.”
Colt arched an eyebrow, his voice dropping low. “You calling me a liar, Strawberry?”
I tossed a card at him, which he caught effortlessly with two fingers, and his thumb brushed over the edge in a way that made me remember those same hands on my skin. “I’m just telling it like it is.”
He grinned, stacking all the cards in his hands, eyes never leaving mine as he rose to his feet. “Well, I won’t tell her about how you let a frog loose in Mr. Becker’s class because you wanted to save it. Then let me take the blame for it when he found out.”
Ruby’s jaw dropped. “What?”
I huffed a laugh as I pushed off the floor, aware of how my shirt rode up slightly with the movement.
“That’s not completely true either. We went in there to do it together.
Your dad chickened out, and I was forced to do it.
” I glanced up at Colt’s grinning face, catching the way his eyes flicked to my lips before I looked back at Ruby.
“We were trying to set it free, not lose it in class, and we wouldn’t have gotten caught if he had helped me. ”
Colt stepped closer, close enough that I could smell his cologne. “You always were the brave one,” he said so softly, heat pooled low in my belly.
Colt made me feel seen in a way Grant never managed.
Grant had never noticed all the little ways in which I changed and shifted to be at his side.
He rarely noticed anything about me, but Colt’s gaze made my skin prickle with awareness.
A part of me wanted to hide, to make sure that he didn’t see too much, but some reckless part of me craved the scorching heat that only he could give.
“I want to be brave like Blaire.” Ruby’s voice broke the spell, and I realized I’d been holding my breath.
“You already are.” I tapped my finger against her nose, using the moment to step back from Colt, whose proximity was making it hard to think straight. “Braver than I could ever be.”
“All right, Ruby.” Colt held his hands out for her. “It’s time for bed. We’ve got school in the morning.”
“Ah, man,” Ruby groaned, but took his hand, her tiny fingers disappearing into his palm. “I’m not ready for bed yet.”
“Well, I’m not dealing with you when you’re a little demon tomorrow morning because you didn’t get enough sleep.” He scooped her up, muscles flexing beneath his shirt as he pressed his lips against her hair.
She went limp in his arms, head lolling dramatically.
“I like being a demon.” Ruby smiled with her eyes closed.
“Well, you’re the only one.” Colt’s laugh rumbled low in his chest. His eyes caught mine over Ruby’s head, and the playfulness in them shifted to something darker. “You staying up?” The question slid between us, loaded with a dangerous promise.
“For a bit.” My voice betrayed me with its breathlessness. “I need to do my skincare and get ready for bed.”
“Good.” His gaze traveled down my body with such deliberate slowness I could almost feel it like a physical touch. “Ruby, tell Blaire good night.”
“Night, Blaire!” She was still limp in his arms, but she peeked one eye open to look at me.
“Good night.” I smiled, and my skin prickled where Colt’s eyes lingered.
“Can we play dolls in the morning before school?” She was still looking at me upside down.
“Of course,” I nodded.
“Pinkie promise.” She held out her pinkie, and I stepped forward, wrapping my pinkie around hers and shaking them once.
Her pinkie was warm and certain against mine, and something in my chest went soft and terrified at the same time.
This wasn’t just Colt undoing me. It was the way Ruby trusted me, the way she folded me into their day like I’d always belonged here, and it made me feel chosen in a way I hadn’t let myself crave in years.
I should’ve run to my room and swore off this weekend as if it never happened. Instead, I stood there as he carried Ruby off to bed, and the want roared back through me as he looked back over his shoulder at me before they disappeared down the hall.
Each minute alone with him would be dangerous, reckless, exactly what I’d promised myself to avoid, yet my body hummed with a need so desperate it scared me.
I couldn’t walk away now even if I wanted to, and God, I didn’t want to.