Chapter 28 Parker
“Three more.”
Summer grits her teeth, grip tightening around the loaded barbell lying across her shoulders.
There’s a faint sheen of sweat along her hairline, making the dusting of baby hairs stick to her skin.
The ends of her French braids brush her chest as she sinks into a squat, ass absolutely tensing against her pale purple shorts.
Every part of her exudes power and strength. Ruthless determination. She’s been pushing our training harder than ever this week, trying to make up for her fifth-place finish at Rocky Ridge—to punish herself a little for it, too, if I know her. But gifting me the view of a lifetime in the process.
I could happily die like this, I think. Standing in Brooks’s home gym, just watching her body flex and release, her abs peeking out from where her shirt’s ridden up. She’s a perfectly packaged dichotomy—the softest heart wrapped in strength and a well-earned toned body.
More than once in the two days since we returned home, I’ve wondered if I’ve gone fully insane and completely imagined the events of that inn. Because why would Summer Prescott, in all her glory, ever let someone like me anywhere near her?
Let alone in her. Just a finger, but still.
Those minutes have been playing on a loop, like a translucent filter over my vision all week.
No matter what I’m doing, where I am, who I’m with—it’s all secondary to the sight of Summer’s sun freckles up close.
The curve of her Cupid’s bow as she smiled at me.
Her green eyes crinkling as she gave that soft laugh—the laugh, the one I misunderstood back in high school—and then squeezing shut with pure pleasure as I touched her.
The feel of her in my hands haunts me. Her body responded to mine as though, at least for one single blissful moment, she longed for me, too.
I’ve been dying for more. But she’s been so down on herself about her score at the surf event and it hasn’t felt right to press her on it.
Still, there’s a permanent stream of tension flowing between us since.
The kind where you know something’s coming—something major, inevitable—just waiting for the opportunity to present itself.
Not a matter of if, but when.
I rub a hand over my jaw as she comes out of her squat then sits back into another like it’s nothing. And then again.
My head tilts, just watching her body move. “One more.”
Summer releases the softest grunt. “What? That was three.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Yes, it was. “One more, Summer.”
She grumbles but does it. Dipping all the way down, then up.
Killing me. “One more.”
“Are you—” With a sound that’s halfway between a laugh and a furious growl, Summer racks the bar and pivots to face me, gripping the metal hanging between us. “I’ve always known your ethics were shaky. But making your client squat for your own viewing pleasure? A whole new level of depravity.”
She’s teasing, but I can see it in the mirrors lining the wall behind her: the way she’s arching her back, wiggling that little ass of hers. Leaning forward against the bar so that the tops of her breasts swell out of the low-cut neckline of her shirt.
Flirting, whether she means to or not.
I grip the bar, too, right beside her hands so that our pinkies touch. “If it’s too hard for you and your delicate constitution, just say so. We can take it easy if you need to.”
“Please—I could squat you in my sleep.”
“Yeah?” I lean in so that my chest meets the bar, just inches away from her. It’d take nothing to kiss her. “Let’s see it, Prescott.”
No hesitation. She ducks under the bar and fists my shirt, driving me back to make room for herself.
A startled laugh leaves me. Summer circles my waist, bends at the knees, and hinges her hips, like she really expects me to let her injure herself to prove a point.
“Summer, are you insane?” I pry her away to find her laughing breathlessly, eyes closed, entire body shuddering even as she tries to wrestle out of my hold.
“Let me do it!”
“Fuck no!”
“Then admit you were making me squat to check me out.”
“Oh, is that all you wanted?” She really is strong.
When I wrangle her arms behind her and flip her around so that her back meets my front, it’s with far more effort than I needed last weekend.
“Of course I was checking you out. No one’s got an ass like you do, Summer.
No one moans quite like you do, either.”
We lock eyes in the mirror ahead. Her laugh fades, but that playful spark still lights up her eyes. “That was a one-time gift from me to you. Savor it. Maybe put it in your diary so you don’t forget.”
“Good thinking.” I brush her ear with my lips and she actually shivers. “Dear diary: Three days ago, my best friend begged me to tie her up—in a B&B hallway, no less—and then asked me to finger her until—”
She smirks. “Dear diary: Three days ago, I admitted to my best friend how desperate I am to push together her tits—her perfect tits, is what I actually called them—”
I nip the side of her neck. “Dear diary: Three days ago, my best friend let me finger her in a B&B hallway, and she’s been replaying it so often that she’s got my exact words memorized.”
Summer’s body melts back into mine. “How would you know that unless you were replaying it often?”
“Summer, love, if you think there’s even a second of the day when I’m not obsessing over you to a near-debilitating degree, then you’re not paying attention at all.”
She stares back through the mirror. Eyes amused. Eyebrows crinkled in disbelief. Her entire backside pressing into me.
And I’m officially done playing this game of ours. The one where we pretend that nothing’s changed between us. That I don’t want to spend my every waking moment kissing her. That she doesn’t look at me in a way that’s very different than the way she does our guy friends.
Summer might not think I’m her dream man, but she wants me, and it’s about damn time we stop dancing around that. I’m taking matters into my own hands. Making big moves on her Dream Man list, starting this Summer Friday.
With a kiss to her temple I release her, shoving her gently toward the squat rack. She catches herself on the metal bar, blinking at my reflection in the mirror, a little disoriented.
“Back to work, Prescott. And make it twenty reps, this time.”
“Did you kiss?”
“No.”
“Hook up?”
“No.”
River bats his lashes, pouting over at me. “Aw, Parker. Did you finally get to hold your crush’s hand?”
I resist the urge to hip check the kid into a nearby bush. We’re half an hour into a light hike on the trail near Brooks’s place, and as much as it would satisfy me to send River’s smug smirk flying, I’m not even sure I’d be able to manage it this morning.
He’s without crutches, looking stronger on his feet. Unbothered enough by our pace and the uneven terrain to be able to go in on me about the state of my relationship with Summer after witnessing our goodbye as they traded places in my morning schedule.
“I’m not talking about my dating life with you. You’re a kid.” I lead him up the path on a mild incline as we loop back around toward Brooks’s gym. The dirt trail is lined with densely packed pine trees and otherwise deserted—I didn’t know it existed until Brooks mentioned it a couple of days ago.
“I turn eighteen in a few months. And we both know you weren’t an angel at my age.”
“I’ll have you know that I was a very responsible and studious seventeen-year-old. Focused on my education.”
A laugh bursts out of River as we near a fallen log blocking our path. “I live in town. Have heard plenty about what you were like at my age, and studious is the last thing they called you.”
River doesn’t wince as he easily steps over the log, and a flood of pride pours into me, dulling my annoyance. Because that—having found a way to motivate this kid, who came to me all doom and gloom a few weeks ago?
No better reason to get out of bed in the morning.
It’s what made me fall in love with this career in the first place—making an impossible situation feel possible, and then proving us both right.
And if I’ve got anything to do with it, he’s going to make that high school team come the start of the school year.
Going to impress those scouts. Going to get recruited to a college very, very far away so that I never again have to endure the smirk he gives when he glances over at me.
“Maybe tone down the pathetic puppy thing when I’m around, then,” River goes on. “You can’t expect me to witness what I did this morning and not say anything.”
“I wasn’t acting like a pathetic—”
“Bye, Summer! Have a great day at work, Summer! I’ll see you for dinner tonight, right? Text me later!” River bounces on his toes, enthusiastically waving at a pine tree in an exaggerated but not altogether false imitation of me.
“Have you called Macy yet?” I ask. River’s expression turns vindictive. “Then I don’t want to hear another thing about me and my girl.”
“She’s your girl now?”
“She is.” River gives me a look. “All right, so she isn’t my girl yet. But at least I’m talking to her, which is more than you can say.”
We emerge from the hiking path right into the sprawling yard behind Brooks’s house, a ranch-style mini mansion that puts my above-a-bar apartment to shame.
“That was a forty-minute hike,” I tell River with a check of my watch. We round the house to the open garage doors leading to the gym.
“It was mostly flat and we were going at a snail’s pace.”
I fling out an arm to stop him in the driveway. All the joy he’d gotten out of teasing me seems to have evaporated. “That was a forty-minute hike, Nowak. Without crutches. Let that sink in for a second.”
He gives me a half-hearted smile. “Nothing pinched this time.”
“Fucking right, it didn’t. And you know what? I will gladly let you give me hell about making eyes at my girl if it means you do it again tomorrow.”
That half-smile turns full smirk. “Again, I’m compelled to ask: Your girl?”
I groan. “Way to ruin a moment.”
River walks off toward the gym. “There was no moment.”
“There was,” I call, eyes narrowed on his back. “We were having a moment, and you know it.”
His reflection in the wall of mirrors rolls its eyes. “I know nothing about a moment.”
I turn at the sound of a car pulling up behind us, expecting River’s dad, but it’s a dark SUV coming to a stop in the driveway instead.
The window lowers, and Noah waves me over from the driver’s seat.
I haven’t seen him in a month, not since I got kicked out of my sister’s house the night I made up with Summer.
“I was hoping to catch you here,” he says when I come up to the window.
“That’s ominous as hell. What can I do for you?”
Noah jerks a thumb at his gym bag in the back seat. “I just finished training at your last place of work. Happy to report that Don is still trying to ruin my off-season with more sessions than I probably need.”
I chuckle, but there’s nothing funny about it. “Good to know he’s as useless as ever. I’m sorry I got you saddled with him when I left.”
“Oh, don’t be sorry. Be obliging.” Noah’s gaze swings across his windshield, looking into Brooks’s gym. “Word on the street is you’re running an underground training center here. You got room for another client?”