Chapter 4 #4
My heart jumps into my throat, and without thinking, I sprint forward and start climbing. It’s not just instinct—it’s calculation. He’s tired, his hands are scraped, his footing’s not great. One more mistake and he’s on the ground with broken bones or worse.
“Fucking fuck,” I mutter under my breath. “You know, rescuing an asshole stuck in a tree wasn’t on my bingo card for tonight. I was supposed to be getting laid.”
“Ha! So you’re s-saying I saved some poor, innocent p-person from having to spend time with your ch-charming self? Make that my epitaph.”
The pine is old and thick, with plenty of handholds, and I’m a hell of a lot more experienced at this than he is, not to mention taller. Within seconds, I’m close enough to wrap an arm around his waist.
“I’ve got you,” I murmur, feeling the tension in his body as he leans into me. “Let me help you down.”
“But the racket—”
“Can stay there,” I insist.
I keep my voice low and steady—the same tone I use with newbies working a sawline for the first time. Calm keeps people moving.
“I can do it,” he pants, but the fight’s gone out of his voice.
“Sure, city boy. You were doing great so far.”
I guide him down slowly, my chest pressed against his back, one hand on his waist and the other showing him where to place his feet. I can smell his hair product—something orangey and probably expensive—and feel the heat of his body through his sweatshirt.
His scraped hands are shaking from exhaustion and adrenaline. I know he has to be scared out of his mind, but he doesn’t freeze or panic.
Griffin is brave.
I mean, he’s a hell of a lot of other things—stubborn and foolish come to mind—but for the second time, I find myself reluctantly admiring this idiot.
We’re about five feet from the bottom when Griffin’s boot slips on a patch of loose bark. His weight shifts wrong, throwing us both off-balance.
“Shit,” he breathes, and an instant later, we’re both falling.
We hit the ground hard, a tangle of arms and legs and pine needles. I manage to twist at the last second so I take the brunt of the impact, Griffin landing half on top of me with his face inches from mine.
We’re both breathing hard, staring at each other in the fading light, too stunned to move. His eyes are even more incredible up close—that impossible green with flecks of gold, framed by the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a human.
And then, without thinking, without planning, without any goddamn sense at all, suddenly we’re kissing.
It’s the adrenaline, I think. But the second our mouths touch, something electric shoots through me, and I’m kissing him like my life depends on it.
He tastes like apples, and he makes a small, surprised sound against my lips that goes straight to my dick. His hands fist in my shirt, and for a second, I’m sure he’s going to push me away.
Instead, he kisses me back. Desperately.
This isn’t like any kiss I’ve ever had. It’s like we’re fighting with our lips, arguing with our tongues. Neither of us wants to yield any ground. Neither wants to be the first to pull away.
There’s a corner of my brain that sees just how ridiculous this is.
Griffin Mercer’s a pain-in-the-ass city boy who’s trying to destroy my livelihood.
I should not be kissing him like he’s the answer to every question I never knew I had.
But once again, my brain’s been hijacked, and I can’t make myself let him go.
When we finally break apart—simultaneously—we’re both breathing like we’ve run a marathon.
My head’s already trying to shove the moment into a mental box marked “complication.” The problem is, the damn box doesn’t want to close.
Griffin’s pupils are blown wide, his lips swollen and pink even in the semi-darkness, and there’s a flush spreading down his neck that’s practically begging me to follow it with my tongue.
“That didn’t happen,” he says, quickly scrambling off me to stand.
“Pfft. What didn’t happen?” I counter, rolling to my feet. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Good! So don’t… don’t kiss me again,” he says, and… yup, like clockwork, that chin is back in the air. “Because I dislike you. Greatly.”
“Oh, Jesus, not nearly as much as I dislike you,” I inform him. “But just to be clear, baby, you kissed me.”
“Like hell!” he squawks. “Believe me, if I kissed you, you’d know… baby.”
I snort. “Like I’d ever kiss someone so—”
At the same time, he makes that teakettle whistle noise he made yesterday and says, “You are so arrogant, so controlling—”
“—so fucking stubborn,” we yell simultaneously.
Somehow, we’ve gotten close so that our breath is mingling again. Like opposing magnets, we don’t seem to have a choice.
Griffin’s milky skin’s practically glowing in the darkness.
His hair’s sticking up like a halo. His shirt—the kind of high-tech, expensive shit people wear when they’re pretending to be outdoorsy—is half bark chips and half pine needles, and he looks like a human porcupine, which is pretty fucking accurate.
There’s not a single attractive thing about him, I swear to god.
So tell me why—please tell me why—when his gaze drops to my lips, I close the distance between us.
This time, I’m almost sure he kisses me first.
It’s fiercer than before, like he’s trying to prove a point. My hands fist in his shirt, and I back him against the pine tree, pressing him into the rough bark as I kiss him back just as hard.
He makes a low sound in his throat, and his hips punch forward, grinding against me.
I can feel every inch of him through our clothes, and when I shift my weight, pinning him more firmly against the tree, he gasps into my mouth.
If my brain hadn’t already packed its bags and gone on a walkabout, the press of his dick against mine would have done it.
It lasts maybe ten, maybe thirty, maybe a hundred-twenty seconds before we break apart, breathing like we’ve been submerged.
“That was…” Griffin starts, then shakes his head. “No.”
“Ha. Definitely no. Never to be repeated,” I agree roughly.
“Or discussed.”
“Absolutely not.”
We stare at each other for a long moment, and then he swallows hard.
“You should…” He waves a hand toward the road.
“Oh, I’m going. Hell, I’m practically gone,” I tell him, though my feet don’t move, and my arms fold over my chest. Out of my mouth come the words, “Just as soon as you admit you started… this thing we’re not talking about.”
He snorts. “No fucking way! You’re a controlling caveman!”
“Oh, please. Spoiled city boy.”
“I guess now I know why they call you the Axe.” Griffin folds his arms over his chest, mirroring my pose.
All at once, I remember who this guy is and who he’s been talking to and the heat in my blood chills so fast it makes my head spin. Or, hell, maybe it was already spinning. Every single thought and action I’ve had since I got here is blurred and melded, light filtered through raindrops.
Either way, I take a quick step back.
Griffin frowns like he’s confused about how there came to be several feet of space between us.
“Let me guess where you heard that,” I say. “You’ve been chatting with your new BFF, Derek Sullivan, right? The man who’s been in Winsome for all of five minutes and doesn’t know shit about shit? The man who can’t even come up with an original nickname for a guy named Axford?” I roll my eyes.
He lifts his chin in his signature move, and I want to kiss him again so badly I force myself to take another step back.
“Be careful of Derek Sullivan,” I say, knowing my words will fall on deaf ears. “You can’t trust him.”
“Oh, unlike you, right?” Griffin’s hiss slides through the night like a knife.
I brush pine needles off my arms. “Yeah,” I say. “Unlike me.”
I walk away without looking back, though every instinct I have is screaming at me to turn around. To apologize. To kiss him again until we’re both senseless.
I refuse.
Because Griffin Mercer might be the most beautiful, infuriating, impossible man I’ve ever met, but right now, he’s also my enemy. I owe it to myself and my family to remember that.
No matter how tempting it is to forget.