Chapter 3 Wyatt
WYATT
I WOKE UP FROM A beautiful sleep, and now I’m drowning.
Literally.
Cold water closes over my head. A frigid, glacial kind of cold that bites through your clothes and cuts down to the bone.
My breath escapes in a flurry of bubbles as my body seizes against the shock.
The freezing water of Lake Tahoe is barely swimmable in May during the day.
At night, it feels like my lungs have closed up. Jesus. I actually can’t breathe.
Survival instincts kick in as I find myself completely submerged.
My hoodie and sweatpants are having the opposite effect—rather than serving as a heat source, they’re pulling me deeper into the lake.
While little needles stab into any inch of skin that’s exposed, I fight the dizzying disorientation and kick up with my bare feet.
A few seconds later, I break the surface, gasping.
The air I suck into my lungs feels even colder than the water, but at least I’m breathing again.
I hear someone else gasping beside me and look over to find the criminal who did this to me. This chick brazenly walked into my house, cracked open a beer, and meandered down here to admire the lake like she’s on fucking vacation. I don’t know who she is, but—
“Wyatt?”
I falter at the sound of my name escaping her lips. It takes a second to recognize her.
“Blake?” I spit out a mouthful of lake water. “What the hell are you doing here?”
We’re both treading water, arms moving in circles and legs kicking beneath the surface.
“Me? What are you doing here? Nobody was supposed to be here!”
She’s got me there. I did leave Nashville and come to Tahoe without telling anyone. In my defense, I pull shit like this all the time. Didn’t realize I needed to send an itinerary to every family friend whenever I get restless.
“Oh my God, I can actually see my breath,” she mutters. “Can we please have this argument on land?”
Without awaiting a response, she starts swimming away. I swim after her, and we’re both dripping wet and shaking uncontrollably by the time we heave ourselves up the ladder onto the dock. And my left cheekbone is throbbing. I gingerly touch it and wince.
“You threw a beer at me,” I accuse.
She shows no remorse. “Because you snuck up behind me in the dark and growled.”
“I didn’t growl. I said hey.”
“It sounded like a growl.”
I grit my teeth. “My voice was hoarse because I just woke up. To find a burglar on my dock—”
“Oh my God, you’re so dramatic. This is my house too.”
“Yeah, a house you’re not supposed to be at.”
“Neither are you!”
“So that gives you the right to throw a beer can at me?” I challenge.
“You pushed me into the lake!” she huffs.
“No, you tripped and pulled me in with you.”
We both glare at each other. We look like drowned rats. Blake’s brown hair is matted to her face and cheeks, and her teeth are chattering loud enough for me to hear it.
“I need to get out of these wet clothes,” she grumbles, putting an end to the most aggravating argument I’ve ever had. “I genuinely think I have hypothermia.”
“You don’t have hypothermia.”
“You don’t know that,” she says over her shoulder, stomping away.
I watch her go, frustration rooting me in place.
Blake Logan.
Fuck.
Of all the people who could’ve showed up to intrude on my summer, the universe had to send the one girl I’ve been avoiding for years.
Smothering a groan, I trudge toward the lounge chair where I was peacefully sleeping before Blake decided to ruin my night.
My acoustic guitar leans against the neighboring chair, which is covered with paper, all the sheets I’d torn from my notebook strewn across the canvas fabric.
I gather the papers, shoving them into the book, then grab the guitar by its neck and climb the stairs to the main deck.
Each step is punctuated by the sloshing from my waterlogged clothes.
Rather than enter through the kitchen, Blake goes around the side of the house.
I catch up to her as she stumbles into the mudroom, a huge room full of coat hooks, shoe racks, and cabinets with beach towels.
Blake approaches the long bench spanning one wall.
When she realizes I’m standing in the doorway, she glares at me again.
“Turn around,” she orders.
I give her some privacy, but it’s impossible not to hear what’s happening behind me. The slopping, squishing noises as she removes her soaked clothing, each item hitting the floor with a plop.
Blake Logan is taking her clothes off.
Jesus fucking Christ.
“Okay,” she says a minute later. “I’m decent.”
I’m relieved to see she’s wearing a royal-blue bathrobe now.
Except the robe keeps slipping off her shoulder, the collar gaping just enough to tease at the curve of her collarbone and the smooth, pale skin beneath it.
I bet her nipples are hard from the cold.
I wonder what color they are. Pale pink, I bet. Like little round, pink pearls.
Oh fuck.
I’m getting hard.
“Stop glaring at me,” she mutters. “This wasn’t my fault.”
She thinks I’m glaring. Guess that’s cool. Better than her knowing I’m imagining sucking on her nipples.
She shakes out her head, and instead of giving wet dog, it gives wet goddess, the long strands clinging to her pale cheeks like dark ribbons.
I wrestle my gaze away and try to distract myself from my semihard dick by pulling off my soaked hoodie.
I toss it on the bench, all the while avoiding Blake’s stormy gaze and reminding myself that this is what happens when you’re not getting laid.
That’s all this is. Six months of celibacy taking their toll on me. Nothing to do with the woman in the bathrobe.
“Why is this thing so huge?” She holds up one sleeve and watches it flop over. She really is drowning in that robe.
I give a wry grin. “I’m pretty sure that’s Dean’s.”
“How do you know?”
I gesture to the breast pocket. The initials DDL are stitched on it in white thread. Dean Di Laurentis. The robe I grab for myself says JT. John Tucker.
“They have matching monogrammed robes?” Blake sighs. “Why are they like this?”
“They” refers to my dad and his college friends.
They’re like brothers, only the way-too-close, always-in-each-other’s-business kind of brothers.
They talk daily in their multiple group chats.
Vacation together. Share obscure inside jokes and running pranks that none of the kids understand or care to try. It’s…intense.
“Maybe once you’ve worn a hockey uniform for most of your life, you need your name on every other piece of clothing you own,” I answer. “I’m pretty sure they got these made after Tucker built that sauna out back for Princess Alex.”
As Blake heads for the door that leads into the house, I drop my sweatpants and boxers and throw on my own robe.
It fits me fine, but I’ve got almost a foot on Blake in height and at least seventy pounds of muscle.
I leave our discarded clothing on the bench.
I’ll throw ’em in the dryer later. Right now, I need to get warm.
I follow her into the kitchen. She pushes some wet strands away from her face, and a droplet of lake water squeezes out from the bottom of her hair.
Just a teeny single drop. I follow it with the intensity of a dog watching his owner’s dinner.
It slides down her neck to her shoulder and disappears beneath the terry cloth like a taunt.
Then the robe slides off her shoulder again, exposing smooth skin.
I bite down a groan and turn away.
This no-sex thing was supposed to help me combat my writer’s block. According to Cole Tanner, my former bandmate, celibacy restarts your creative juices. Allows for no distractions, fostering nothing but pure focus. Artistic soul ecstasy over mindless bodily orgasms.
But my buddy clearly didn’t account for Blake’s naked body beneath that robe.
The last time she and I were alone, it was also in a kitchen.
With a counter.
Which I lifted her onto and then splayed her across like a feast for me to devour.
And I almost did. I still remember how good she smelled, like coconut and strawberries and pure temptation. Fresh and sweet, just like Blake herself. And when I was dragging my tongue over her neck, kissing and sucking on her silky skin, she tasted so fucking good.
I’d like to blame the alcohol for what I did that night, but that would be bullshit. I wasn’t that drunk. I wanted to taste her. I wanted to spread her legs and let her feel how hard she made me.
In that one reckless moment, I allowed myself to bite into the forbidden fruit that is Blake Logan.
Before that, I’d successfully managed to avoid her for two years, ever since she confessed to having a crush on me.
She was sixteen at the time. I was nineteen, turning twenty.
If I’m being honest, I never once looked at her in that way before that day.
Really looked at her. But I’m a guy, and when a girl tells you she wants you, it plants the seed in your mind.
Makes you think. So I started paying attention. I started to notice.
And I noticed things I shouldn’t.
Like how impossibly blue her eyes are.
The pitch of her laughter, how it sounds like a song.
Her sarcasm.
Her walls. I don’t know why they’re there, but I’ve always been attracted to walls.
But she was too damn young, so I shut it down hard. Wouldn’t let myself even go there.
Until Christmas Eve, when she showed up at our house looking hotter than she had any right to look, with that dark wavy hair that begs for a man’s fingers and those big blue eyes surrounded by sooty lashes.
Talking about some douchey football player who wanted to make her his girl, all the while sneaking glances at me, practically broadcasting that I could have her if I made a move.
Like an idiot, I made a move.
And then pretended not to remember.
I’m a fucking prick.