16. Dove
DOVE
T he next few days passed by in a burst of thick, heavy humidity thanks to the impending weather, accompanied by the equally suffocating presence of Josh following me around like my own personal shadow.
It was as if something had shifted between us since the night I’d woken up using him as a glorified pillow. Josh was a little less distant—and a lot more determined.
He no longer stood by while I started the day by ignoring him, quietly slipping out the door to begin my routine alone.
No, now he wanted to talk. Talk about the chores that had fallen by the wayside since my mom got sick and his dad had been glued to her side.
Talk about how the animals were doing, or our plan of attack for the harvest.
Just… talk.
Although he never brought up his leaving, skirting around talking about it altogether. A part of me bristled at that, hurt by his years-long absence and simple return as if no time had passed, but I could tell he was trying to make amends in his own way .
Wasn’t that what I’d wished for every day since he’d left—for him to simply be back, just like he was now?
Every time a laugh fell from his lips, or a smile spread across his face, my anger dissipated little by little, and I found I didn’t want to scowl and evade him.
I wanted to hear that deep laugh, to watch his smile curl playfully, to let him tease me like he once had before the years stretched long and harrowed between us.
The past few days were so much like before that I nearly forgot we weren’t those carefree teenagers anymore—that something much heavier surrounded us now.
I shrieked, forced abruptly from my meandering thoughts as something buzzed by my ear and hit the side of my head.
My body convulsed in response, attempting to dislodge whatever had flown into my hair, subsequently dropping the board I’d been holding in place for Josh as he patched the broken part of the fence that lined one side of the driveway and the pasture beyond.
“What!?” Josh looked up at me in alarm from where he was kneeling, hammer poised in his hand like a weapon as if he was about to ward off an attacker with it.
“A bug,” I sputtered, still failing, “flew into my hair!”
Josh gave a choked off chortle before rising, or at least I think he did. I could hardly see him through the flurry of my hair as I shook it wildly.
“Stop that,” he managed through his laughter. “You’re going to break your neck.”
I tossed my head back to glare at him, pushing dark strands out of my face and running my hands through them frantically, chills rolling down my spine at the thought of finding a bug in it.
There was a lot I’d learned to deal with since living on a farm, and while I wasn’t afraid of bugs per se , that didn’t mean I wanted them on me.
“Let me check,” he murmured in a low, pacifying voice. “Nothing but a stink bug, I’ll bet.”
“Oh, sure.” I shuddered. “Nothing but. ”
He chuckled, stepping closer as I stood still to let him inspect my hair.
It was actually down today, a marvel indeed, something I cursed myself for immediately the moment I’d stepped outside into the humid dawn.
I’d held my hair tie in my hand this morning, ready to pull it up and out of my face for the day, but then the silly urge to see Josh’s reaction to it being down kept me from tying it back, leaving it loose and flowing past my shoulders instead.
He circled me, combing his hand through the back as I attempted to reign in another shiver, this one conjured by the slide of his fingers against my scalp as it raked down to the ends of my hair.
He hadn’t mentioned anything about me leaving it down today, but I’d caught him staring at me all morning out the corner of my eye when he thought I wasn’t looking.
I wondered if he liked seeing it down, but a bigger part of me wondered if he enjoyed the feel of it running through his fingers just as much as I did.
He rounded back in front of me, his eyes busy scanning for bugs, which had my skin crawling at the thought.
Nope, not thinking about it .
Drawing my eyes up to his serious face, I inspected him instead.
The honey flecks in his focused brown eyes glinted like embers in the bright sunshine, and his dark hair was curling slightly from the mugginess of the day, not quite touching his ears on the sides but long enough on the top that he had a habit of reaching up to brush it off his forehead while we were busy working.
But what captured my attention the most was the stubble darkening his jaw.
That’s new. He’d been clean-shaven when he arrived, and kept it that way for the funeral, but now it seemed he wasn’t bothered by a few days’ worth of growth.
I found I wasn’t either.
I’d been drawn to it all day. Josh focused on hammering nails and not his thumb while I stood there to pass and hold, a job that didn’t require much concentration and gave me plenty of time for my thoughts, and eyes, to wander.
And wander they did. Straight to Josh.
Since the moment we’d started working on the fence, a tingle of awareness had broken out over my skin at our close proximity, summoning scenarios where I allowed myself to lean over and shift his concentration to me instead.
Now that we were so close, the urge to trace my lips along the line of his strong jaw—to find out whether the scruff there was coarse or soft—was so tempting, I nearly trembled with it.
I did tremble when Josh’s hand slide beneath my hair to palm the sensitive skin at the back of my neck, my breath hitching when our gazes locked.
“Just being thorough,” he murmured with a low rasp that made my stomach flutter.
The air between us thinned, each inhale weighted and slow. A jolt of pure desire coursed through me, connecting the gentle grip of his callused hand straight to the apex of my thighs, where I could feel myself growing wet just from his simple touch.
Even after all these years he still had the hands of a working man. Suddenly I needed to know—desperately—what he’d been doing all this time. What he’d filled his days with that wasn’t the farm.
Wasn’t me.
“Josh…” His name left me in a raspy whimper instead of the question I’d intended.
His eyes darkened, the brown of his irises taken over by expanding black pupil as he swayed closer, like a moth to flame.
His expression intensified as if caught in a cross between pleasure and pain.
Now was not the time for questions, not when that look had my stomach tightening and my core throbbing.
I licked at my dry lips and his eyes flickered down to follow the movement.
God, that look. It nearly burned me with how heated it was.
I’d never seen that look on his face before.
A tiny spark of something like hope ignited in my chest. This couldn’t simply be a one-sided crush on my part, not when the evidence was staring straight back at me.
Josh’s eyes had gone nearly black with want, and I had absolutely no idea what was building between us, but it felt charged, like the air before a lightning storm.
If I was being honest, I felt it since he’d been back.
I’d tried so hard to ignore it in my anger, but I was the opposite of angry right now.
Half of what sparked between us was from Josh, so rich and heady it was near palpable in the air surrounding us, and I found I didn’t want to take shelter from whatever was heading our way.
I tilted my face up, relaxing back into his hand that had moved to cradle the base of my skull, and closed my eyes, waiting. My heart pounded against my ribcage as hard as a drum and twice as loud as he leaned down, drawing closer, until a puff of air ghosted across my lips?—
A horn honked a friendly greeting in rapid succession, and gravel crunched under tires as someone barreled down our long driveway.
The spell was immediately broken as I jumped from the unexpected sound, my eyes flying open in shock.
Josh was a solid wall of muscle along my front, and I gulped as I noticed how close we had drifted together.
A drop of sweat ran down the length of my back, from the heat of the day or the heat radiating from Josh, I had no idea.
My eyes darted nervously between him and the approaching vehicle, and the warmth in my chest sank into a fearful chill when I saw how close they were to reaching us.
Josh felt me tense as I prepared to pull away and reacted by tightening his hand around the base of my neck, as if he could hold me in place.
But when I shifted out of his grip, he let me go, fingers trailing over my skin as I stepped back until a few feet separated us.
Josh’s eyes shuttered with the distance, extinguishing the flame of desire burning within them into a longing smolder.
The hand that had held me so delicately, yet so firmly, hovered in the air for a single beat before it lowered, curling into a fist by his side.
I squinted against the sun and focused on the baby-blue Jeep Wrangler as it rattled down the drive with its windows rolled down, not bothering to avoid the various dips and holes scattered across the dirt road. My heart began to pound in my chest for an entirely different reason.
I knew that Jeep.
“Reverie,” I breathed. Partly from shock, partly because I’d yet to regain my breath from where Josh had stolen it away.
Josh released a heavy sigh, either for what we were about to get into with Reverie being back, or for what she’d interrupted.
God, what she’d interrupted…
I risked a glance at him, but his eyes were focused ahead. My lips still tingled from the air he’d exhaled along them. I pulled my bottom lip between my teeth, worrying it. A part of me was disappointed, but…
Another part was relieved.
My head was starting to clear from the fog it’d been in from Josh’s touch, and I couldn’t believe what we’d been about to do.