Chapter 16 #3
“Fine,” he says. “You’re attracted to me but that doesn’t count. Noted.” My attempt to argue goes unacknowledged. “I’ll assume same goes with my jokes.”
“For once, assuming doesn’t make you an ass.”
He snorts. “Then I’ll go with using my hands.”
“Your hands?”
“Yeah,” he says, stretching all ten fingers wide as if needing to showcase them.
They’re big hands. Callused and scarred.
On a patch of soft skin, they probably feel as rough as a coarse sheet of sandpaper.
That conjures up all kinds of new thoughts.
“I like using them.” He looks at me, one side of his mouth creeping up.
“Some people might say I’m even good at it. ”
I really wish I was drinking alcohol.
“Oh?” Damn his eyes and mouth that can’t not smile. No matter how hard he tries or doesn’t, there’s no denying Gavin Nickels is charming as hell. And has hands he likes to use. “By whom?”
“You, for one,” he says easily.
I guffaw. “I know nothing about what your hands can do other than mow.”
He grips the can of beer, and his forearm jumps with a slight flex, bringing attention to his yard-implement tattoo. And muscles. “Sure you do.”
“Oh really?”
He takes an easy sip of his beer. “Yep.”
“That why you have the tattoo?”
His brows pinch. “The tattoo?”
“The hedge trimmers you use with your hands?”
He examines the tattoo on his own forearm. At this proximity, it looks less like hedge trimmers and more like tongs used to cook a steak. He doesn’t correct me, so I must be right. But also . . . why does he look like he wants to laugh?
“Sure,” he says. “That’s why I have the hedge trimmers.”
My gaze goes to his hands. Unlike the men I’ve been with in the city with smooth skin and clean nails, true to his words, Gavin’s hands have done work.
Marred with scars, they’ve lived a whole life and touched a whole world—tools, trees, and women.
Fine lines of white and thick circles of red dot his knuckles, wrists, and forearms. I was right about a lot of him—Gavin is a man who works with his body, the evidence branded into his flesh—but there are blanks I can’t fill. Marks I don’t know.
Did he need stitches?
Did he go to a hospital?
Did he laugh and call the assaulting branch or blade a damn sonofabitch?
A table nearby shouts at something happening on the TV but my eyes find Gavin’s.
Surrounded by people blowing off steam, clanking glasses, and a bartender scooping ice just feet away, a shift happens. An intensity that creeps into his gaze that I feel myself matching.
Stop it, Reese! my brain screams at me. You knew him when he believed in Santa!
That brain scream doesn’t change the version of the man sitting in front of me or the space he takes up or the way he’s looking at me now. Nor does it change the way I’m looking right back or the things I’m thinking.
In a single deft movement, he swivels our stools to face one another, the wide spread of his legs becoming two firm walls around mine.
He leans in; I lean in.
His lips part; my lips part.
He lifts a hand; I go still.
He brushes my hair from my face, and for one, split, second, I close my eyes and breathe him in.
His next words are scraped and low. “And what are you reading about me now, Miss Reese?”
A familiar heat floods me. It starts low in my belly then smolders its way out to nerve endings and vein lines. It’s the one I have every time I sit on a barstool next to a man who I’m two drinks away from getting naked with then fucked by.
Only this time, it’s not a stranger in a sea of many who I’ll never see again, it’s Gavin. The man whose family I’m now connected with by a business, who lives as far from the city I’m trying to get back to as it gets, and who is a ten-years-too-young distraction that I in no way need.
And yet I don’t back away from him. If anything, his overt desire for me pulls at me like a thread.
Maybe it’s a kink, but I like him wanting me.
Like him stoking those first embers of a fire that might consume me as much as I like the conflict between anticipating what comes next and knowing it should never, ever happen.
My tone stays uninterested. “I’m thinking it makes sense you haven’t found a girl to settle down with since I set the bar so high for you right out of the gate.”
Gavin chuckles softly. His breath smells like trail mix and canned beer and does anything but repulse me.
“Would you believe me if I told you that you pointed me toward my future all those years ago?”
“No,” I say, smiling at his bullshit line and our ridiculous closeness. “But it’s cute you think I would.”
“Ahh.” Dimples carve through his awful beard. “So I’m cute and attractive.”
We’re dancing a line here—at least I am.
I could sling a leg over his lap and press my mouth to his and he’d do nothing but grip his big, talented hands into my hips and let me lead.
Just knowing that—feeling the way he’d give in to me and let me tell him what to do—sends a thrill down my spine.
Makes me think he’d be a distraction worth exploring.
I lift my chin and my nose brushes his. A move that asks how far are we going to push this? “Young and dumb, actually.”
He doesn’t budge. “Not that dumb. I’m reading a book about anti-gravity—” He wets his lips. “It’s impossible to put down.”
I bite back my smile. “Bad.”
“Hm.” He rests one hand on the bar and the other on the back of my barstool, fully securing me in a Gavin-made cage. “I think you like it though.”
I hate that I might.
“Why do you hate hugs?” he asks.
“Not all hugs,” I correct him. Still close. Still flooded with heat and dirty thoughts. “Only ones from strangers. They’re assumptive.”
“Assumptive?” His brows raise along with one corner of his lips.
“Assumptive,” I repeat, tips of our noses once again brushing. “That someone thinks their touch is welcomed or needed. I hug my family. I don’t need more people in my space.”
“Because you don’t want them there?” Some of the play has left his voice.
“Because I’ve yet to find anyone who belongs there.”
His eyes sweep over every inch of my face, this time like they’re seeing something beneath the surface, and I wish I could unsay it.
What I said is true—I barely tolerate most people, let alone need them touching me with chests and arms and breaths on my neck—but the way he’s looking at me and the way I’m letting him . . .
“You hugged Addie,” he says.
“She’s cute.” My lips twitch. “She’s allowed to be assumptive.”
He touches my face again; my lips part again. This man is going to kiss me and everything in me is screaming to let him.
“Gav!” someone hollers across the bar. “We’re up!”
He looks their way with a wave and our bubble of our aloneness pops, both of us returning to our own spaces.
We’re in a bar, and I’m here to get a job done.
And while I might hope to one day meet someone I want to let get close, Gavin Nickels isn’t that man—he can’t be.
He’s young, happy to settle, and has an unrequited dream of living in a shed.
Not to mention the community snacks. Every difference between us could stretch the miles from here to Chicago.
He hands the bartender cash and says, “Hers too.” Then to me: “Stay.”
I laugh, slinging my purse over my shoulder as we stand. “And do what?”
“See where the night goes. Have fun.” He lifts a shoulder. “They have that in Chicago, don’t they?”
He says it in jest, but little does he know I can’t remember the last time I did something for fun. That me sitting here talking to him for the last twenty minutes is the most fun I’ve had in months.
Laughter erupts from the dartboards, and my gut reaction is to say yes. To stay, to play—with him, his friends, even Nose, the former potential father of my child—and see where it leads. But I also have work to do. Donors to research and the whole wine industry to learn by Monday. “I can’t.”
He takes his change and leaves a tip. “Can’t or won’t?”
My eyes drift all over him. His City of Fontain hat. His clothes. His boots. His scarred hands and tattooed arm. “Both,” I admit.
Another call of his name comes from across the room, and he raises a finger while keeping his eyes on me. “Firm you work for only buy vineyards, or do they give out loans too?”
“Loans?”
He leans toward me, close, and my breath stills. At my ear, he whispers. “I’m interested.”
I school my amusement.
He winks then walks away, skirting around tables to the dartboards and friends who greet him with half hugs and handshakes. He’s surrounded by people who know him, and everyone looks happy. Especially him. Even Nose.
On his first throw, Gavin gets a bullseye. I can’t hear what he says, but the way people around him react, it’s a shit-talking one-liner.
At the doorway I pause and give him one last look; he’s already looking at me.
Stay, he mouths.
I slip into the thick summer night air.