The shock melted from her features and twisted into a furious scowl that I might have found adorable if I wasn’t currently worrying that the best sex of my life had been with a raving lunatic with stalker tendencies.
“What’s it look like?” she asked in a snotty voice while lifting the bottle of red in her hand. “I’m buying wine.”
“Not what I mean, and you know it. What are you doin’ in my town? How the hell did you even find me?”
“Are you serious? I didn’t find you! This is purely coincidental. How would I even go about doing that when all I knew was your first name?”
I threw my arms out at my sides, exhaustion and stress making me a tad bit irrational as I declared, “I don’t know! I don’t know how the hell stalkers think. Maybe you went through my wallet that night. Who the hell knows?”
“Oh my God!” she cried indignantly. “I’m not stalking you, asshole. I live here.”
“Bullshit,” I clipped, noticing from the corner of my eye that we’d gained the attention of the people around us with our loud argument. “I live here,” I stressed. “Lived here for years. I know every resident of this town, and you are . . . not . . . one of them.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and glared furiously. An expression so unlike all the ones I’d seen from her that night. “Well, apparently not all of them.”
I mimicked her stance, narrowing my eyes in a glare. “Yeah? Since when?”
“That’s none of your business,” she returned snidely before letting out a dramatic groan and lifting her hand to rake her fingers through all that long thick hair. In spite of being in the middle of a yelling match, watching all that silky red fall made my dick begin to thicken. “Should’ve known he was a jackass,” she grumbled to herself. “Jesus, I can really pick ’em.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Her face scrunched up in rage. “Again, that’s none of your damn business. I’m so done with this,” she clipped. She whipped around and started to storm off before changing course and stomping back up to me, shoving a finger in my face. “And you know what? You need to get over yourself. You weren’t even that good!” she exclaimed loudly.
I let out a caustic laugh. “Sure, Red. Keep tellin’ yourself that. I had the scratch marks all over my back for days to prove otherwise.”
“Gah!” she shouted. “You’re such a prick!”
“A prick who rocked your world!”
“That night was the biggest mistake ever!”
My mouth curled into a smug grin. “Yeah? Bet if I offered you’d jump at the chance for a repeat.”
She threw daggers with her eyes. “Not on your life, asshole. I don’t sleep with men I hate.”
“Wanna put money on that, stalker? Hate sex is the best kind there is. Give me a few minutes and I’ll prove it to you.”
“Lick rust, Micah.” With that, she spun on her heel and stormed down the aisle, her round ass and curvy hips swaying enticingly as she disappeared around the corner, leaving me pissed and turned on at the same damn time.
How the hell was that even possible?
Hayden
I let out a deep, cleansing breath as I followed Sylvia into the next position, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop stewing over my encounter with that arrogant, narcissistic bastard from the night before.
“You know, yoga’s supposed to help calm you. You’re as tangled up as that piece of gum you had to get outta Ivy’s hair last week. You wanna tell me what’s going on? Is it ’cause Ivy’s gone this weekend?”
“No. I mean, yes—well, kind of . . . It’s not entirely that,” I admitted, letting out a deep sigh. “Of course I hate not having her with me. I don’t think that feeling will ever go away.”
“I wouldn’t imagine so. But if that’s not the crux of your issues this morning, what is?”
Pursing my lips, I blew out a long, slow exhale as I adjusted on my mat to face Sylvia. She did the same, criss-crossing her legs and pulling her heels in much closer than I could pull mine. From so many years of yoga, my eighty-three-year-old great-aunt was about a million times more flexible than I was.
“I met this guy in a bar back in Richmond one night a few weeks back . . .”
Her blue eyes began to dance in the sunlight beaming down on us. “Ooh, this sounds promising.”
I let out a laugh and shook my head. “Only you would think of admitting to a one-night stand as ‘promising.’”
She scoffed in affront and exclaimed, “Well, of course I would. I see no harm whatsoever in a woman knowing her desires and doin’ something about seein’ they’re fulfilled. I’ll never wrap my head around these people who think it’s wrong for a woman to go in search of great sex while a man gets a pat on the back for the same damn thing. Speaking of, how was it?”
“It was . . . incredible,” I confessed, my shoulders slumping in defeat. “Hands down, the best I’ve ever had. Like, nothing before that even compared. And I had all these really great memories of that night that I thought I’d be able to look back on whenever I wanted.”
She lifted an inquisitive brow. “I don’t understand. Why do you sound so broken up about that?”
“Because I am. In a cruel twist of fate—since that bitch hasn’t already gotten enough punches in—I discovered he lives here when I ran into him at the market last night.”
“Well, that’s a good thing, right? It means you can have as many repeats as you’d like.”
“No! That’s just it. It’s a bad thing. As it turns out, the guy’s a massive dick. I mean, he actually accused me of stalking him. He thought I was in Hope Valley because I’d followed him or something.”
“The hell he did,” she snapped in outrage. And an outraged Sylvia was nothing you ever wanted to mess with.
“He absolutely did. We got into this big shouting match right there in the middle of the aisle with all these people I don’t even know watching like we were putting on a show or something.”
“That’s small-town livin’ for you, sweets. Everybody knows everybody else’s business. Don’t worry, you’ll eventually get used to it.”
I collapsed back onto mat with a pained groan, staring up at the gorgeous blue sky and puffy white clouds. “This is just sad. I’m a thirty-three-year-old divorcee whose husband couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and threw me over for the other woman. Then the best sex of my life turned out to be the biggest asshole I’ve ever met. Maybe I’m cursed or something.”
“Oh nonsense. There’s no such thing as curses.”
I turned my head and looked up at her, lifting a hand to block the sun. “Yeah? Then what do you think the problem is?”
“You’re simply crap at picking good men, that’s all,” Sylvia stated almost amiably before sucking in a gasp like she’d just had a lightbulb moment. “Oh! You know what? You should really meet my neighbor,” she insisted, like I wasn’t in the middle of a crisis.
“Sylvia,” I groaned, “another guy is so not the answer.”