“I …” My gaze caught on her lips, then my thumb as it tested the cushion. Her jaw was in my hand, I noticed.
“Yes?” It was a whisper.
The tension between us was unbearable, the fight in my chest at an impasse, a pair of locked horns. My mind was a void. Time was a vacuum. I stared at her lips.
“Oh, fuck it,” she breathed, and then she was in my arms.
Our lips met with almost a bounce—hard from surprise, then soft in desire—as I gathered her up, felt the shape of her in my arms. Held her like a delicate thing, a precious thing, a thing to be treasured, this woman who could stop a thunderhead with a word.
I noted every detail of her with the obsession of an artist who’d seen a thing that would disappear. Her lips, soft and sweet—she tasted of sugar, did she taste like this everywhere? I needed to know. I needed to feel the press of our bodies, to mark how she fit against me with a familiarity I shouldn’t possess. I traced her neck with my fingertips as our lips parted, a soft seam. I knew every line of her, knew without knowing the way the curve of her waist would fit my hand. I knew her mouth, not from the clumsy kiss so long ago. I knew it because she was mine.
Mine. The word was a rush of thunder, a roar in my ribs, the knowledge pure. I couldn’t fathom how I hadn’t known. How I’d missed something so plain, so clear.
With a shift, I rolled us, fitting my hips against hers, pinning her with my lips, with my hand on her face. A long flex against her, and she mewled.
You can’t have her.
I broke away with a pop of surprise, staring down at Olivia. Pale skin, eyes closed. Rosy cheeks, lips plump.
You can’t keep her.
I rolled off of her, staring out the window at the oak trees, scrubbing a hand over my lips.
This was a mistake. As right as it felt, I knew it was wrong. We were partners, and if we did this, I’d drive her away. Somehow, I’d lose her too.
“Jake?” she said. Her hand found the small of my back.
“I … I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—” I scrambled to my feet.
She shifted to sit, her face bent with confusion. “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t … we can’t …” I raked a hand through my hair and headed for the ladder. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. Please, come back and talk to me.”
My feet were four rungs down when I chanced a look at her. “I can’t.”
“Is this about the bet? Is it about the farm?” she asked frantically, moving to crawl in my direction with rejection all over her.
I stopped. “No. Or not exactly. But we can’t do this. You know we can’t. I shouldn’t have kissed you—”
“I kissed you.”
I shook my head and started down the ladder. “It shouldn’t have happened. Goodnight, Olivia.”
“Don’t say goodnight to me, asshole,” she said with a rough voice and tears in her eyes as she threw a handful of hay at me. It rained down on me, sticking in my hair and fluttering down to the floor.
I jumped the last few rungs, hurrying for the back of the barn where I could cut to my house without her seeing me again. I didn’t want to hurt her any worse than I already had. But I couldn’t pretend like if I did what I wanted with her that it’d be casual. And I couldn’t pretend like it wouldn’t kill me when she left me here like anybody with a brain knew she would.
So I stormed across the property in the dark like a thief.
She didn’t follow me.
But I wished more than anything she had.
18
F is for
OLIVIA
I looked like shit.
It was a fact, not negative self-talk. My face was puffy from crying all night, and no amount of scrubbing would loosen up the mascara from my lashes, not without losing a hefty portion in the process. It’d been calcified by my tears.
I wished I were kidding.
Pop’s office was warm that afternoon even with the windows open, my neck dotted with sweat and my hair piled on my head. I’d been in here for a few hours going through Pop’s things, digging through his drawers in search of treasure. And I found quite a bit, everything from a tiny Holstein cow from a farm set I’d had as a girl to one of his wooden snuff boxes. A pair of six-pound scissors that could have decapitated an intruder sat on the leather desk pad next to a handful of unexpectedly fascinating rusty nails.
Essentially, Pop’s office was a gigantic junk drawer.
Of course, when I opened up the file cabinets, I discovered records going all the way back to a ledger from the late 1800s. I pulled the most recent set when I found some of my drawings stuffed haphazardly into the folders and promised myself I’d go through them.
Jolene was going to town on an old rope she’d discovered under his ancient glass-doored bookcase, and I eyed the scissors, wondering what part of Jake I should cut off first.
I relived the shame I’d felt last night as I climbed down the ladder with hay in my hair, bleary-eyed and miserable and desperate to be alone. The house had been silent as a tomb until Jolene heard me and started howling, not stopping until she was in my arms. And with that, I was up the stairs and facedown in bed until the sun came up.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. I lay on my back too, staring at my ceiling with tears in my ears. There was also a stretch where I watched out the window as everything wound down, the lights going down and gear loading out. Courtney had said she and Kendall were on it, and I’d put all my faith in them because I didn’t know if I could get out of bed to smile my way through the rest of the night.
So I’d spent most of the day wandering around, hoping to run into Jake after the supreme rejection he’d laid on me. The time it took me to milk Alice was occupied with rattling annoyance with the whole affair. Like me having to kiss him. Or that we had literally been a millimeter from a literal roll in the hay before he rejected me. While I dewormed the goats—which wasn’t as gross as it sounded, though no one enjoyed the process—I was just mad. Mad at his stupid, manchild, I’m sorry, but I can’t use words line. Mad at his stupid mouth for kissing me back like it did. Mad at his hips and the python between them that he’d promised but didn’t deliver.
But when I came inside without seeing him—thus giving me a place to actually dump my rage—my emotions dwindled down to sadness alone. Because I wanted Jake and not just for the hayloft. But he’d made it clear how he felt about me. About us. He’d left me crying in the barn with nothing but a halfassed apology and no explanation.
And I wanted an explanation.
Jolene and her rope went all blurry when my eyes filled with miserable, frustrated tears. So I got myself up, stuffed my feet in my rain boots, and marched toward the big barns. Somebody would know where he was.
White-topped barns stretched out in rows across a wide spread of land, bracketed by pastures. Each herd—between thirty and fifty a pop—had their own interior barn with access to grass and extended time in the pastures. I caught sight of a couple of our guys, one of them pushing a wheelbarrow. I must have been a sight, storming through the yard in sweat shorts, my boots, and my hair a mess, because they both stopped and stared at me like I might bite them.