Page 32 of Skin Deep

I blushed and turned away, hating how much I liked that he’d done that in front of people.

“Your turn, baby,” he said and held the axes out to me.

I took them and tried to look like I was fuming instead of secretly glowing. His stupid possessive caveman display was getting me all wound up in all the right ways. When he slapped my ass on the way past, I glowered at him over my shoulder.

He grinned. “Give ‘em hell, gorgeous.”

“I’ll give you something,” I grumbled and tossed the first ax. I barely had to look to hit the center of the target. It was stationary and only a few feet away. If they wanted to make it challenging, they should’ve had moving targets that threw things back.

“Another perfect throw,” the husband on the other team remarked flatly. “At this point, I’d be more surprised if you missed.”

I gripped the ax and turned to him, but before I could do anything stupid, Pax swept in and pried it out of my hands. “I think it’s time we called the game so we could go eat, huh?”

The other couple waved goodbye and quickly retreated to their table while Pax retrieved the other ax.

“You can’t go chopping off their limbs for being sore losers,” Pax said, draping his arm over me again.

“It wasn’t about them beingsore losers,” I scoffed.

He smirked as we reached the counter. “Aw, is somebody jealous?”

“No,” I said way too fast to be believable, and then I sighed. “Maybe. A little. It’s…a sore spot, I guess. My ex was a serial cheater.”

He used an ax handle to tip my chin up. “Let’s clear that up right away. If I’m with you, then I’m yours, and yours only. Understand me?”

“Words are cheap,” I said firmly.

“Then I’ll prove it every fucking day if you need me to.” He turned and handed the axes over to the attendant.

Warmth sprouted in my chest, but I pushed it down. I couldn’t afford to catch feelings for Pax, even if he was charming, handsome, and patient with me. So far. That could all change in an instant if I said or did the wrong thing, which would happen eventually. Men were all the same. I wasn’t going to get my hopes up.

“You want to try knives?” he asked me.

I raised an eyebrow. “And defeat you even more soundly?”

He chuckled. “Fair point. My ego can only take so much.”

Pax took the two beers he’d ordered for the table and tugged one of my hands away from my chest and twined his fingers in mine. That little spot of warmth in my chest bloomed into a full sun that left my cheeks blazing and my heart thudding noisily against my ribs as he led us back to our table. I blushed even harder when he pulled out my chair for me, but I didn’t protest. That’d only draw more attention.

He popped the top on both beers and sat at the table across from me. “I knew you were good with pointy objects, but I didn’t think knives translated to axes.”

“It doesn’t. Not really,” I replied with a shrug. “Different skill sets. But I spent a lot of time hitting targets.”

I closed my eyes and I was twelve years old again, out in the woods surrounded by nothing but trees and dirt.

My head throbs and my bones ache from dehydration. My skin is burned and peeling from long hours of being in the sun.

A whip cracks behind me and an angry old man’s voice calls out in Serbian, “Again!”

Thunk, thunk. My knife sinks into the target an inch to the right of the bullseye and I wince. Not because I missed, or because I’ll be the one carrying all the equipment from one campsite to the next, but because I know it means another day of throwing knives until my fingers bleed. All I want is a shower. A real fucking shower and not some dip in the lake.

But it isn’t happening.

Until I pass all of Majistor Stojan’s stupid tests, I’m not leaving that forest.

I winced and shook the memory away. “It’s probably a bad time to tell you I actually had a private tutor teach me how to do this.”

He put the beer down and gave me a funny look. “You had a private ax throwing tutor?”

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