Page 4 of Love JD

Her arms tightened around my neck. “That’s not very nice.”

“I’m not nice,” I smiled blandly. “I’m conscientious. There’s a difference.” I walked carefully over the uneven terrain, following the hiking trail back to the event center. “And if you don’t tell me your name, I’m just going to start waving you around until someone recognizes you.”

Her cheeks went cherry red. I’d never seen anyone blush like that. Like actually blush. I always figured it was an expression, but not on fainting goat girl. She manifested that euphemism literally. She turned that saucy glare on me even though she’d laced her hands behind my neck and seemed to have accepted my help in carrying her through the forest. “You’re not conscientious, you’re bossy.”

“I am a boss.”

“Not my boss,” she countered.

“Lucky for you.” I gave her a hard glint for good measure.

Her mouth clacked shut. I carried her silently through the forest, my mind turning over our conversation and trying to make sense of this woman. If she was here for the wedding, then she had to be a friend of Laurel’s or Cade’s, but if that was the case, then why didn’t she want me to know who she was? Maybe she was an ex-girlfriend. Or, more likely, she was supposed to be helping with the catering and had ditched her job to look for moss.

“You really don’t have to do this,” she reiterated suddenly.

I stopped at the edge of the woods, adjusting my grip on her soft body again. Normally, carrying someone her size wouldn’t be a problem for me, but she’d really thwacked my ribs. They burned with every breath, and sweat gathered along the collar of my dress shirt. I gave her a withering scowl. “I think what you mean to say is, ‘thank you for rescuing me. How can I make this easier?’”

Granite had nothing on the hardness of this girl’s answering glower. “I’m only saying it because you’re scowling and it’s making me nervous. And I faint when I’m nervous.”

“I’m not scowling,” I muttered, but I pulled in a steadying breath through my nose, willing my features to relax. “There, better?”

Her wide, hazel eyes surveyed my expression, so close I could see the dusting of freckles across her pale nose. “You’re still doing it.”

“This is just my face,” I argued, but I felt my eyebrows drift together again.

“You have a very unpleasant face, then,” she said seriously.

My eyelids hooded with irritation. “Yeah, well, pretty boys don’t have the body type for catching fainting goats from trees, so maybe you should be grateful for my hideous face.”

Her lips curled in, like she was tamping down a smile. “Did you just tell me to be grateful that you’re an enormous yeti person?”

“A yeti?” I demanded. We had reached the parking lot of the event center, and the ground sloped upward steeply as I headed for the back entrance. “I can’t decide if I like that or if I should be mortally offended.”

“The latter,” she sniffed.

The sass on this girl. I made my way through a row of cars, my sights set on the back door, which had been propped open, and then it happened. They found us—the reporters. I wasn’t sure where they had been lurking—probably around all the entrances, realistically—but they converged on us like a swarm of angry bees with their cameras flashing and phones held out to capture the horribly damning image of me carrying a woman naked underneath my suit jacket. It matched my pants. There was no hiding from it.

“Ms. Valehart, who is this?”

“Isla, is this your new boyfriend?”

“Isla, what happened to your clothing? Can you comment on what you were doing with this man?”

“Is this your first boyfriend, Ms. Valehart? Our viewers would love to know!”

I rotated a glare down to Isla Valehart. Tristan Valehart’s sister. She blinked back at me. “Oh.”

“Oh?” I echoed angrily.

The blood drained from her face, and as bodies pushed in around us, she released a shuddering breath. Then she fainted.

Chapter two

Isla

I played a sick and twisted gambling game every day. I never knew where I would pass out, and it was anyone’s guess where I’d wake up. On the ground with a bleeding chin? Surrounded by my peers with an ambulance on the way? Face-first into a plate of enchiladas? My life felt like a bad Mad Lib. Isla slumps into a radioactive vat of flatulent gumballs.

“What do you mean twice?” my brother’s voice demanded from somewhere over my head. “She fainted twice?”

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