Page 36 of Forget Me Not

Toast backs off and Nova offers her hand, scowl still on that pretty face.

“If you can’t control your dog, you should keep him on a leash. There could be kids out here.”

She narrows her gaze on me, letting her hand drop when I decline it and get up on my own. My back cracks, my muscles aching painfully. I’m almost thirty and six-four. It’s a long way to fall.

My gaze coasts over her, taking her in. She’s got on another pair of shorts today, and a tank top, letting me see those tan legs and the freckles on her shoulders. Her feet are bare, her toes painted a light purple that somehow causes me to develop a sudden toe fetish. She looks good.

Really fucking good.

“I was going to apologize, but now, I’m thinking you deserved it.”

And there she goes.

Fuck.

Normally, I would leave. Go back to the inn and work on something, but today? I feel like following her.

I haven’t spoken to her since yesterday when I stitched her hand and thought of every possible surface I could fuck her on while she rested between my legs.

Not my smartest moment, but I did what had to be done.

“How is your hand?”

She stops a few feet up the beach and turns to glare at me.

“It’s fine.”

Fine. I fucking hate that word. People use it as an out to get away from saying what’s really on their minds.

I want to hear every damn word she has to say, even if half of them piss me off and the other half make my cock hard.

I step in front of her, not giving her the space to deny me, even though she takes a step back. One minute, she wants me in her space. The next, she’s running the other direction. It’s a mind-fuck and a half.

Grabbing her hand, I force her to drop a tennis ball she’d been holding, which Toast takes and runs off down the beach.

She stares up at me with an angry glare while I carefully unwrap the bandages, keeping silent for the first time since I met her.

“Are we going to keep fighting like this every time I see you?”

“I don’t know,” she grumbles. “Are you going to keep being an asshole to me.”

I guess I deserve that. Though, when her dog charged at me like a bull to a red flag and then she appeared, I was so fucking lost on how to react, I did what I do best.

Be a dick.

The stitches look fine, her delicate skin slowly starting to heal itself. She winces but doesn’t complain if I’m being too rough with her.

Figures.

“How did you learn how to give stitches?” she asks quietly, that fire in her voice turning to nothing more than a few embers.

“My mother.”

She doesn’t ask what happened to her, and I’m glad. The last thing I want to do is talk about my mother with Nova. They’re a lot alike in many ways. Both stubborn. Both hard working. Tough. They take care of everyone they meet, and they wear their hearts on their sleeves.

Well . . . wore, in Mom’s case.

“Was she a nurse?”

---