Page 18 of More Than Words

“There. I don’t think you’ll frighten off the wildlife anymore.”

Isobel’s chest heaved while her fingers lingered near one of my sideburns, slowly rubbing the short strands, sending a bolt of lust straight through my system.

“And here I was, hoping to show off my manly prowess to protect you.” My voice was an octave lower, my hands lingering at her delicate ankles once her shoes were securely in place.

Her eyes connected with mine as she continued to rub her fingers against my skin. My fingers twitched with the urge to cover hers, but I stayed where I was, under the spell of her gaze.

“We should go,” she whispered, drawing her hand back and flexing her fingers while I stood.

“Ladies first,” I smiled, gesturing back to the trail.

“You just want to stare at my ass again.”

Wiggling my eyebrows as I stepped back for her to get in front of me, I confirmed her suspicions. “Damn straight, I do.”

And surprisingly, she didn’t say anything as I fell into step directly behind her.

ISOBEL

Bar Harbor, ME

When we crossed the state line into Maine, we must have crossed into an alternate universe. One where the guy I wanted to vote ‘most likely to be muzzled’ in the office had somehow turned into a charming reincarnation of himself that I had a hard time keeping my thoughts clean around.

At lunch, I’d thought naughty things about him. Bad, dirty, filthy things that I should never be thinking about Adrian, yet somehow, I couldn’t stop. When he made playful comments about my ass, I found myself blushing instead of wanting to cram a red pen into his eye socket. When he offered to wheel my suitcase up to my room, I wanted to drag him inside to see what he kept under all those suits.

I’d seen glimpses here and there in the gym on the first floor of our office building, but never up close, and I usually bolted in the other direction if I saw him because I detested him.

I did.

I detested him completely.

But I also might be developing a bit of a crush on this fictionalized version of him.

One of my authors, Chase, had written his kind of hero dozens of times, the grumpy ass-wipe who terrorized everyone in his office but secretly had a heart of gold or simped hard for the sunshiny heroine. I was not a sunshine heroine. I was a tired divorcee almost past her prime, who never dated and delved into the psyche of fictional men all day.

As we headed back toward the small oceanside resort, I flexed my toes inside my shoes, knowing I’d need to soak them in warm water once we returned to our room. I mean rooms—separate rooms, plural—because I was not staying with Adrian in the same room. This wasn’t some forced proximity trope that would force the two main characters to realize their true feelings for each other.

The only true feeling I was having toward Adrian right now was suspicion. Where was this funny, playful, considerate man while his alter ego was off terrorizing his co-workers with elitist comments about his authors and nasty comments that were borderline sexual harassment? I didn’t know this Adrian. In the five years since I’d had the misfortune to work in the same office as him, I’d never once seen him act like this.

And it was fucking with my head. Big time.

“Are you not going to talk to me anymore? Your toes are frozen, not your tongue,” Adrian teased from behind me. I could see him walking in my peripheral vision, and I may have caught him stumbling over a tree root because he’d been staring at my ass.

Do not think about his tongue. Or what it’d feel like in your mouth, or licking your…

God, it had been far too long since I’d had a man do anything remotely sexual to me, and now I was projecting years of pent-up tension on Adrian. That’s what it was. I couldn’t possibly like him. No. Just no.

He was Dickhead.

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you it was better to say nothing than make small talk with someone who is just flirting with you to entertain themselves?”

Adrian reached forward to grab my elbow, stopping me in my tracks as a shock ran through my arm at the contact.

“That’s what you think?” he asked, his voice low and slightly menacing.

“What other reason do you have for acting like you have for the past six and a half hours? I don’t know who this guy is, but it sure isn’t you.”

“God,” he scoffed as he released me and scrubbed his hand over his face, thrusting his fingers into the hair I’d recently had my fingers in. “Nice to know how you really feel about me, Isobel. I thought we’d finally come to some sort of cease-fire, but all the flirting from you today must have been fake too. I guess that’s what I get for finally letting my guard down around you. Couldn’t possibly be that I’m attracted to the stunning woman who gives as good as she gets. Nope, I just got something else. A square kick to the nuts.”

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