Page 31 of Past Tents

“Sorry. Yes?” I refocused my gaze on him. His expression was soft, eyes roaming over my face like a delicate touch. I felt a rolling wave through my body.

“I’d throw myself into the jaws of a bear before I’d let it hurt you.” The quiet rumble of his voice stirred something deep inside me. I felt my jaw go slack.

“I...” I should have thanked him for having my back. Or just left the moment alone. Instead I blurted out a nonsensical story I’d never planned to tell another soul. “My mom used to say a bear ate my dad.”

That did it.

Any romantic tension was blown away with Clay’s sharp exhale. “Come again?”

“It was a story my mom told us after our dad left. Of course, we knew he’d moved out, but my mom insisted that wasn’t the case. She had...some issues handling reality.”

“Huh,” Clay said, nodding.

“Yeah. Jefferson must’ve given you the impression she was a little batshit crazy. She moved to an all-female commune in California. We haven’t seen her in years.”

“I guess, sure, he told me some odd stories now and then, but I never heard this one.”

Didn’t surprise me. I hadn’t told anyone either. Because it was nuts. But despite the number of times I tried to suggest a different scenario, my mom stuck to her version of events, even if it didn’t explain why my mother seemed to distrust men more than bears.

My mom tried hard to pound the message into my brain: men were never going to stick around, and I needed to rely on myself to get through life. Unfortunately, my brain had other ideas, preferring to be stuffed full of swoony suitors from Regency romance novels.

Each time I went into a new relationship with an open heart, I promptly got it crushed. “Told you so,” she’d say. “Men are like that. Best you learn that now while there’s still time to get your priorities straight.” My mom was there to pat my head and tend to my wounded heart, her message now proven, her work now done.

After my most recent relationship ended, I relented and acknowledged that my mom was right—I’d been looking for a happily ever after instead of relying on myself for my happiness. So I doubled down on being self-sufficient and capable, strongwith an impenetrable heart. This independence had served me well.

And men like Clay Meadows, they were exactly the type my mom had warned me about—the kind who were pretty enough to lure an unsuspecting woman into their clutches, the kind who feasted on them and walked away two dates later.

Better to get eaten by a bear than left by a man.

With the cicadas chirping in the surrounding trees, it was hard to pretend I wasn’t outside, but I was trying. The sky was getting darker by the minute, and through the canopy of trees, I could see tiny dots of stars.

We were really doing this—staying out here all night long.

Despite my fear of things grungy and buggy, this little foray into the backyard wilderness was growing on me. How could it not with Clay sitting here beside me wearing form-fitting denim and smelling like cedar, smoke, and Irish Spring? If this was camping, sign me up.

The dark sky and intense quiet felt so intimate—just the two of us alone under the stars, a fire crackling and popping at our feet.

I snuck a look at his tight Henley under a half-unbuttoned flannel and reminded myself why it was a good thing that most of the time he sped around campus like a roadrunner with its tail ablaze.

Kept me from thinking things.

Dirty, inappropriate things.

But now I was thinking them. All of them.

Especially now that the intellectual Clark Kent had shown me his mountain man side. Holy Highland Hottie. In a matter of hours, he’d transformed from a friendly English teacher well-versed in classics and track and field to a relaxed, savvy outdoorsman who exuded manliness and sex. This version of Clay was not what I’d signed up for. This version was making me rethink my staunch insistence that he and I could never be more than friends.

Give me a literary quote and the one-two punch of flannel and wilderness skills and apparently I crumbled.

Clay was turning out to be nothing like the man I thought I knew. He didn’t act like someone who went around purposely breaking hearts. He was sweet, attentive, considerate. He had taken such good care of me when I got hurt.

If he was good looks alone, I could get past my pesky feelings. But the whole package—Clay’s sexy looks and his sincere kindness in trying to help me get past my camping fears—I was hopelessly falling under his spell.

“There’s a gap in the firepit.” Clay pointed to a space in the circle of stones and pushed up from his camp chair. Going over to a small pile of rocks in a corner of the yard, he returned with a rough stone in his large hands. His forearms flexed when he gripped it. I watched his careful dark-eyed assessment of the other rocks in the firepit while he decided where to place this one. And I stared as he crouched down, quads straining the fabric of his pants.

“Sap,” Clay explained, plunking back down into the camp chair. I moved my chair closer to him, seduced by the warmth already emanating from the fire, which cast an orange glow across thesculpted planes of his face. I watched him watch the fire. Then I exhaled a long breath.

“Something about a fire. Hard not to stare, right?”

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