Page 44 of Hunt for You

ME: You like dick pics? Is there something you want to tell me?

ME: Sneaky bastard. How did you figure out the password for that?

CAIN: Disappointed in *you*

ME: Some things can only be appreciated in the flesh.

ME: I mean that in every way you heard it.

ME: For the record, the hottest part of the male anatomy is actually shoulders and arms, but very few men refine their forearm porn. So chests and abs it is.

I had slowed in my running because I was so busy texting. I heard a crack in the bushes nearby and squeaked, shoving my phone into my pocket and sprinting forward, laughing.

Come find me. Come find me. Come find me.

My phone buzzed in my pocket again, but I made myself wait until I’d found the big, felled tree that was a landmark on my route before I turned to follow it and slipped the phone out again.

Then I stopped dead, panting and gaping at the phone.

Cain had sent me a picture.

Holy shit.

He’d stopped in the shade of one of the big pines that had a bare trunk for the bottom twenty feet, and taken off his shirt.

He’d lifted the phone high to take a shot of his back and shoulders, one arm bent up, shoulder muscles rigid and tendons proud on the back of his hand that he’d clamped on the back of his own neck. Sadly, his forearm bent out of frame, and I couldn’t see his face at all, only the nape of his neck—his hair was dark and needed a cut—but his hand was thick and strong, and his shoulders…

Desire hummed between my legs because he had the kind of muscles that didn’t come in a gym, or from a needle. The kind of muscles that were useful and raunchy, because they were carved by hard labor.

The kind that didn’t disappear in the off-season, because there was no off-season.

There were scars here and there all over him, including an ugly pucker of skin right below his ribs.

My mouth watered as I imagined licking that scar. And the ridges of muscle down his side.

When I found the presence of mind to text back, it was only one word.

ME: More.

Then I remembered where I was, and I started running again, slinging the bag of food over one shoulder and sprinting because the clearing wasn’t far from here and Ireallyhoped I’d make it before he found me.

When I broke through the trees into that little light-bathed oasis of pretty, I was ecstatic.

I dropped the bag of food and darted into the center where the sun was high enough to bathe the thin grass in a warm glow.There was another couple fallen trees here, not as big as the one I used to point me, but big enough to sit on.

I couldn’t sit down, though. I was panting, my heart thumping, my senses shrieking.

He’s here. I know he’s here.

But where?

I stopped, held my breath, tried to hear the sounds over my pulse pounding in my ears, but there was nothing. No crack of a foot on a twig. No rustle of a very muscular body pushing through the leaves.

I turned a slow circle, trying to breathe deeply, but quietly, trying to catch any sound or flicker at the corner of my eye.

Where was he?

I wanted to pull the phone out again, but all the hair on the back of my neck was standing up.

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