Page 10 of My Surly Valentine

Hazel looks at me with a saucy smirk that makes my heart swell. “How can you be a rugged survivalist guy and not even know how to sew on a button?”

She grabs my arm, nudging me toward a chair. I study her every movement as she threads the needle and demonstrates. Then she hands everything to me. “See? Easy. Now you do the next one.”

It’s not just that she’s extremely smart making me do it myself. It’s that she’s confident enough to boss me around a little.

When Hazel first laid eyes on me, she looked downright terrified. Well, of course she was: we met in the dark when she was asleep. But I had to wonder if maybe she also knew who I was, and that I have a reputation of being a grouch who barely speaks to anyone.

Not exactly the kind of boyfriend she might have been envisioning.Definitelynot the kind of guy to take her to parties, or impress her friends.

“Christ on a bike.” I jab my freshly stabbed finger into my mouth. “How do you work with these fiddly things?”

Hazel reaches for my finger to examine it. “I think you’ll live. Keep going.”

I eventually finish the job well enough to receive a fierce hug as she throws her arms around me. “Well done.”

Blood immediately flows south from feeling this hot little beauty in my arms. Cuddling her against me, my lips ghost across the top of her hair. I can’t wait until we’re in bed so I can hold her again.

My hands caress her back gently, pressing her close against my chest. I inhale her sweetness, my arms tensing as they get set to lift her and hopefully carry her to the bed, when her phone beeps.

“Oh!” She spins out of my arms to grab it. Then her face falls as she slips into a chair.

In a blink I’m on my knees in front of her. “What’s wrong?”

A long sigh rattles her shoulders. “Dad knows where I am.”

My teeth grind for a split second. “He has a tracker on your phone?”

“Yeah. I thought I turned it off. I told him I was going to stay with a friend, and he seemed okay with it.”

“Why does he have a tracker on your phone?”

Her lovely blue eyes roll dramatically. “It’s another way for him to pretend he’s more important than he is. He heard something about rich CEOs taking measures to keep their daughters from being kidnapped. So of course he has to do it, too.”

“May I go through your phone and remove them all?”

She nods, even as the phone beeps again. Cell service in this particular part of the mountain is spotty, and it appears that a bunch of texts are coming in at once. She reads one, then flips to the next, her eyes widening. “I can’t believe it.”

Her bottom lip has begun to tremble, so I take her hand. “Tell me. What’s wrong?”

She exhales slowly. I’m still learning her facial expressions, but the poor thing seems sad and angry and frustrated all at once as her hand clutches mine.

“Dad knows I’ve never had a date for Valentine’s Day. It came up when I was talking to Mom last month. He wants to send Fern here tomorrow to take me out to dinner on the thirteenth, because restaurants are too busy on the fourteenth. He thinks it’ll be more romantic to do it early.”

“Fern,” I practically spit. “Anybody with that name is not going to make it here, driving up these winter roads. Let me guess, he drives a little sports car, right?”

Relief floods my heart as she smiles. “Usually he has a driver. I’ve seen him being chauffeured around in a Rolls. I doubt he’d risk it on the mountain roads.”

Hazel stares into space for a moment, then her thumbs start flying across the screen. “There’s no sense telling either of them no. They never accept that. I’ll tell them there’s too much snow, and to wait for better weather.” She types for another moment, then nods. “There. I suggested the gardens in late March, just as they are waking up. That would be super romantic.”

She flashes me a guilty look. “I hope you know I don’t really want anything the least bit romantic with that guy.”

My entire body wants to growl, making it difficult to keep my expression relatively neutral. “In that case, is leading him on the best move?”

Hazel shakes her head. “He has the attention span of a fruit fly. There’s a very good chance that he’ll find someone else and shatter Dad’s dreams within a month.”

I set the phone aside, then lift her hand, kissing each fingertip. “What if, a few weeks from now, you told him you had another man?”

Hazel’s smile strikes the center of my chest with the force of a cannonball. “Are you telling me that whatever this is between us, it could potentially last more than a week?”

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