Page 63 of After All

“I text things like ‘meet you at seven’. Maybe a sexy selfie after a couple of shots but not really…words.” She frowned as if this was all a very thought-provoking realization for her too.

That made him smile. All of it made him smile. That she’d never dirty texted with anyone else. That she was surprised by that. He really wanted to just get her naked. Right now. Right here.

But he needed to give her a chance to pull this off. Hell, they were both out of their comfort zones here. He was only succeeding at sexy consistently because she found oregano a turn-on. And had a few erogenous zones on her feet. And liked his abs. It wasn’t as if he was really an expert at dirty texting either.

“Okay, let’s go, then,” she said.

“Right behind you.”

“Where’s your crutch?”

It was propped up next to the stove several steps away, actually. “I keep forgetting it as I get around,” he admitted.

She frowned. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah, they said to do what I felt like I could do.”

She chewed her bottom lip. “Maybe I’ll just text Kyle quick.”

“No. Do not text Kyle.” Lord, he was already getting enough shit from his friends about protective Peyton.

“Just to check,” she said.

“No.” He frowned down at her. “We’re going for adrive. And then we’ll be parking. I don’t intend to do a lot of standing or walking around, okay?”

She didn’t look happy, but she finally nodded and turned toward the door. He followed her out to her truck, grabbing a cap off the hook by the door. She set the pizza on the floor behind her seat and watched like a hawk as he climbed up into the passenger seat. He worked on not grimacing. It wasn’t difficult. It didn’t hurt that much, but he was stiff. He set the bottles on the seat between them and pulled his cap on. When he was finally settled on the seat, she climbed up behind the wheel.

They drove for nearly ten minutes without talking. Scott didn’t know where exactly she was taking him, but it wasn’t the most common make-out spot, Klein’s Hill, nor was it the park, or the river.

She turned off the highway onto a gravel road, then off the gravel onto a narrow dirt path leading through a field. They bumped along until they came to the top of a hill that looked down not onto the river, as most of the party spots did, but onto the town of Sapphire Falls.

The town was nestled in among the rolling rises and dips of the prairie. It was surrounded on all sides with fields and farms. Trees, fences, dirt roads, the highway, the river to the north, all added to the landscape. The deep greens and browns of the land and crops, the spots of color of houses and buildings, and the sky—the blue deepening as the sun sank, the western horizon streaked with pinks and oranges—looked like a painting. This was called the heartland for a reason. And Scott felt his chest tighten.

“Wow,” he said simply.

Peyton didn’t say anything. He glanced over. Her eyes were fixed out the windshield, and she had her bottom lip pulled between her teeth.

“This is gorgeous,” he told her.

She nodded. “It’s my favorite place.”

This was her favorite place. Not the Come Again, not the river, not her house. This hill that looked down over her hometown.

He had not been expecting that.

Scott flashed back to when Derek had said that it seemed that leaving would have been easier on Peyton but that there must have been something keeping her here.

“You come here a lot?”

She sighed. “Used to.” She looked over. “I come here alone. Usually.”

Scott wasn’t sure why she felt compelled to tell him that. But he was glad she had. He also wasn’t sure why she’d chosen to bring him here, rather than keeping it to herself. But he was glad she had.

He reached for the pizza. He was going to make this as casual and easy as he could. It was either eat pizza and look at the view, or grab her and make love to her right here on the front seat of her truck. He was pretty sure she’d go for the sex. In fact, he was positive she would. That would make it easy for her to pretend that she’d brought him here to make out. But she could have taken him a million other places for that. And he wasn’t sure she’d realized that yet. Or if she had, he didn’t want her thinking about it too hard. But he didn’t want her to turn this place into a make-out spot just to cover up that she was feeling more than that.

He handed her a piece and took one for himself. For a second, it seemed as if she wasn’t sure what to do with it. But finally she bit into it, sighed, and chewed.

They both got through half a piece before she spoke again.

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