Page 35 of Coming Up Roses

I don’t even know how it started. I think it was Abi’s hand on my leg, refusing to let me go, my chest pressing against her back, and when my dick—my still hard dick—came in contact with her ass, I lost all reason.

Abi climbs off the bike and approaches me, the same way someone would approach a spooked horse. “Flynn,” she says again. “Breathe.”

Why’s she telling me to breathe?

Oh.

Because I’ve stopped.

That thundering in my ears isn’t just the ocean.

I suck down a lungful of air.

“I’m sorry,” I croak. I think I’m repeating myself.

“Why are you sorry?” Abi asks, her eyes uncertain and her steps towards me tentative.

“I shouldn’t have done that. Touched you like … that.”

She pauses right in front of me and tips her chin up to look me directly in the face. I want to avoid her gaze. I want to shift away.

But at the same time, I want to close the distance between us again, to carry her back to my bike and lay her across it.

I want to strip those tight, tight jeans off her body and spread her out.

I want to savour her, get down on my knees in the sand and worship her.

“I started it,” Abi says, lifting a hand between us, as if to touch my face, but she doesn’t make contact and it hovers between us for a moment before she lowers it again. “And I wouldn’t mind finishing it.”

Oh god. I thought she’d be running for the hills by now, if not because I just groped her like a fumbling teenager, but because the second her hand touched my cock—through my pants—I flung myself halfway across the beach away from her. I’m super classy like that.

“Sadie,” I blurt. I shake my head. “Dallas.”

Oh, fuck. Dallas. Katie and Olivia. They’re going to destroy me for this.

The flush in Abi’s cheeks fades rapidly. “Dallas doesn’t really get a say in my life anymore,” she says. “I’m quite capable of making my own decisions.” She has that flinty look in her eye, the one she gets when she thinks I’m implying she’s not capable of handling things on her own.

“I know you are, but I’m a really, really bad one.”

Abi laughs. “I don’t know why you think that. You’re one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. Like an actual nice guy, not one of the ones who justthinkshe’s nice.”

That may be true, but how nice I am doesn’t come into it.It’s my attachment issues that are the problem, and my complication isn’t my avoidance of attachment.

I already feel a pull to Abi. I want to be around her all the time. I want to learn every little detail about her, and I know that if any more happens between us, that feeling is only going to intensify.

It’ll build and build, then one day she’ll be done with me and want to get as far away from me as possible.

Except here, she can’t get away from me because we work together, and she doesn’t have an option of getting away from me, because of Sadie.

So long as Sadie’s at Wildflower Ridge, Abi is going to be around.

My heart has taken a beating more than once over the years when people have left me, especially my parents and Katie when she left Kauri Creek for a few years. But to have to see Abi every day and know she’s done with me, that she doesn’t want me back … I don’t think my heart would recover when she chooses to leave me.

“It’s too complicated,” I mutter, turning my head away from her.

“Complicated?”

“Yeah.” I sigh and step around her. I can’t explain all of this.

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