Page 61 of Braving the Storm
“Is this my uncle asking… or the guy who shows up after dark?” Her voice is soft. As if there’s a risk of someone hearing her words that she knows neither of us are supposed to be entertaining.
I fix my eyes on the road. Fuck. This is dancing us closer to something we’ve been careful to avoid until now. “You’re one to talk. Those thorns of yours are doing a good job of keeping everyone at arm’s length.” We’ve been experts at side-stepping any real conversation after the couple of nights when I’ve watched the most intimate sight of this girl falling apart in my arms. “Don’tthink I haven’t noticed the way your pointed barbs avoid getting close to revealing the real reason why you’re even here, or what you’re running from, Briar. My patience only goes so far.”
Briar fiddles with the cuff of her jacket—my jacket—where her palms rest in her lap.
“I’m not sure, ok.” From the corner of my eye, I see her examine a thread on the sleeve extremely closely. “I don’t know if I want to meet up with him again, like that, for a date.”
“He wasn’t good to you?” My neck prickles. “If I find out he did anything, so help me—”
“No, no… he was fine. It was nothing like that.” Briar is quick to respond, to cut me off from whatever dark place I was about to plunge into, sensing my rising tide of tension.
“Then what?”
Puffing out a breath, she lifts her gaze to stare out the window. “He talked about you… kinda a lot.”
Those words act like a warm and welcome breeze, blowing in and instantly melting away all the fraught emotion and clenched muscles. A mere handful of words have gone and got me feeling about ten feet tall inside the cab of this truck.
“Did he now?” This is news to me, and all of a sudden, just like that, Westin motherfuckin’ Hayes is off my shit list.
“Oh, you can put all of that away.” Briar swivels to face me from the other end of the bench seat, and waves a hand in the direction of my unconcealed smirk. “Don’t look so goddamn pleased with yourself.” Her disapproving glare is far too cute for her own good.
“What would you rather have happened then, darlin’? Would you have preferred he took you somewhere and didn’t talk to you at all?”
She squirms. Doesn’t say anything. Immediately flicks her gaze down to the place where her fingers curl around the jacket sleeve.
“Briar. Answer the question.” As I touch my tongue to the front of my teeth and demand more from the beautiful girl, who is becoming increasingly more flushed each time I look over her way,we turn into the gravel track winding through the tall pines leading to the cabin.
Pulling up outside, I put the truck into park and cut the engine. The silence wraps around us in the same lingering manner as the night she sat in my lap while parked in this very spot, and surely, to all that is morally correct and honorable, that should be my warning to leave.
That deafening stillness is the alert, the siren, the alarm bell going off. My signal to get the fuck out of this vehicle and not wait to hear her reply. To not corrupt this girl with my goddamn messed-up fantasies.
Yet, I wait, keeping my fingers wrapped around the steering wheel in every effort not to put those hands somewhere inappropriate.
To prevent myself from touchingher.
“It’s embarrassing, alright.” Briar chews her lip, giving me a glimpse of those dark eyes as her lashes hang low over her gaze.
“You can tell me.” My heart thuds a little harder at the prospect of what I think this girl is about to put into words. What I suspect the real reason is. Something that I have no right to be curious about, considering that I’m her uncle.
But fuck. Do I want to hear it.
“I already told you the other night. I don’t have muchexperience, so I need to get some somewhere, don’t I? Wouldn’t you rather, if it had to be with anyone, that it was with Mr. Nice Guy Cowboy Country Manners?”
Briar’s words tumble out of her in a hasty confession, immediately followed by slamming her mouth shut, as if she’s said too much, but it’s out there now, and she can’t reel those words back in. Her painted fingernails hook the door handle, attempting to push her side open, to escape this front seat after her outburst. However, fate, or whatever you want to call this pivotal, unsanctioned moment between us, clearly has other intentions.
Her door jams.
The harder Briar tries, huffing, and making a small noise offrustration, the more resolutely it gives her the middle finger and refuses to budge.
I open my side and unfold myself from the seat, letting my boots hit the dirt as I chew over the prospect of what this sequence of unlikely, and endlessly enticing events has brought to fruition. Resting both hands on the roof of the truck, I allow my body to drape across the open doorway, filling the space with my bulk as I duck my head and affix my sights on the girl staring back at me. We stay like that, gazes locked, and I run my tongue to wet my bottom lip. Briar focuses on the motion, watching my mouth with a piercing intensity—something akin to terror and interest in her dark eyes and fuck, if that combination isn’t a potent drug—while I allow my eyes to take in every gorgeous inch of her.
Because this feeling right here, is the same as being in the bucking chute preparing to be released into the arena.
We both feel it, but only she has the power over what happens next.
This is the moment when the air crackles, the adrenaline spikes. It’s the act of voluntarily climbing into a situation you know is going to go from zero to one hundred in the stamp of a hoof, a bullwhip slicing the air with a crack, flipping unpredictably in the blink of an eye.
Readying yourself to either be bucked off and stomped all over, or hear that sweetest roar of victory when the buzzer sounds.
