Page 5 of I Hate Myself for Loving You
That was the very reason Avery was here. To try one last ditch effort to talk him out of keeping the land. Maybe she could talk him into allowing Max and his family to pay back the money he’d forked over. Like easy lifetime installments on a monthly basis.
“Ah, the tree hugger,” Lassiter mocked, opening the door to reveal the brick shithouse hard body he was.
His voice was like brown sugar melted with butter, thick and bubbling sweet. He grinned in that smug, disarming way that made her furious and tingly at the same time.
Avery let out a loud, exasperated sigh and bit her tongue. “Yes, it’s me. The tree hugger. I’d like to talk, if we could.” She was shooting for amicable, but saying the words through clamped teeth might ruin the effect she was aiming to achieve, so she loosened her face into an almost smile.
“Shouldn’t you be off trying to save the almost extinct tsetse bat in Zimbabwe or something?” he taunted.
Folding her hands in front of her, she clasped them together to keep from clocking him in his perfect chops. Pleasant. She could be pleasant. She had to be pleasant if she wanted to try and find a rational end to this. “I don’t think Zimbabwe has tsetse bats. I could be wrong, but last I checked, no tsetse bats.”
Lassiter’s jaw twitched and his hands rested on his lean hips. “Well, there must be a better cause than this. Go find it, Avery, and leave this cause alone. It’s a dead issue. I’m not leaving.”
Sucking in her cheeks, she tamped down the ire swirling in her throat, working its way to her sharp tongue. “What is it you want, Lassiter? You haven’t built anything, but you keep digging up stuff and ruining perfectly good wilderness. Why can’t you just let the Adams be and go dig somewhere else?”
“Because you’ll just follow me to ‘ somewhere else.’ I figure I’m hiding in plain sight here.” He chuckled, probably because he thought he was clever. When really, he was just a shithead.
Ohhh, that smug, arrogant tone of his chewed at her ears, making them burn. Shoving her hands in the pockets of her jeans, she plodded on. “I don’t follow you, Lassiter. I follow a cause,” she said with a calm she didn’t feel.
Rocking forward on his toes, Lassiter positioned his body close to hers without actually touching it. The heat he emanated was sexy and daring, and Avery’s nostrils responded in kind, flaring to the musky, male scent. “Your cause won’t stop me from doing what I need to do, Avery.”
And what the hell was that exactly? What did he need so desperately to do?
Avery looked into his dark brown eyes, staring down at her, and narrowed her own.
“You never change, Lassiter Adams.”
His breath fanned her cheeks, warm and smelling faintly of something sweet.
“Neither do you, Avery Palmer,” he said with sinister glee before hauling her to him and pulling her into the trailer, shoving the door shut with a booted foot.
Avery hung in his arms, neither allowing nor preventing her capture. Calling Lassiter large was, by far, understating his bulk. The arms that held her tightened, holding her much smaller frame close, allowing her a sampling of his thickly muscled thighs.
And what hung between them.
Some things, like the hard thing between Lassiter’s legs, never changed either.
Chapter Three
“So when are we going to stop behaving as if we don’t know each other, Avery?”
Avery leaned back, bracing herself on his hard forearms. His rugged face, always suspiciously pale for the amount of time he spent in the sun, loomed in front of hers. “I never said I didn’t know you,” she hissed, finally losing the control she’d promised to keep.
“Then you’ve told the Adams you’re privy to me in, er, the most carnal of ways?” he taunted, but didn’t elaborate.
Her cheeks burned. “That’s no one’s business but mine. It has nothing to do with what’s happening here at the Adams’. However, if you choose, you can give me up. Go crazy,” she dared him, defiantly letting her gaze slip to his.
Lassiter’s hand slid down her spine, resting on the curve of her ass. The hip hugging jeans she wore now seemed terribly snug, making the heat of his bulk an entity she wasn’t willing to encounter. His tight, full body press kept her from thinking clearly.
“So, that was just a weak moment for you last year in California? I meant nothing to you, is what you’re saying? I’m some cheap lay to be discarded at whim?” His tone was light, but the underlying anger in it was there too. She sensed it in the way he said discarded. Eyes like melted chocolate stared into hers, daring her.
To do what, she didn’t know.
To say what, she knew even less.
Oy. No, it hadn’t been like that at all. It had, however, been very foolish on her part, and when all was said and done, she’d left California for less humiliating territory with her tail between her legs, literally. “I’m saying it happened and it’s over. What’s happening here has nothing to do with California.”
His head dipped as he rasped his tongue over the smooth column of her throat, evoking her raw nerves to dance to life. “Do you always bed the men you hope to annihilate for your cause?”
