Page 30 of Fight

He groaned and stepped forward until he was standing flush with her body. She leaned into him, standing on her tiptoes, her face drawing toward him like a magnet, unable to resist the pull.

Finally, he lowered his head and pressed his lips softly to hers. She didn’t move as he kissed her one, two, three times. He lifted his head up to stare into her face after the third kiss. She opened her eyes then to see him staring down at her with concern etched on his brow. His beautiful multi-colored eyes were conflicted.

Worried that he would change his mind about kissing her, she stood on her tiptoes and pressed her lips against his, opening her mouth to suck on his bottom lip.

He moaned as they both opened to each other and he wrapped his arm around her waist with the hand that wasn’t buried in her hair, pulling her up and tight against him. He was so much taller than her that her feet were barely touching the ground. When their tongues touched, Lena’s breath caught in her throat and she melted against him as her muscles all gave up on her.

She pressed her hands to his chest and felt the hard ridges of his muscles through the thin cotton t-shirt he wore. Spreading her hands wide, she slid them around his strong back and pressed the front of her body to his as they continued to kiss and explore each other.

He moaned again in the back of his throat as his tongue delved into her mouth. Lena felt completely overcome, like this was the first kiss she'd ever had. He was so magnificent, she could stand here kissing him forever with his hands all over her body.

A car door slammed somewhere behind Jake. He pulled his face away from hers for a second to look back at the interruption. Turning quickly back to her, he picked her up by the waist and carried her around the corner of the building. His strong arms supported her as if she weighed nothing, and Lena hoisted herself up to wrap her legs around his waist.

“Oh god,” he rumbled almost incoherently. His actions became rough and inelegant as he pressed her against the building and moved his hand up her waist to cup her breast, rubbing it reverently over the soft velvet of her dress. She could feel his hard center against her, but before she could really go to town on him, he abruptly dropped her and put an arm’s length distance between them.

The abrupt loss of his warmth and hardness was disconcerting and it took her a few seconds to understand what happened. She still stood against the building, but he had stepped back a yard or so away from her. He breathed heavily, wiped his mouth with his hand and looked off to the side.

“Why’d you stop?” she whimpered as she took a step closer to him and reached for him. He shook his head. “No, after all this time, I’m not doing this with you in a parking lot.”

She let out a frustrated sigh and looked around the parking lot. The music was still going inside. It was a song she didn’t recognize, so it must be a Cole Sutton original. “I’m so confused right now,” she finally admitted.

Jake drew out a long breath and ran his hand through his hair. “Yeah, me too. C’mon.” He pulled out his phone and started tapping it. “I don’t know about you, but I have no interest in going back into the bar now. Let’s get an Uber home and call it a night. We can talk more tomorrow?”

After a pause she nodded firmly and looked around the parking lot. “Okay,” she finally said. “That sounds like a very responsible and mature decision for us to make.”

Jake looked up from his phone and reached out to tapped her under the chin forcing her to look up at him. His face was fixed in a serious expression. “Hey—don’t get used to it,” he said roughly as he winked at her.

A couple beats of silence passed before Lena groaned dramatically and threw her head back. “Well, unfortunately, you’ve pretty much ensured it will never happen again,” she informed him in mock seriousness.

“Man,” he snapped his fingers and looked off to the side before coming back to meet her eyes with a big smile on his face.

Jake stood at his living room window late the next morning with a cup of coffee in hand watching Lena strip the varnish off an old dresser with an electric sander. Who knew a woman with a power tool could look so good?

She wore light denim overalls over a purple tank top, her messy hair covered with a purple bandanna, safety goggles over her eyes. He wondered how she’d managed to move the dresser out of the house. It looked like it weighed about five hundred pounds.

She was surprisingly adept with the tool, pushing it over the wood’s finish in smooth, even strokes. He wouldn’t have expected that of her. That was true of a lot of things with her though. She'd been surprising him every time he was with her lately.

She was funny, for one thing. After last summer, he had resolutely decided she had no sense of humor. She was fiery, too. But he’d already knownthat.

And when he'd put his hands on her the night before, it was thunderbolt city. He’d known it would be fireworks between them, but that was more than he could have dreamed. He wasn’t sure how she was going to react when he initially touched her. He thought she may recoil, or slap him, or maybe,just maybe, welcome him.

She’d stood there in her bare feet staring up at the stars with those big expressive eyes that carried around the weight of the world. He’d wanted to soothe her and remind her they weren’t enemies—he was on her side.

When it came down to it, he could have taken her right there in the Blue Sky parking lot against the building. He didn’t want things to go down with them like that, though. After all the fighting, tension, and time, if they were going to do this, they’d do it right. He could do a little better than standing up in a parking lot. Especially for a girl like her. She needed softness and comfort.

Watching her, he thought of the conversation that had led to her storming out of the bar—her plans to hike Dalak with fucking Daniel. Jake could only hope that Lena had agreed to that in the heat of the moment and she would realize how ridiculous it was in the clear light of day.

Although they had both behaved badly on the Fallen Leaf trip, she had to see that she didn’t have what it takes to hike and camp at a place like Dalak. He'd had a hard time understanding that last summer, but now it all made sense. He'd gone from wanting to ridicule her for her ineptitude in nature and sports to wanting to protect her from it. Lena was the type of person who needed to be taken care of. Who knew that he was the type of guy who found that type of thing attractive? But here he was.

Fallen Leaf was a piece of cake compared to Dalak. He didn’t want to think about how difficult it would be for someone so small and delicate, with her…artistic sensibilities to handle the endurance needed for a trip up that mountain.

Not only was he worried about how she would manage the actual hike, the last thing he wanted was for Lena to be alone with that slimeball, Daniel. He would most definitely make a move on her, and Jake worried about where it would leave her if she turned him down halfway up a mountain.

He hadn’t wanted to ruin their post-make out glow so he hadn’t brought up her plans to hike Mt. Dalak in the Uber ride home last night. He knew he had to bring it up today, though…and he had to do so very carefully. They were still treading on eggshells here.

Lost in thoughts of how to appropriately broach the subject with Lena, he barely heard Ian walk over and join him in staring out the window. Like Jake, Ian was sipping a mug of coffee.

They watched Lena bend this way and that for a couple of beats before Ian finally spoke. “How’d they get that out there?” he asked. “It looks like it weighs a ton.”

---