Page 37 of Only in Your Dreams

“I can help you wash up,” Zac says without a single thread of shame at the brazen offer. “If you want.”

“I don’t think…” My lips part at images of Zac’s wet body next to mine in the water, the gentle way his fingers would sweep my skin like they did while looking after my ankle.

Zac drags his teeth over his lower lip, blinks down the length of my body. Shoulders rise and fall in one deep breath, and we might both be there. In that imaginary water, where my nails would dig into my palms, willing me to behave until we both finally snap and—

“No,” I say firmly, holding up a hand between us to drive the point home. My fingers are shaking and I hope he doesn’t notice. “You… you stay over there. Way over there. Far, far away. Over there.”

Smooth as ice, Mel.

Zac doesn’t have any trouble catching the drift of my alarm, and I wrench my eyes away the second I see his mouth shape into a playful smirk.

“Don’t look at me like that while you’re… dressed like that.”

“I’m practically fully clothed. Yet you seem to be blushing, Clover.”

Oh, not the nickname, too. What’s this guy playing at?

I limp away. “Don’t come back to camp until you’re fully dry and—and clothed. Withpantson. There’ll be no funny business at this campsite. Mark my words.”

He doesn’t say a word. No, he does me one worse.

Zac lets out this soft, husky laugh. And I pick up speed before I do something really stupid.

* * *

I keep myself preoccupied all day.

Take down Brooks’s storm-crumpled tent. Limp around gathering firewood only to realize that Zac was right when he said everything is still far too wet and mud-covered to manage a fire. I drag a canvas chair down to the lake so that I can stare out at the water, rather than at the man I’ve been avoiding.

If there’s one thing about him, it’s that Zac takes a hint. He gives me a wide berth as the sun moves through the sky. Whenever I chance a glance over my shoulder from the shore, I find him still in his own chair, poring over a massive binder in his lap. Muttering to himself, scribbling things down on a yellow legal pad of paper. He sounded stressed, talking about work last night. But he really looks it now as he obsesses over whatever’s in that binder.

Thing is, stressed Zac is my weakness.

It’s always been—it was how our four-leaf clover ritual got started in the first place. Zac walks around with all the confidence in the world. But those moments when that swagger slips… There’s something so painful, even now, seeing him like this. His face isn’t meant to look anxious. His smile is just too damn good to go without, even though I’ve barely seen it all weekend.

That’s what has me rising from my chair now. My ankle’s slowly improved throughout the day, but my steps are still unsteady as I head for the tent I dismounted earlier. I don’t look, but I can feel Zac’s eyes follow me as I cross the camp site.

“I’m bored,” I announce. I hear the sound of Zac’s binder falling shut. “I found this inflatable canoe by Brooks’s tent. I think I’ll take it out.”

“Are you inviting me to take a canoe ride with you?” Zac arches a dark eyebrow from where he sits.

You need a rebound. Quick and dirty—

Shut up, Summer.

“I suppose I could allow it,” I say briskly. “If you inflated it and did most of the rowing, of course.”

He rises from his chair and shrinks the gap between us. “Are you trying to punish me for catching you staring earlier?”

How does he make his eyes twinkle like that? The nerve of him.

“I was staring in horror. It was like spotting the loch ness monster, emerging from a bubbling swamp.”

A laugh bursts out of him, setting off those laugh lines around his eyes. “I don’t think so. You haven’t looked me in the eye all day.”

Zac tips his head, all six feet and God knows how many inches of him looming over me. Making me feel the kind of small he could easily toss around, manhandle in the most knee-buckling way.

Quick and dirty—

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