“Do you always go home alone, then?”
I almost fall over my own feet at the shy look she casts me. “You ah… you’re asking if I have a girlfriend?”
She snorts. “Sure. Or girlfriends. Or boyfriends.”
There’s a beat where I scramble for the right words. Do I tell her the truth? Will she ask why?
“So do you?” She’s playing it cool, but I catch the way she watches me from the corner of her eye. She cares about my answer, which makes me nervous. I have to toe a line here.
I clear my throat, but just as the words are about to leave my mouth, her foot slips.
She’s close to the edge. There’s no railing on this part of the track, and the slope down the hill is steep and rocky.
My bear reacts instantly, before I even process the choice. I grab her around the waist, hauling her against me and slamming my back into the embankment on the safe side. Her heart is beating fast. I feel it pulsing against my hand where it rests over her ribcage. Her scent—her real scent—fills my nostrils, and to my great shame my cock stirs against her back.
It’s then I realize how the height difference between us means my grip has slipped a long way north of where it started. Insteadof her waist, my hands are cupping her breasts, and even the thick jacket she’s wearing isn’t enough to disguise the distinctive feminine shape.
Shit.
Neither of us moves for a long, silent moment. Very slowly, I release my grip a fraction. “You good, Vera?”
Her voice is shaky when she speaks, and the scent I thought I imagined before has grown ten times as strong. “Y-yeah.”
“Gonna let you go now, OK?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
All the way back to the car, neither of us talks. Neither mentions the place I grabbed her or the way my palms still throb with the phantom feel of her small, firm breasts which fit so perfectly there.
Fuck, when did she get breasts? It feels like I blinked and the flat-chested tomboy who used to follow me and Riley around grew up into a beautiful woman. A woman who smells ripe and sweet and breedable.
It’s cold, but I leave the window down all the way back to the ranger station in case I do or say something too fucking stupid for words.
I need Riley and the Ballards in my life. This last month has made that fact hit home harder than it has for a while. I won’t do anything to compromise that, especially making a move on Vera when I’d only end up hurting her.
I’m too big. Too clumsy. Too much of a beast. If today doesn’t make that abundantly clear, nothing could.
I’ve got to work harder on keeping my big paws off her.
SIX
Vera
My heart rate still hasn’t settled back to normal by the time we get back in the truck. Every time I think about his huge hand covering my breast and the little intake of breath he sucked in as it flexed, it spikes and I get a shot of sensation straight through my center.
I promised myself I was over it, that I’d grown up, moved on. But I don’t think I’m fooling anyone, not even him.
God, his big, solid body against mine felt so good. Sometimes when I look at Bas, I want to crawl inside his chest and camp out there. He just looks so large. So dependable. Like he’ll never ever change. Like nothing could break him, not even chronic illness or disease—which is stupid, because I know better than anyone it doesn’t matter how strong you are or how good.
I thought just for a moment that flex of his hand was a good thing, a crack in the veneer of restraint. I hoped maybe he was about to turn and slam me against the mud and rock and yankdown my thermal tights and show me how he’s been holding back all this time.
And then he let me go and stepped back like he’d been burned, and he hasn’t looked me in the eye since.
I mean, of course he did. That’s exactly how he reacted when I tried to kiss him four years ago. Of course that’s how he’d react now. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change.
He and I can never be more than friends. I’d better get my head on straight and stop daydreaming about him if I want to keep even that much of him in my life.
I hope like hell my perfume is covering up my arousal. I know for a fact the scent would be rolling off me otherwise. I try to distract myself by thinking about something else—anything else.
