Page 70 of The Arrangement

I walked around the vehicle to face him. “Nothing much, my ass. What’s got you making that face?”

“Well, now that you mention it, your ass does look amazing in those absurdly short shorts,” he said with a playful grin. Tempting as it was to enjoy his appreciation, he wasn’t fooling me. I raised an eyebrow, and he let out a huff, turning his gaze toward the sky. “The breeze making this morning so pleasant smells like rain.”

I mirrored his look toward the sky, which was still brightening with the sunrise. “Really? It doesn’t look like rain.”

He shook his head and repositioned his bag. “That gives us some time, but don’t expect it to last. If dark clouds roll in, we need to head back ASAP.” He started toward the trail with a light jog, and I fell in step.

“We can do that. I don’t understand why you sound so dire though.”

“Not sure what storms are like where you’re from, but around here, they're fierce, can come with tornados, have deadly lightning, and it usually floods. In short, if you don’thave to beout of the house, you aren’t. And if you are, you get your happy ass back home on the double.”

My eyes bugged out a little at the list of natural disasters one storm could bring, especially when there was barely a cloud in the sky now. “Okay then, Mother Nature isn’t fucking around on the coast.”

“Nope.” He glanced at me with a mischievous look in his hazel eyes. “How about we pick up the pace and give those long legs of yours a proper stretch?”

I snorted and didn’t waste any time hitting the gas. Marc’s indignant cry of me being a cheater dogged my heels until Marchimself was once more at my side. “What’s the matter, baby boy? Winded?” I flashed him a cheeky grin, but didn’t slow down.

“No fair on the head start. Your legs are longer than mine,” he grumbled between breaths. I laughed, and he joined me.

God, I loved this. Spending time with him was so easy, equally relaxing and exciting. He made me feel like I could do anything, but the only thing I wanted to do was make him smile and laugh.

We got lost in the steady pounding of our feet on dirt and wooden planks. The forest wrapped around us in a comforting hush that even the birds and insects didn’t seem eager to disturb.

“I still can’t believe you made me actually like running,” Marc said when he stopped for a break, then squirted a long stream of water into his mouth.

That gave me pause. “Wait, you don’t like running? Why didn’t you say anything?” I replaced my now empty bottle into the open bag hanging from his shoulder.

He waited to respond until he’d polished off his water bottle and dropped it beside mine, then cinched the bag and replaced it on his back once more. “Maybe I wanted an excuse to spend time with you.”

“Oh, yeah?” I leaned against the wooden railing of the footbridge we’d stopped on. “And why would you want to do that?” Where I expected him to clap back with a witty retort, he simply looked at me with those expressive eyes of his, the ones that had first snared me and had me chasing him ever since. Then they dropped to my mouth.

He wet his lips. “Pretty sure it’s purely selfish by this point.”

I tilted my head to regard him. The breeze had picked up enough to combat the humidity, so neither of us was an overheated, sweaty disaster, though our hair and shirts were still damp from the exertion. His loose shirt and shorts did a good job of obscuring the amazing body I knew lay beneath. Finally, Ibrought my inspection back to his handsome face, where he was eyeing me dubiously. “Is it still selfish if it’s what I want too?”

His eyebrows rose in surprise, and his lips twitched with a smile. He took a step closer and plucked at my shirt. “Is that what you want, to spend time with me?”

He was making it very difficult to school my rebellious grin as he continued to invade my personal space, the breeze teasing loose tendrils of his brown hair. “I think we both know I want a hell of a lot more than that.”

There was a feral glint in his eyes as he stood close enough to tease me with a kiss, which he withheld. “Oh, I’m all in for more.” My heart surged at his words, though I doubted he meant them the way my heart wanted to interpret them. Then his mouth closed over mine.

I moaned into him as he tasted my lips and dove past to taste the rest of me. I grabbed his waist, pulling him closer while I slipped my hands beneath his shirt to tease the band of his basketball shorts. He gasped when I reached past the elastic to palm his ass. I used his moment of distraction to switch our positions, moving from the railing to push him against a nearby tree. His groan nearly destroyed me as I rocked my hardening dick against him.

“Jesus, James. You going to have me right here?” Despite the breathlessness of the question or how blatantly ill-advised it would be, he didn’t sound even remotely against the notion.

“Would you like that, baby boy?” His eyes fluttered, and I kissed my way along his jaw to whisper huskily, “Want me to bend you over this railing and show you how good you made me feel?”

“Fuck yes,” he hissed, grabbing my hair and yanking my head back so he could claim my mouth again. Abruptly, I felt him smile against my lips. “I think I just had the same thought that led to the tree-climbing crack.”

“Remember that now, do you?”

He chuckled and pulled me tighter against him. “No, just the same thought.”

I slashed my mouth over his again, aching to touch more of him. “Are you finally going to admit that you said you wanted to climb me like a tree?” I teased, nipping at his swollen lips.

“Why would I do that?” His goofy smile made my heart do veritable cartwheels. “But if it helps, the tree you currently have me pinned against is a longleaf pine. Which, in case you didn’t know, is an evergreen.” There went my heart again.

I kissed him again, pouring every ounce of that feeling into him and nearly losing my mind when he kissed me back just as intensely. He kept one hand tangled in my hair while his other slipped beneath my shirt to scratch along my lower back. I groaned into him, eager for more, and grateful that we hadn’t seen anyone in the lot when we arrived or on the trail the entire time we’d been out here.