Page 148 of Risking the Pucking Defense

We stand side by side, taking a moment to appreciate the view before Hayden steps in front of me and takes my cheeks in his hands.

My face is no doubt a little red from the late summer sun, and I’m not wearing any makeup, and yet, Hayden is looking at me like I’m the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.

“Yeah,” he muses, “I was thinking the same.”

“Stop,” I whisper, rolling my eyes at his cheesiness as I battle with my self-confidence to believe him.

A smirk pulls at his lips. “Never,” he promises, holding my eyes so I have little choice but to believe him. “Hungry?”

“Starving.”

Tightening his grip on my hand, he tugs me toward a private spot in the trees that showcases the waterfall before us.

“This is beautiful,” I whisper after lowering myself to the blanket he had in his rucksack while he gets out the food.

The sound of others visiting the waterfalls floats around us, but this spot is perfectly private. Confident that we’re safe from prying eyes, he turns his hat backward and drops down beside me.

“I wasn’t sure what you’d like, so I just got⁠—”

“It’s perfect,” I praise, stopping him from babbling nervously by covering his hand with mine. “Everything is perfect.”

Our eyes hold, the air between us crackling in ways I’m becoming all too used to.

“Kiss me,” I demand.

“As if I’ll ever say no to you,” he mutters as he closes the distance between us, wrapping his hand around the back of my neck and kissing me as if he’ll never get the chance again.

When we part, we’re both smiling, and one look at him has a happy laugh exploding out of me.

“All of this is crazy. You know that, right?”

“Hell yeah. I’m sitting here with the hottest woman on the planet, and she just let me kiss her. Fucking insane.”

I shake my head. “Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Doesn’t what bother me, baby?” he asks, ripping open a sub bun and grabbing a couple of slices of ham.

“My age. My past. What everyone is going to say.”

He freezes before turning to look at me. “Are you kidding?”

“N-no. If we do this, it’ll come out eventually and⁠—”

“I don’t care,” he says with zero hesitation. “I don’t care about anything that happened before we met. All of that, no matter what it was, it helped to make you who you are today.”

I smile at him, trying desperately to believe him. My heart wants to, but my head is holding me back.

“And why the hell would I care about your age? You’re hot, Hails. I have no issues with having a hot older woman curled up in my bed every night.”

“Jesus, you make me sound ancient.”

“Oh, hardly. What are you, twenty-nine?”

“Thirty,” I mumble, aware that I let that milestone pass by without anyone knowing. It’s how I wanted it to be. But I can’t deny that it didn’t sting when I didn’t hear a single thing from my parents.

I’m not sure why I’m surprised. I may as well have died along with Spencer that day. Sure, I was still around, but they weren’t interested in me. All they wanted was to ensure the business had a future, and that meant marrying me off to someone who they deemed to be an eligible candidate and popping out a handful of kids—boys, preferably—that they could pull into the empire once they were of age.

And for a few years there, I was the fucking idiot who just rolled with it.