They sprinted for his truck and scrambled inside as Owen’s truck doors opened.
“Hey!”
“Mitch!”
“Dammit!”
That was all he heard as he started the truck and pulled away from the curb.
He only slowed at the stop sign at the end of the street, not coming to a full stop. He looked over at Paige.
She grinned back at him. “That was close.”
“You have no idea. Those are just the scouts.”
“Just checking me out?”
“That and making sure you don’t get away before everyone else showed up.”
Her eyes widened. “There were more coming?”
“No doubt. Probably had to load up the food and beer and stuff.”
“They were bringing lunch over?”
“Well, there’s never not a good time for food and beer around here.”
She nodded. “Kennedy did tell me that I wasn’t going to get any grilled cheese while I’m here.”
He glanced over at her. “I’ll get you grilled cheese, Paige.”
She smiled. “Can I eat it at your house without your whole family?”
He hesitated. “That will be more difficult,” he said honestly.
“That’s what I figured.”
She definitely didn’t sound like she thought being included in the big family dinners, grilled cheese or not, was something to look forward to.
He turned the truck out onto a narrow dirt road that cut through the field behind his house. This would take them down to the bayou, a few miles from where the Boys of the Bayou docks were. This was a private road, and the spot where he was taking her was never visited by tourists or really anyone other than the family.
They would be able to get right up to the water’s edge, but it was a smaller branch of the bayou that was hard to get to even by boat because of the varying depths of the water. He and Owen and Chase had gotten an airboat stuck out here last summer and had needed Sawyer to come pull them out.
They bumped along the road for a few miles before he slowed. The swamp didn’t have specific set boundaries, and it wandered and spread as it liked, so it was a bit of a guessing game as to how far out they could go before the ground got too soft for the truck. High trucks with big tires were fun… and necessary out here.
“Here we go.” He turned them down another narrow path, and they drove out from a small cluster of trees. The ground was mushy, but nobody was going to sink.
“Oh, wow,” Paige said as the bayou came into view.
“You live by a river,” he said as he turned the truck so he could back up, and they could sit in the bed and watch the water meander by.
“Yeah, but the river is different from this,” she said.
She was studying the trees. They were mostly big cypress and tupelo. Spanish moss draped the branches creating the stereotypical picture of a swamp.
He shut the truck off. “Let’s go sit in back.”
She nodded and started to open her door.
“Hang on, Hawkeye,” he said, jumping out of the truck. “You’re not dressed for this.”
She was smiling when he opened her door.
“Hawkeye?” she asked.
“Iowa is the Hawkeye state, right?”
She nodded.
“And Josh calls Tori ‘Iowa,’ so that can’t be your nickname.” He held his arms out.
“I need a nickname?” she asked, as she slid to the edge of the seat.
“Well, you’ll probably hear a lot of ‘darlin’ and ‘honey’ and ‘sweetheart,’ too,” he told her honestly. There was something about her that made him want to use endearments. That was not his norm with the women he dated.
Then again, neither was having them move in with their five cats. He had sleepovers but never more than one night at a time, and he’d never lived with a woman he wasn’t related to. And that hadn’t happened until his dad got a job that kept him out of town for a few days at a time, and Mitch had moved in with Ellie and Leo.
And he hadn’t had a sleepover—or a quickie or even a hot make-out session—with anyone other than Paige in the past six months.
Yeah, there was a lot of “out of the norm” stuff going on here.
“Sweetheart is maybe okay,” she told him.
“You don’t like darlin’ and honey?”
“Darlin’ makes me want to take my clothes off, and honey makes me think of lying in bed in the dark, sweaty, and breathing hard after you made me come twice in a row.”
He froze with his arms extended to help her out of the truck as his whole body went hard.
“And my grandma calls me sweetheart,” she said with a sly smile.
He narrowed his eyes. “Come here… darlin’.”
She put her hands on his shoulders as her smile grew. Mitch scooped her up in his arms. She gave a little gasp but then relaxed, letting him carry her to the truck bed. He had boots on, better to handle the marshy ground than the sandals she was wearing, but truthfully, he would have used any excuse to get her into his arms.
He lowered the tailgate with one hand as she clung to him. Then he set her down and climbed up beside her.
“So…” she said.
He prepared for her to say something else flirtatious that would make his cock press even more insistently against his zipper.
“What are those trees?”
He let out a breath and laughed as she pointed to the tupelo trees.
“Those are cypress, right?” she asked, moving her finger to the right. “With Spanish moss.”
“Yep. The others are tupelo.”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” she asked. “The same river feeds the waterways where we both live, but the swamp is so different from the river in Iowa.”
He hadn’t really thought about that, but suddenly the idea the water that flowed past her town in Iowa ended up here in his bayou was awesome.
“That is pretty amazing,” he agreed after a moment.
“So I read that Spanish moss is harvested and used for a bunch of different things,” she said, still looking out at the trees. “They used to stuff mattresses with it and things like that. Now it’s more decorative and used for crafts and stuff.” She angled him a look. “They put it in voodoo dolls sometimes though.”
“You looked up Spanish moss?” For some reason, that touched him.
“I looked up a bunch of stuff about Louisiana in general,” she said. “Spanish moss was part of that.”
“You were looking into where I live?”
She turned her head and met his gaze. “And where I’m going to be living for a while.”
His heart thumped. Don’t overreact. Don’t spook her. “Henry Ford stuffed the first Model T car seats with it,” he said, instead of commenting on her living here for the next few months. Or forever.
“Really?”
“Yep. There are dozens of uses.”
“And it’s not really moss at all,” she said. “It’s a flowering plant that’s actually related to pineapple.”
He grinned. “You did do your homework.”
She looked pleased. “The Native Americans called it ‘tree hair,’ and then when the Spanish and French settlers came, they came up with names for it that were supposed to be insulting to the other. Since the French outlasted the Spanish in this area, ‘Spanish moss’ stuck.”