“Sounds about right,” my dad says, a chuckle in his response. I nearly choke from shock. My dad rarely laughs, even with us kids, and the fact that a complete stranger (to him, not me) has made him have that response is something I can hardly believe.
Dakota nods smoothly. “I’m glad to hear I’m on the right track.”
“So what do you plan to develop if not some strip mall?” my dad asks.
Dakota hesitates. “I have some ideas, but I’d like to spend a little more time looking at the land in-person, and also in town learning what the people of Sierra Grande could use. Would you mind giving me a day to figure that out? I won’t have to take up any more of your time, I can email you the ideas.” She emphasizes the word you. What she’s really saying is, I won’t be emailing you, Wes, you crybaby who’s pretending not to recognize me.
“Don’t you worry about taking up anybody’s time, Miss Wright—”
“You can call me Dakota, Mr. Hayden.”
“And you can call me Beau, Dakota.”
You both can call me shocked. What the hell? Since when does my dad like anybody this much? I glance at Mr. Wright. He’s looking at his daughter with unfettered pride.
“So, Dakota, I was saying you don’t need to worry about taking up my time.” Dad clamps a hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be Wes’s time you’re taking up, and I’m certain he won’t mind giving you a tour of the property or the town tomorrow.”
I think there was a small part of me that knew he was going to say that, so at this point, I’m not even surprised.
“Sure,” I say tightly. Sounds fun. Dakota will be imagining the ways she’d like to kill me, and I’ll be trying to forget I cried in front of her while simultaneously fighting off the erection that always happens when I think about all the other things that happened that night.
Like when she pulled me into the trees after the sun went down…
And unabashedly stripped off her clothes while I watched, and then walked into the lake…
Shit. Why didn’t I wear a looser pair of jeans today?
“I’d love to be with you on that tour, if you don’t mind,” Jericho pipes up for the first time since her late entrance.
I don’t even know why she’s here. She didn’t add anything valuable to the meeting, and she won’t add anything valuable to tomorrow’s tour either. She’s good for making the transaction official, I suppose, and as far as I can tell that’s about it. She can’t tell Dakota anything about the land that I don’t already know.
And I’d be lying if I said there isn’t a small part of me that wants Dakota to myself.
Dad looks at me. “I’ll leave you to work that out. I need to get back.”
Everyone takes the hint. Chairs scrape the floor, Dakota grabs a water bottle and twists off the cap. She turns so she’s facing the window and drinks deeply, as if she’s parched. A fraction of her profile is visible, and her delicate throat undulates as she swallows, the same way it did when she tipped the whiskey bottle to those full pink lips.
“Wes?” Jericho interrupts my blatant staring.
Annoyance flares. I look at her expectantly, waiting for whatever it is she needs to say. My jaw flexes as she stares up at me, eyes widening slightly. Her lips part an inch, and I wonder if this is a game women play… the game of, this is what I’d look like if I was on my knees in front of you.
A throat clears. Dakota’s. I turn just in time to catch the angry look on her face before she pivots and walks around the table, passing by me without a second glance. Her father follows, but he nods at me as he goes.
“Did you need something, Jericho?”
“Tomorrow?” she asks, adjusting the stupid face she was making. “What time?”
I look down at my boots and cross my arms, thinking about what a shit show this has the potential to turn into.
“Eight a.m. Meet me at the property.”
She balks at the early time, but doesn’t complain.
I follow Dakota and her dad out front, and Jericho walks beside me. It irritates me. She’s making it look like we know each other better than we do, as if I haven't known her the same amount of time I’ve known Dakota’s dad.
Jericho goes to her car, a fancy black two-seater, and Dakota and her dad walk to a white sedan. I let Jericho go with a terse wave, and walk closer to Dakota.
“Eight tomorrow morning,” I call out to her back. She whips around. Her expression is one of polite, cool interest, but it looks crafted. Like she painted it and set it on her face like a mask to conceal what she really feels underneath. If it weren’t for the hand fisted at her side, I’d be inclined to believe the façade.
“Great,” she says, nodding. “I’ll be here.”
I turn around and go back to the house, but I don’t go inside. I stand in the shadow from the stone pillar and watch that little sedan bump its way over the dirt road, kicking up dust.
The night I met Dakota, her face had imprinted on my heart and soul, even though I hadn’t wanted it to. We’d met at two in the afternoon on a hot summer day, and by three a.m. I thought I’d memorized most of her expressions. I saw flirty, silly, funny, happy. As we laid in the bed Jason told me was mine for the night, she talked about her parents and what a naïve young girl she’d been to leave home so early, and I saw sadness.
Which is how I know that beneath the anger I saw flashing in those brown eyes just now, I glimpsed her sadness.
And I’m the asshole who put it there.
6
Dakota
I’ve done everything I can to calm myself down. Deep breathing, meditating, punching the shit out of a pillow. Turns out, none of those things work when what you really need to do is confront the person who either doesn’t remember you or is pretending not to. And, oh, by the way, he’s also a potential seller of heretofore exclusive property and you’re the hungry buyer.
Wes Hayden.
Wes fucking Hayden.
He looks like a slightly aged version of the man I met one hot summer afternoon five years ago, which is to say he’s unfairly gorgeous. No man should have eyelashes that dark and long, or lips that full and nibble-worthy. And if that shirt he wore rolled up over his forearms gave anything away, it was that he’s still covered in ropy, thick muscles.
Just thinking about him makes my body come alive. My hand brushes over my stomach, the pads of my fingers tracing the path his fingers traveled when they touched me.
There isn’t a single thing I don’t remember about that night. He was quiet, hiding somewhere inside himself, a soldier released from duty for the first time in over ten years. I wiggled my way into his arms and his mind, and he opened up.
We’d had an incredible afternoon, and when the sun went down the night got hotter. Skinny-dipping in the lake was the first of our shenanigans. It was followed by sneaking past the party in our dry clothes and soaking wet hair, and finding a shower in the house. We made use of the shower, the bathroom counter, the floor, the bed.
Wes towered over me, and his hands were huge. He lifted me as if I were made of nothing but feathers, and all I could think was here’s a real man.