On The Rocks

I know this. And yet, I can’t help myself.

Hunter Markham is stuck on the yo-yo of Gabby Ward’s life. I went from treating him with disdain for the past five years, to accepting his apology and trying a bit of a truce, to hopping right back on the bitch-train with him. I know it’s not fair, yet I don’t know any other way to keep myself emotionally distanced from Hunter.

I’m not angry with him anymore. I swear it. His apology gave me peace, and the fact that he regretted the way he treated me truly soothed the hurt away. But when we were sitting on the beach, side by side, and he confessed the reason he returned was to help Brody, I knew, without a doubt, that I was only minutes away from falling helplessly back in love with the man.

He is dangerous, and I am like an adrenaline junkie.

I know myself. I know that I would seek his danger, that my heart would open up wide for him, and then at some point, I would get hurt. I would get hurt ten times worse than what I ever felt at the tender age of eighteen, when all of my young and innocent fantasies were crushed. It would hurt more now because I had a greater appreciation of what I stood to lose.

As I sat on the beach the rest of the day, watching Hunter interact with Casey and Brody, I felt my heart thumping in yearning to have him look at me that way, to treat me as if I were treasured. It would be so easy for me to fall there again.

Except… I vowed to myself I wasn’t going to let it happen. I was going to distance myself from Hunter, and I was going to move on with my life. The only way I knew how to do that, with even any hope for success, was to go back to the tried-and-true method of showing Hunter my inner-bitch. It had worked well for me for five years—it would work well for me again.

It was nothing for me to lapse back into my role. Sure, for every snide word or catty remark, I would have to school my features so he’d never guess that I really wanted to throw my arms around him.

And it was working fine, too.

Until that jackass had to go and kiss me.

And gosh, just the memory of that kiss is succeeding in chasing away the bone-cracking coldness that has overtaken my body with shivers.

Because I’m stuck on the side of the road in a driving rainstorm that’s plummeted the temperature down twenty degrees in the last ten minutes. When my old Ford conked out while I was running errands Thursday morning, I popped the hood and stood up on the front bumper, fiddling around with the various wires and gadgets on the engine. I didn’t have a freakin’ clue what I was doing. I might be able to build an armoire out of a few scraps of lumber, but I knew shit about engines and what made them work. I was hoping something had just rattled loose, and I’d be able to tighten it back up again.

It wasn’t five minutes after I started messing around with the engine that the sky decided to open up and pour freezing rain down upon me. I was soaked in less than twenty seconds, and my resolve to figure out the problem increased out of desperation. I doubled my efforts to rattle around different parts of the engine, intermittently jumping back in the truck to turn the ignition.

I got nothing.

On my third such attempt to climb back up on the bumper to work my magic, I heard, “What in the hell are you doing, Gabby?”

Spinning around, I lose my balance and hop off the bumper, straight into a huge puddle, which now coats the bottoms of my soaked jeans with mud. Wiping a wet lock of hair out of my eyes, I peer through the driving rain and see Hunter stalking up toward me, his Jeep parked just ahead of my truck.

“What does it look like?” I grumble, lifting my leg up to climb back on the bumper.

Hunter’s arms wrap around my waist and he pulls me off, setting me carefully beside the puddle. “Let me look,” he says, and I let him… because I clearly know shit about engines.