“Is this the part where you kill me in the woods?” I asked, slowing my footsteps dramatically.
He stopped and turned to face me. “There’s a lot of things I could do with you in the woods. Should I start naming some off?”
My breath caught. “Well, I don’t see any mistletoe out here, so…”
He leaned closer, his flirting game on level one thousand, and whispered, “I’m not a big traditionalist.”
Having sufficiently rattled me, he smiled and began moving again.
I told Miles I liked about fifteen different trees on our walk before he finally deemed one perfect. I held the tree while he sawed the base, and soon we were making the trek back toward my cabin with Miles dragging our capture behind him.
He was on another level today, teasing me mercilessly like he just couldn’t help himself. For ten minutes straight, he rehashed every line of the infamous email, one jab after another. My mind couldn’t keep up as he used his wit and way with words to render me utterly outraged one moment and blushing and speechless the next. He brought up the letter, the nicknames, the hams, the missed kiss, and every other interaction between us that he could possibly twist into some form of a flirtation. One after the other, until I was left with unanswered retorts fluttering around in my head but unable to think fast enough to gather one and let it fly. As we walked side by side, my fingers clenched into a tight ball as I tried to school my emotions. He was Miles unleashed, and I couldn’t decide if I should laugh, or push him, or punch him or—
Reader, I spanked him.
Instantly, I knew I had done wrong. The entire forest seemed to hush, fading away into quiet spectators watching this unfold. My hand shot back, and I stared at it as though I had never seen one before. The other hand covered my mouth. My eyes went bug-eyed. Miles dropped the tree and whirled around with a stunned expression on his face. Actually, to be more accurate, he was looking at me like I had just handed him a one-hundred-dollar bill.
“I didn’t realize we were at this point in our fake relationship, Oliviana.”
I couldn’t move. My mouth gaped open, desperately wishing to bring a few seconds back on the clock. Rewind. Redo. Of all the people to get handsy with, it had to be Miles. My palm burned. I could only imagine what his…derrière…felt like. Well, I knew what it felt like…taut and firm…the perfect amount of bounce—FOCUS, Olive.
His eyes were dancing. Okay, he was just fine. Him and his…butt.
He bit his bottom lip in an ultra-attractive way as he took a step toward me, which I immediately countered by stepping backward.
“You just spanked me.” He couldn’t even get the sentence out without laughing.
“It…” I swallowed hard, my hands in my hair. What? Olive. WHAT? “You deserved it.”
“If that was being bad, I never want to be good.”
An embarrassed smile broke across my face before I leaned forward to push his annoying, laughing body away from mine. He held fast to my arm. I was out of protests, dismayed at how my traitorous body let me revel in the feel of his hands tugging me closer.
“I need to talk to you.” His gravelly voice and our sudden proximity read like a warning sign to me.
“What?”
“I’ve learned a couple of things about myself the past few days.”
“Should I be scared to ask?” Don’t look directly into his brown eyes, Olive. Don’t!
“Maybe.”
Against my better judgment, I looked at him square on, nervous, until he broke out into a wide grin, the scope and attractiveness of his smile literally taking my breath away.
I took in some air for my lungs and shook my head. “What have you learned?”
He held up a finger. “Number one, I’m not really a fake-dating kind of guy. As in, I hate it.”
My shoulders dropped while my mind immediately began to race. Did that mean he wanted out? That would make things awkward if we broke up here—embarrassing for me, anyway. Glenn would love this turn of events. Unless Miles let me do the breakup. Maybe instead of a breakup, we could just say he was called back in for work. Well, no, we work at the same place. Maybe we could…
“Number two.”
His strong voice gave me pause in my thoughts enough to look back up at him.
“And this is something I’ve suspected for a while but has since been proven true.”
“What?”
“I’ve got a thing for pretty, uptight English teachers.”
I blinked as his words fell over me, but nothing made sense. He was staring at me calmly, almost nonchalant after this major bomb of a revelation. I stood like a statue, unable to move, though my body was a kaleidoscope of activity on the inside. There was something amiss with his words, a puzzle I wouldn’t be able to finish without this missing piece. And I needed all the pieces to make sense of his words.
I swallowed and held up a finger, mimicking Miles. “Follow-up question.”
He nodded. “Shoot.”
“You said pretty uptight English teachers.” The words were coming out mumbled, like I was in a daze, which I totally was. “Were you meaning an English teacher that’s moderately uptight, or was there a comma in there somewhere?”
He cocked his head to the side as he regarded me with an expression somewhere between amusement and a tenderness I could drown in. “The statement could probably go either way. This teacher is definitely pretty uptight, but I did, in fact, mean that statement with a comma after pretty. But now that I’m really thinking about it, beautiful would have been a better adjective.”
Suddenly, I noticed how close he was. Much too close. Much too comfortable. His eyes were roaming my face before landing on my lips. I made the mistake of catching his gaze, and it was…in a word…smoldering. Oh my gosh. I needed to remember to ask him if he had a pen name or something—for romance books he must secretly write. He didn’t put anything like this into his adventure books. I mean…from what I’ve heard…they’re not romantic.
Shoot. Shoot. Shoot.
“Well,” I said, my chin raised high, determined to keep us on track. “I’ve enjoyed my cabin, but that’s about it.”
He breathed out a chuckle. “Such a little liar.” He slowly gathered me tighter until his arms were wrapped comfortably around my waist. It was December in Vermont, okay? I was going to lock in that heat source, so I allowed him to embrace me. I was half tempted to lean my head against his shoulder. I couldn’t tell if that would be better or worse than actually looking at him.
“Who can see us?” I asked. We were within view of the lodge now, but currently, my view was blocked by his shoulder.
“Nobody.”
“What? Hey!” I pushed myself out of his arms only to have him pull me back again. I’d give myself a solid D-for effort in resisting him.
“I would never fake date somebody I didn’t already want to be dating.”
The hair on my arms stood at attention with his words. Why was he whispering?
I drew in a breath and tried again to step out of his arms. He let me go a little, but not all the way. “You can’t tell me that.”
“Tell you what?”
“That you…that you…” I was lost for words.