“You’re changing,” he said in a tone that didn’t leave room for negotiation.
A few minutes later, I got into my car, my chest straining against one of his fire crew t-shirts and my ass encased in a pair of super soft gray sweats. The faint scent of laundry detergent mixed with something woodsy and masculine hovered around me. I breathed it in as I pulled down the drive, waving to Lane with my arm hanging outside the window.
Every instinct screamed at me that I needed to walk away from this job and not look back. But I was already falling for the little boy who loved dinosaurs. And I was head over heels in lust with his ice-cold dad.
CHAPTER 5
HOLT
I entered the clearing where we held Friday night trail suppers. My brothers Thatcher and Dane were already there, along with everyone else except Harlan.
“There he is.” Thatcher walked up and handed me a beer. “Rumor has it you’ve been seen in town with someone. A cute young thing with long pink hair. Is there anything you want to tell us?”
For a guy who used to only speak in one-word sentences, he’d become a lot more outgoing since he and Joely got together. Shrugging, I added the bags of chips I’d brought to the folding table. “She’s helping me with Lane.”
“You’re shagging the nanny?” Dane asked with a smirk.
“Not yet,” Ridge said. “He’s way too uptight to be getting laid, but from what I’ve seen, it sure seems like he wants to.”
“Shut the fuck up.” I popped the top off the bottle of beer and sank onto a tree stump. “Nothing’s happening. She’s watching Lane, and I’m getting to work without having to worry about him full-time.”
“Is she watching him tonight?” Dane waggled his brows. “Waiting up for you to get home? Does she think she’ll be the one to finally thaw the iceberg?”
“I’m not doing this tonight.” I shook my head. They were just giving me shit, but I wasn’t in the mood. Especially since their comments hit way too close to the truth.
I did have the hots for my son’s nanny, and I had no idea what the fuck to do about it. As much as I wanted to wrap my hands around her sweet, thick hips and memorize every inch of her skin, all I could do was ignore the feelings she stirred up inside. Calla had to be at least ten years younger than me with a pure heart and a smile that could make a man believe in second chances. But it didn’t matter how blue my balls got, she deserved better than an old single dad who’d been described as being “cryogenically preserved.”
“What do we know about the fucking list?” Ridge asked as he looked at each of us. “Anybody got anything yet?”
“Nellie knows, but she’s not talking,” Thatcher said.
“She says we should spend more time thinking about what got us on the list than who wrote it,” I added. “And unless there’s one or two women that all of us have dated, the list has to be a group effort.”
“Hell, I haven’t dated anyone in years,” Thatcher said. “And the last woman you were with was your ex, right?”
I couldn’t remember yesterday, much less every detail of the past four years, but I was pretty sure going out on a date would have registered somewhere in my brain. “Yeah. So unless someone’s harboring a grudge from high school…”
“That would be a hell of a long time to wait to try to get even.” Dane tapped his beer bottle on top of mine, causing it to bubble up… the same stupid trick he’d been pulling since Thatcher and I gave him his first drink.
I held the bottle to my lips and took a huge gulp before it overflowed. As I swallowed, a dark shadow moved out of the trees.
“Shit, Harlan. I almost choked on my beer. You can’t go around scaring the crap out of everyone.” I wasn’t pissed, just surprised as I held out my hand to grab hold of his.
He gave me a quick half-handshake, half-hug as he stepped into the clearing and grunted a greeting. Harlan ran the Hard Timber Outfitters and had grown up in the mountains. For a guy who could have carried the entire defensive line in high school on his back, I had no idea how he could move through the woods without making a fucking sound.
“We’d almost given up on you.” Ridge reached out and took the cooler Harlan carried. “Looks like you’ve been busy, bro. What did you bring to share tonight?”
“Steak.” Harlan shrugged off his backpack and grabbed a beer. He popped the top and downed the entire bottle before saying another word. When he was done, he turned to me and Thatcher. “Since when is your sister back in town?”
“Jessa?” I asked.
“You got more than one sister?” His lip curled up. “That piece of shit truck she’s driving popped a tire in front of the store. You need to get her something more reliable.”
Harlan spent a lot of time at our place growing up. His dad made ours look like a saint. So he’d always been protective of Jessa, just like Thatcher, Dane, and me. She’d also always gotten under his skin. The two of them fought like a grizzly bear and a wolverine. If we were ever bored with nothing to do, we’d bait one of them into starting a fight with the other and watch the verbal jabs fly.
“She couldn’t find a job after college and had to move back for a while,” I said. I’d tried to convince her to watch Lane over the summer, but she was convinced she’d only be around for a couple of weeks before she left again. “Did you help her change the tire, or is she still sitting outside the store?”
He glared at me like I was speaking a foreign language he couldn’t understand. “You think she’d let me help her?”
