His lips parted in surprise, lashes fluttering over those deep brown pools that were calling my name, begging me to stare into until I was lost within the dark depths. Suddenly, he drew a hand up to his face, partially covering it from view.
Too bad because I would’ve loved to revel in what shade of red he was currently turning. I bet it looked lovely against his tanned skin.
“Anyway.” He cleared his throat, avoiding eye contact. “What do you do? Your job?”
“Nice segue. Very subtle.” I preened at the look he shot me, basking in the attention once again. “Would it surprise you if I said I was in finance?”
“What kind of finance?”
“I’m a financial analyst. Mostly for investments. I get to play with rich people’s money all day.”
Blake slowly dropped his hand back down to his side. “Was that part of why you said you didn’t really care you bought the wrong package with us?”
“Partly.” It really wasn’t my place to rub it in his face—no matter how unintentional—about my own wealth. Coming from money and then staying in it was a flex I wasn’t often keen on putting on the table. Discussing jobs and finances was one thing, yet I found it distasteful to brag about what was currently floating around in the trust fund. Call me privileged, but it tended to do the opposite of what I wanted while in a conversation. “Think of the overage as a donation to your youth program. How about that?”
“How generous.” His tone was dry but I could tell from the small smile trying to crawl across his face that he was happy to hear I wasn’t looking for any sort of refund.
To me, a few hundred bucks was a drop in the bucket, but for a business like the one Blake was running, that could be the difference between buying an extra palette of food or trying to make due with chicken and rice for the third night in a row.
“Do you like it? Playing around with other’s money?” he asked. “Seems kind of dangerous.”
“Oh yeah. It’s like gambling, I love it. Don’t tell anyone that, though, they’ll think I have a problem.”
A laugh burst out of him. “He says as his eye is twitching.”
Oh, I was riding high now. I’d earned myself a full-blown laughanda jest. “Look, I can quit at any time.”
Blake merely shook his head at me, his lips still twisted up in a half smile. “You know, I’ll hold you to that. Six weeks out here will be a nice detox for you.”
“Just don’t try to get me into basket weaving. I can’t afford bringing a hobby like that back home.”
“I’ll try to remember to keep you away from the pavilion when Mara, our basket maker, starts doling out supplies next week.”
I stopped short. “Wait, is that actually an activity you have here?” Man, I really needed to look up the damn itinerary.
To his credit, Blake gave me no answer, keeping me on my toes indefinitely. Instead, he simply nodded his head back toward the trail and said, “Come on, let’s keep moving.”
CHAPTER 3
Blake
Marlow Knight was...something else entirely.
A shameless flirt, for one. And an enigma wrapped up into a neat little package that was beginning to scream ‘danger!’every time I caught his eye with my own.
At first glance, Marlow was simply a friendly guy who liked to joke around and have a good time. The type of guy who’d be a good wingman out at the bar, but someone you’d hesitate to bring home to meet your parents. He was charming, funny, and a little bit reckless in the least threatening way possible.
Deep down, though, there was something else lying right beneath the surface. A kind of trickster energy that my own was feeding off of tenfold and I had no way of braking that train from careening off its tracks.
It’d been a while since I’d felt equal in a conversation—at least in terms of snappy back-and-forths that didn’t end in the other person looking at me like I had ten heads or hurt because of something I quipped back with without dressing it up in a frilly little bow.
Whatever I threw at him, Marlow took with ease. An attribute I could admire in a man.
Taking over as his partner for the foreseeable future was a spontaneous decision on my part. One that was abruptly becoming clearer by the second how terrible of an idea it was. I was having too much fun being pulled away from my duties managing the camp’s grounds, to the point where I’d left my radio back on the charger in my office intentionally before I’d even embarked on this hike.
That wasn’t me. I was supposed to be more responsible than this. Not get caught up in some guy with charming dimples and a cheeky smile, whose tall and muscular body was as strong as it was nice to look at, who had a witty personality that had so easily won me over.
Keeping my well-oiled machine was a difficult task that didn’t need to be derailed just because I’d suddenly caught interest in someone for once in my life.
