She giggled. “Maybe.”
“Are you planning to ravish me?”
“Also maybe.”
“Well then I’ll take my chances with you out here.”
The headlights carved out a narrow tunnel of visibility ahead of us, but beyond that cone of light, the world might as well not exist. If those headlights went out, I wouldn’t be able to see my hand in front of my face.
I had not been anywhere this dark ever. I didn’t know places like this even existed in the world. Maybe in the outback of Australia, but in the US?
Sylvie was completely unbothered by the isolation, humming along cheerfully to Mariah Carey belting out what sounded like a Christmas song on the ancient cassette tape playing throughthe truck’s crackling speakers. She navigated the winding forest road like she’d driven it a thousand times, which she probably had.
“Okay, but for real, are you taking me somewhere to murder me?” I asked, only half-joking. “Because this is exactly what the beginning of a horror movie looks like.”
Her laugh was a bright sound that never failed to make something warm unfurl in my chest. “Trust me, City Boy. Have I steered you wrong yet?”
“I’ve never been in the middle of nowhere before,” I said.
“We’re not nowhere,” she said. “I know exactly where I am.”
“This is somewhere you’ve been before,” I said. “You bring all the boys out here?”
She rolled her eyes and said nothing.
Was I jealous? What the hell? Did I get jealous? I honestly couldn’t remember a time when I’d ever been jealous. Jealous meant I cared.
That was definitely new.
In my world, it wasn’t arrogant to say getting a woman was pretty easy. I could walk into a bar and pick a woman I wanted and that was that.
Sylvie made me work for it.
And that was what made the situation so much worse. How the hell was I supposed to destroy her life and then ask her to let me be with her? It was never going to happen. I knew how much the farm and lodge meant to her. There would be no coming back from that.
Which meant I needed to appreciate every minute I had with her.
We drove for another ten minutes through what felt like the absolute middle of nowhere before the trees finally opened up into a clearing. It seemed like an old forestry route, probablyused decades ago for logging operations. Now it was just a wide, flat space surrounded by towering evergreens.
“Get out,” Sylvie said, killing the truck’s engine and plunging us into sudden silence.
I climbed out of the cab, immediately struck by how quiet it was out here. No traffic sounds, no city noise, no human activity of any kind. Just the soft whisper of wind through the trees and the distant call of some night bird I couldn’t identify.
“Now what?” I asked.
Instead of answering, Sylvie walked around to the back of the truck and lowered the tailgate. Then she climbed up into the bed and lay down on her back, looking perfectly comfortable on the cold metal surface.
I frowned at her. “What are you doing?”
“Come on, City Boy,” she said, patting the space beside her. “Trust me.”
I hesitated for a moment. Lying in the back of a pickup truck in the middle of a forest in winter wasn’t exactly my idea of comfort but something about the way she was looking at me made it impossible to refuse. I climbed up beside her and stretched out, trying to find a position that didn’t involve metal digging into my spine.
At first, I was only looking at her. How could I not? Even in the dim starlight, she was magnificent. The curve of her nose, the soft swell of her lips, those long dark lashes that cast shadows on her cheeks. She was beautiful in a way that made everything else fade into the background.
She must have caught me staring because she smiled that bright, teasing smile that never failed to scramble my brain. “Look up,” she whispered.
“Huh?”
