“Beaver?”
“Beaver,” she confirmed.
Teagan didn’t know what was going on half the time that he was here, and that proportion only increased when Darcy was speaking to him. Possibly Darcy was delivering the least charming proposition he’d ever received. More likely there was an actual giant rodent sighting in his immediate future.
“Sure,” he said from the floor. Either way, sure.
“Fantastic!” she said, although she didn’t seem to have doubted his answer. “Hurry up and get dressed—Yellowstone is a three-hour drive from here.”
Ah. The toothy kind of beavers it was, then.
Darcy pulled his folded clothes off the chair by the bed and tossed them over to him. She bounced on her heels while Teagan pulled on his pants, eyes fixed awkwardly on the ceiling as he did up the fly on his chinos. She did all but physically hustle him out into the bracing chill of the early morning.
“I got you breakfast already,” she said when he looked at the residence building. “You can drink it on the way. And we’ll get lunch in Mammoth Hot Springs.” She took his arm and began to drag him along with her to increase their pace.
“Wait, wait, I should ask Sloane if she wants to go,” hesaid, leaning back on his heels and looking at his sister’s tent. He wasn’t totally awake yet.
Darcy halted. Her face flashed with a few emotions, faster than he could follow: surprise, wariness, then a shade of judgment. “You want to bring your sister along?”
Teagan flushed as he realized that yes, objectively speaking, he was cockblocking himself. He nodded rather than backpedal.
“Okay, go on, then, be quick,” Darcy said. “There’s a line outside the tollbooth by nine.”
This was the little dance he and Darcy did: he acted like a teenage boy with his first crush, and she graciously pretended not to notice. He remained keenly aware that she had used most of her words ever uttered in his presence to convey that he was a disaster, and he was only deluding himself if he thought that uninterrupted time with Darcy would do anything to change her mind about him. Despite that conclusion, he still generated a small pearl of regret as he veered off the main path and over to his sister’s tent. A long ride alone with Darcy might have been nice.
“Sloane?” he warily called from the mosquito-netted entrance. He ducked inside. “Sloane, could you wake up for a second?” Sloane went off like a parcel bomb if disturbed in her sleep, and he carefully stayed out of striking range. She didn’t move from under her mound of fluffy pillows. “Sloane?”
“Mrf,” she finally grunted, tossing the uppermost pillow aside. “Are you dying again?”
“No,” he quickly reassured her. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Thenfugoff,” Sloane moaned, reaching for her pillow again.
“Sloane,” he insisted, grabbing the pillow away. “Holdon. I’m just checking if you want to go to Yellowstone today. On a hike. To see beavers.”
“No, I don’t want to get up and see beavers, have you met me?” she snapped, lunging for the pillow to wave it with menace in his general direction.
“I have, yes, but also, you dragged me out here. So I thought you might be interested in hiking now,” Teagan said, planting his feet.
“I’m not.”
“Okay,” Teagan said, a little relieved despite his best intentions.
“Wait,” Sloane called when he took a step back. “You’re going though? Is Darcy taking you?”
“Yeah,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck, hoping he looked blasé about the topic. “You’re still welcome though.”
Sloane snorted her disagreement to that proposition. “You’re so dumb, Tiggie.”
He sighed. “So I’m often told. You’re sure you don’t want to come? Who knows when you’ll ever see Yellowstone if you don’t.”
“I can live with that,” she muttered sleepily. “But you and Darcy have avery nice time, okay?”
He wondered what he was missing that Sloane was engaging in subtext.
“It’s not like that. I’m like her... rescue pet. That she’s fostering. She doesn’t like me.”
“God, wish I could meet someone hot who dislikes me the same way she does you. You’ve been spending, like, every waking hour with her for the last two weeks—do you realize that?”
