“Where’re you going?” he asks.
“Thought I’d try living with the forest animals, what do you think? I’m going back to my sister’s.”
His eyes narrow. “Gia’s?”
I jut out my chin. “Exactly.”
His expression turns hard. “You want to walk almost seven miles to Gia’s house.” He moves closer to block my path and looks down at me head-on, face twisting in outrage. “What’re you trying to prove? That you’re insane? No.”
The fuckingaudacity. I stare up at him, heart pounding. “No? You don’t get to tell meno. You have no bearing on what I do.”
He huffs out a breath. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you back there, but I won’t let you walk in the snow and ice, down the mountain and through town for almost seven miles dressed like that. Your feet would freeze before you make it a half-mile.”
The fact he isn’t wrong sends another bolt of irritation through me. And there it is again, louder this time: that nagging sense I’m missing something. Nothing about this situation makes sense. Why is Sawyer making me come one minute, rejecting me the next, and worried for my safety now? Hot, cold, hot, cold. Why has this been his game for years?
And why are we stuck up here in the first place? I can’t think clearly when his throat pulses like that, his eyes boring into me as snow kisses his naked torso. But Sawyer living in a half-built cabin onthismountain feels like an elaborate ruse to trick me. It doesn’t fit the Sawyer I know.
“Why’re you even here anyway?” I snap. “Why don’t you live where you belong?”
If he lived in Belmont like he should, I never would’ve been stuck with him in the first place.
“And where’s that?”
“Town! The north side of town! Northwest, if you want me to be specific. That’s where your kingdom is.”
He practically sneers, “Town isn’t for me.”
That doesn’t make any sense. It isexactlyfor Sawyer. The Strongs, collectively, are a paragon of Belmont. The most affluent neighborhood in town.
Unable to swallow the question down, I ask, “But, why?”
His eyes darken, and I can see him weighing his answersin his head. The muscles in his torso are strung tight, but he gives me an airy shrug. “It’s where all the hoity-toity folks live.”
“But you’re the hoitiest of the toities,” I insist, as if it isn’t the most ridiculous sentence to come out of my mouth.
He gives me a flat look, like there’s something I’mso obviouslymissing here. And clearly, I am. Clearly, I justdon’t get it. Yet he’s done nothing to help me get there, given me no hints or clues to any of the questions slithering in the back of my mind.
If he doesn’t want to talk about town, that’s fine, I have plenty of other things to ask instead.
I roll my shoulders, readying myself for the next stage of our verbal battle. “What happened to your old truck?” It sounds like a challenge. I dare him to tell me.
Both hands tighten into fists. “Got rid of it before leaving for the Navy.”
“Why didn’t you get something better when you came back?”
Now he’s grinding his teeth. Nowhe’saggravated. It’s in every flex of his muscle, every protruding vein in his neck.
“Definebetter.” He starts back toward the house.
Is he walking away from me? Shutting down on me?Again?
I am so tired of dancing around the meaning of things. He’s being intentionally evasive. He isimpossibleto talk to. But I’m not letting him off this time. He has nowhere to go and, apparently, neither do I.
Stomping up the steps behind him, I say, “Why did you decide to become a principal? How come you’re not outsourcing all this hard manual labor?” I gesture to his house as we enter it.
He grinds his molars as he takes a pair of boxer briefs from a dresser and pulls them up underneath his towel. My eyes involuntarily follow his every movement. He dries his hair with it before tossing it over a chair.
My brain glitches as I take him in, clad only in his black underwear before he throws on a pair of jeans that sit low on his hips. The horny part of my brain protests when he puts on a Navy t-shirt, and it’s all I can do to internally tell the slut to shut up.
