“You can’t treat me like a whore, Kristen,” Garrett said, making her sigh as she once again dropped her head back and found herself wondering how they got to this point.
“Look,” Kristen said, closing her eyes as she reached up and rubbed her temples with her fingertips, “I don’t want to hurt you, but if you don’t stop pissing me off, you’re going to leave me with no choice but to slap the shit out of you.”
“I charge extra for that,” the annoying bastard said, making her lips twitch.
Damn him!
Slowly exhaling, Kristen said, “Look, as much as I appreciate the offer, I already have plans today.”
“And what would those plans entail?” Garrett drawled as she grabbed the bottle of body wash.
“Besides figuring out what to do with your body?”
“Besides that,” he said, waving that off as though it was a given.
“Well, after I kick you out, I plan on going back to bed, where I plan on staying for the next five hours. Then, I’m going to drag my ass downstairs to the couch where I plan on spending the day devouring the rest of the Chinese food while binge-watching 80s movies with the occasional nap to fill my day.”
“That does sound like an exciting plan,” Garrett said, nodding.
“It does, doesn’t it?” Kristen asked, reaching for her luffa.
“There’s only one problem with that plan,” he murmured, sounding thoughtful.
“And what’s that?” Kristen asked as she squirted body wash on the sponge and-
“I already ate the Chinese food.”
CHAPTER 16
New Hampshire Camp Grounds
He honestly had no fucking idea how this happened.
One minute, she was beating the shit out of him with a wet towel and the next…
Christ, the next, she was destroying his will to live.
There was honestly no other way to describe it, Garrett thought as he watched Kristen slowly take in the campsite they’d rented for the week while he stood there, thinking about the moment he fucked up.
He should have just stuck with their agreement, pointed out that she owed him three days, renegotiated their deal so that they could stay the week, and if that failed, leave a trail of Snoballs leading to his truck. Instead, he’d pointed out that she could use this camping trip as research for a future book.
The last word barely had a chance to leave his mouth when she went still as her eyes narrowed dangerously on him and her expression turned thoughtful. With a few muffled words, she went from trying to smother him with a wet towel to dropping it on his head and promptly forgetting about him as she steppedover him and quickly made her way into her room, where she spent the next two hours learning everything she could about camping.
That led to her researching camping equipment, compiling a list of everything that she was going to need to go camping, and then debating her camping site options. He’d expected her to take a couple hours to do a little research, ask questions, and make a quick trip to the store to get everything that she was going to need.
What he didn’t expect was for her to tear her house apart until she found what she was looking for, her grandfather’s old pocket knife that was rusted shut, an old backpack, a pair of old tennis shoes, two bottles of water, a notebook, a few pens and pencils, and a granola bar. That was followed by announcing that she was going to reserve a “Primitive” site and the realization that he forgot something important.
Really fucking important.
When it came to researching for her books, Kristen didn’t fuck around. She took it really fucking seriously, which he learned the hard way after they watchedThe Gooniesfor the first time. If he’d known that she’d used Elmer’s glue instead of nails to hold that board down, he never would have agreed to walk the plank…
That was followed by learning how to set booby traps, dumping her piggy bank in the pond only to remember that she didn’t know how to swim, enticing him with a trayful of her aunt’s cupcakes to jump in and get them, followed by creating an intricate treasure map to find her piggy bank only to lose the map and forget where she hid it, and a deeply disturbing weekend spent trying to learn how to play the piano.
When she decided to try her hand at writing a ghost story, she begged her aunt and uncle to let her go to a haunted house and refused to take no for an answer. She hounded them day andnight, waited outside their bedroom door, ready to pounce on them and recite all the reasons that she came up with the night before on why they should bring her, did extra chores, tried to entice them into saying yes by bringing them breakfast in bed, and made it clear that she wasn’t going to give up until they brought her until they finally had enough and said yes.
Granted, if they’d known that she planned on “getting in the right mindset,” her words, by sneaking downstairs the night before and watching every horror movie that she could get her hands on, they probably would have said no. Then again, if they’d known that she’d watchedThe TexasChainsaw Massacrethe night before, her uncle probably would have thought twice about cutting down that old oak tree in the morning.
He didn’t want to think about what happened when they realized that she’d watchedThe Exorcist…
