“Do you ever get any off?”
“You mean like for the season-opening football game?” Though her head was down, her focus on her shot, I caught the tiny grin that tipped up the corner of her mouth.
“Yeah.”
She took her shot, chipping her ball over the water to land next to the hole, showing off that she wasn’t lying when she’d said she’d been practicing while I was away. Stepping aside to allow me my turn, she rested her hands on the top of her putter.
“Turns out I have that particular Saturday off. I was thinking about watching some Wildcats football.”
I lined up my shot. “Were you, now? Perfect timing since I’ll be suited up.”
She cleared her throat right as I swung, and I shanked my shot. My ball teetered on the edge of the water, and I put my hands up and blew at it in the hopes it wouldn’t drop into the drink. Taryn cracked up at my antics, her laughter making a trip into the water worth it.
“Does ‘suited up’ mean time on the field?” she asked as she neatly stepped past my scary shot to take her next one.
“What kind of a question is that, T? Of course I’ll be running routes and catching balls.”
“Just making sure. Wouldn’t want to waste my student pass on any old game.”
Her teasing smirk lit me up. But I played that close to the vest. “For the next four years, there won’t be ‘any old games.’ Count on it.” I gave her a side-eye. “You’re going to want to find a way to take Saturdays off. Just sayin’.”
Forced into an unnatural stance to take my shot, I mostly willed the ball away from one water hazard and nearly rolled it into the opposite water hazard. Taryn chipped hers perfectly and gained another point on me as my play ended in one-over-par on the hole. We finished up right as the family behind us did, so we switched holes.
As we passed them, Taryn gazed at the chattering little girls with a wistful kind of sadness. Then she blinked and glanced up at their mom with a smile. “Twins?” she asked.
“Twenty minutes apart.” The woman sighed. “They were talking in the womb.”
“They’re adorable.”
“Until we play this next hole.” The dad’s tone said he was kind of looking forward to it.
While we played the looping hole, I snagged every opportunity to touch my girl—a brush of our bare arms, a gentle shoulder bump, tugging on her ponytail—and I relished every hitch in her breath, every tiny shiver, every wide-eyed glance. By the second-to-last hole when I’d managed to break her concentration enough to tie her—a nice side perk, but not my goal—she planted her hand on her hip and glared at me.
“Danny Chambers. We are playing this hole fair. You stay over there”—she pointed to a spot right outside the raised edge of the playing area—“and keep your hands to yourself while I shoot.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I was good at feigning innocence, but she wasn’t buying it.
“You were losing so you resorted to underhanded touchy-feely tricks.” She glared. “It’s not a win if you have to cheat.”
Giving her a sly smile, I said, “Who said I was trying to win?”
“Ha. Ha. You’re sooo funny.”
She lined up her shot and impressively chipped her ball into the top of the volcano—a hole in one. Forgetting herself, she danced a little happy dance and flung her arms around my neck. I wrapped my arms around her too and swung her in the air, both of us laughing. I sensed her awareness of our bodies pressed together a second before her laughter stopped.
The electric blue of her eyes sparked, but she said, “You can put me down.”
Her soft curves molded to my body like two parts of one whole.Fuck. No one else had ever felt so good, so right, pressed up against me like this. I would have held her for the rest of the evening if she’d let me. Instead, I slowly let her slide down my body until her feet touched the ground again, savoring the sensation of being close to her.
Wide-eyed, she smoothed her hand over her hair and picked up her putter from where she’d dropped it by the tee. Sliding her eyes sort of past me, she said, “Your turn.” The scratchiness of her voice told me she wasn’t as immune to me as she pretended to be.
After four tries I finally made the shot, and we moved on to the last hole. But something had shifted between us. Taryn kept sneaking looks at me like I was some sort of puzzle she needed to figure out. She also went out of her way to put distance between us. I was okay with her first response. Not so much with the second.
?Chapter Sixteen
?Taryn
“Nothing happened. ButI had a weird sense that Danny wanted something to happen,” I said as Zoe and I met up in the Union between classes.
