I smiled, sharp and bright, letting the wicked edge slide back in. “Besides,” I added, “if you bail now, I’m telling everyone in town you backed out after I complimented your dick.”
He huffed out a startled sound that was almost a laugh, eyes squeezing shut for half a second like he couldn’t believe me.
When they opened again, that hot, dark spark was still there.
“You’re insane,” he muttered.
“Yup,” I said. “Ready?”
“No.”
“Good enough.”
Before he could protest, I planted both hands on the back of the sled and shoved.
It jerked forward, then launched, plastic scraping over packed snow before catching and flying. Wes’s shout punched the air—half curse, half wild, startled sound that ricocheted off the trees and slid down my spine like a live current.
He shot down the hill in a spray of powder, shoulders hunched, hands gripping, the blue sled cutting a clean path through untouched white.
For one suspended heartbeat, he looked less like a man braced for disaster and more like someone who’d been yanked headfirst into something terrifying and maybe, just maybe, a little bit fun.
A laugh ripped out of me, bright and breathless.
I watched him hurtle toward the pines, my pulse racing to keep up, and knew with bone-deep certainty that whatever waited at the bottom of that hill, for both of us, there was no shoving this back uphill.
