“Get your shoes.”
I looked up to find Hawk in the doorway to the living room, long black hair falling over his forehead. His black T-shirt made his eyes look more gold than brown, his tattoos etched like a secret message onto his skin. He was starting to gain back some of the weight he’d lost in the hospital, and his muscled thighs once again filled out his ripped jeans.
I was getting used to the lust that had become a constant hum in my body since we’d brought Hawk home from the hospital. I’d wanted the Hawks before the explosion at the paper mill — who wouldn’t? — but almost losing them made my hunger feel more desperate, and sleeping with them every night definitely wasn’t helping.
I wasn’t the only one in a state of sexual overdrive: it was getting harder to hold them off when they reached for me. I told them abstinence was for their own good — they were all in various states of healing, especially Hawk — but I didn’t know how long the explanation would satisfy them.
Or me.
“Why do I need my shoes?” I asked, trying to focus on something other than how good Hawk looked, how much I wanted to unzip his jeans, take his dick in my hand.
“Field trip.”
I looked at the papers scattered on the floor around me. “I’m in the middle of… this.”
I didn’t know what to callthisexactly. My Nancy Drew era? A PhD in agoraphobia?
“You’ve been at it for days,” he said. “You haven’t even been outside since we got home from the hospital. “Now get your fucking shoes, mouse.”
There was an undercurrent in his good-natured tone that made it clear he wasn’t really asking.
It got me hot all over again. Not that it took much to do that these days.
I got to my feet. “Will there be food on this field trip? I haven’t eaten breakfast.”
He bent to pick up a cooler from the floor in the hall. “There will.”
“Well why didn’t you say so?”
I moved past him into the hall but he stopped me by grabbing my hand.
“I don’t like waking up to an empty bed,” he said, looking down at me.
“Jagger and Vigo aren’t up there?” I couldn’t hold back the smile teasing my lips.
“Jagger and Vigo don’t have skin like satin. They don’t smell like vanilla. They don’t have a sweet little pussy I’m fucking dying to eat.”
I tried to ignore the heat that rushed between my thighs. “Did you say something about a field trip?”
He must have seen right through me because a long, low chuckle sounded from deep in his throat.
“Can’t put me off forever, mouse.” He straightened and took my hand. “Let’s go. I have something I want to show you.”
I’d never driven with Hawk alone in his black Hellcat. The Hawks almost always traveled in a pack, and the only car that accommodated all of us was the G-Wagon.
Now it was just Hawk and me speeding along the roads outside Blackwell Falls, dappled morning sunlight making its way through the riot of fall color overhead.
Jagger and Vigo had told me stories about Hawk’s music in the Hellcat: the earsplitting heavy metal you could hear from a mile away.
But Hawk didn’t put music on as we drove. There was just the sexy rumble of the Hellcat’s engine and the sound of the wind, cool and crisp now that it was October, coming in through the open windows.
Hawk held my hand over the car’s console, like he didn’t want to go a minute without touching me, and I had to say, the feeling was mutual.
After about ten minutes we swapped the shaded roads that wound through the Blackwell Preserve for a stretch of open asphalt that led away from town. The mountains loomed in the distance, a technicolor border of red, yellow, and orange that rimmed sprawling fields painted gold by the morning sun.
It was always a surprise to enter the farmland that surrounded Blackwell Falls. My hometown felt like a world unto itself, sheltered by the mountains of the preserve.
It was easy to forget there was something outside of it: fields and farms that led, eventually, all the way to the ocean.
