Page 133 of Off the Grid

It’s almost as if I made the paddock my safe space, and one glimpse of him turned my world temporarily upside down.

But Riggs righted it in the most unexpected of ways.

“You didn’t know,” I murmur and mean it.

“I know, but what a shallow prick. I made fun of you because you were covered up like you owed it to me and everyone else to show your body.”

“You didn’t know,” I reiterate.

“But I should have.”

“Look. Don’t beat yourself up. You’ve done more for me than you ever could have imagined.”

He snorts but presses a kiss to the top of my head.

“It’s true. It sounds weird to many people, but after . . . everything, I wasn’t shy about having sex again. In fact, I wanted to, to prove I wasn’t broken. To prove that—” I almost slip and say the bastard’s name. A bastard that Riggs may or may not know. “He didn’t break me.”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with me,” he says.

“I felt nothing. No sensation, no pleasure, no anything. He’d won. He’d broken me . . . and then there was you. When I kissed you in the bar, it was like somebody had plugged me into an electric socket. I burned where I was supposed to burn. I ached where I was supposed to ache. I felt sensations. It was . . . insane.”

He huffs on his knuckles and rubs them on his chest. “Glad to be of service,” he teases, and I love the levity he’s injecting into a rather serious evening.

“I even tried to go out with someone else after the bar. I kissed him. I . . .” Why am I telling him all of this? He’s going to get spooked. I asked for sex to help me get through something. For sex without strings. And now here I am telling him he’s the only guy in years to make me feel something.

Abort. Abort. Abort.

Otherwise, he’ll do the same on this little agreement we have.

“I . . . what? Finish what you were saying or did my mere presence knock out your train of thought?”

“Yes. That’s it.” I look up at him and smile. “That’s exactly it.”

“I knew it. I’m a jack of all trades. Race finishes. Kissing. Orgasms. A human headrest. Just ask me. I’ll tell you.”

“And the ego returns.”

“And the ego made you laugh.”

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CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Camilla

The smell of coffee is as constant in my suite as is the silence that settles in around Riggs and me.

Or rather, almost silence since it seems some of our crew has begun a conversation in the hallway outside of my room.

Riggs and I have never slept together. Like sleep, sleep. In the same bed. We meet up. We hook up. We talk some. We part ways.

It’s just how this whole thing has panned out over the past few months.

But last night we must have fallen asleep watching television because I woke up with Riggs’s arms wrapped around me and my face nestled in the underside of his jaw.

I froze.

Like full on froze.