“Enough yapping. Give them the riddle,” Aunt Louise said before popping a corn chip in her mouth and crunching it loudly.
PawPaw rolled his eyes at his sister who, by the looks of things, had been telling him exactly what she thought he should be doing with his life for the better part of sixty years; then he turned back to Hadley and Will. “You ready?”
Hadley let out a sigh of resignation. “Yes.”
“I sizzle like bacon and am made with an egg,” PawPaw said. “I have a backbone but not a single good leg. When I peel like an onion, I still manage to remain whole. And even though I can be long like a flagpole, I can fit in a hole. What am I?”
“Diner food,” Will said without even having to consider.
Easy answer. The key with riddles was to never overthink it.
PawPaw made a loud, blaring horn sound. “Wrong.”
“Shhhhhhhhhh!” Hadley nudged him in the ribs with her elbow just hard enough to get her point across. “We only get two more guesses. No more answering without consultation.”
“How was I supposed to know that?” he asked, scooting in closer to her so they were too close for a repeat—the fact that they were now aligned thigh to hip to shoulder was an unavoidable side effect. It wasn’t the reason he’d moved closer. Although, yeah, he’d shot Matt a how-you-like-me-now smirk when he’d done it. He never told anyone that he wasn’t an asshole. “It’s not exactly a common occurrence to handcuff two people together until they can solve a riddle.”
“Exactly,” Hadley said, her voice a little breathier than it had been a minute ago. “Welcome to the family.”
He spent the rest of dinner hyperaware of Hadley. The brush of her shoulder against his. The citrusy scent of her shampoo. And the weight of the metal handcuff against his wrist went from cold and strange to familiar by the time he was eating the chocolate cake. He and Hadley were still finishing up dessert when the rest of the family started clearing the table and going inside to set up for game night.
He lifted his cuffed left hand, picking up her right with it. “So what happens now?”
“We’re stuck together until we solve it or tonight’s game ends, whichever comes first,” she said but didn’t scoot over so there was more space between them, despite the fact that they now had the entire bench to themselves.
He followed his own logical advice not to read too much into that. His dick did not, thickening against his thigh as if he had all the control of a teenager sitting next to the hot chick in biology class.
“And this is totally normal for your family?” he asked, grateful in that moment that his voice didn’t crack like it had when he had been in high school.
Hadley pivoted, her leg sliding against his. “When you’re half an hour from your nearest neighbor, you learn to make your own fun. It was Knox you have to thank for this one. He got a pair of toy cuffs for Christmas one year and hooked himself to PawPaw. Of course, the locking mechanism went haywire, and they made a game of working out how to pop the lock.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Since then, PawPaw has provided the riddle and whoever is the designated duo has to solve it in three guesses or deal with the shame of not being able to figure it out.”
As natural as breathing, he dipped his face and lowered his voice, making the circle that was them even smaller. “What, you have to wear an I’m-a-loser hat?”
She tilted her chin upward, the move bringing her lips within inches of him, one side of her mouth curled in a smile. He couldn’t look away from that mouth of hers, just like he hadn’t been able to last night.
He’d devoured her image in the mirror, committing it to a memory that not even a kick to the head with a steel-toed boot would remove. The fresh pink of her nipples. The curve of her hip. The roundness of her thighs. He’d remember it all, but it was her mouth that he’d kept returning to look at time and time again. Even as he fucked her, deep, hard, and with everything he had last night, he hadn’t kissed her. Looking down at that mouth now, it was hard to imagine he’d been such an idiot to have missed the opportunity to kiss her again.
“No hat,” she said before wetting her lips with the tip of her pink tongue. “But in this family, we don’t play games for fun. We’re here to win.”
“I can get behind that.” He turned a little more, the move bringing his leg under hers and moving her hand a little higher on his thigh.
“Good, because I am awful, and between this”—she lifted up her arm, which brought his into the air as well—“and a game of Donavan-Martinez Scrabble, we could be in cuffs all night long.”
That gave him all sorts of ideas he should not be having, like he needed any help with that. For the past year, he’d either been thinking about fucking her or screwing her over—either way, the addition of handcuffs was going to add to that.
The hair toss, the light laugh, the hand that dropped back to his thigh, her fingertips grazing the inseam of his jeans. It was all part of her plan; it had to be. Otherwise… Well, he couldn’t think about that.
“Okay, so what are your ideas?” she asked, her cheeks turning pink as her eyes widened. “For the riddle.”
Riddle? It took his brain a second to regain blood flow enough to figure out what in the hell she was talking about.
“A stick of butter?” he asked. “That sizzles in the frying pan and can be long.”
She bit her bottom lip, but a giggle escaped anyway. “I realize you’re a city guy, but you do know that butter comes from a cow, not an egg, right?”
He should. He did. It didn’t matter right then. “Guess I’ll have to keep thinking up new ideas.”
God knew he was having enough of them right now. Every inappropriate can’t-even-contemplate-it’s-such-a-bad-choice was running through his head. All the warnings were getting muffled by being so close to her. A move of less than two inches and he’d be kissing her again, feeling her full lips open under his as she slid her hand higher on his thigh until—