“You still want to move to the country?”
Yeah, living in his penthouse in Harbor City sounded pretty good—especially after he got a look at the carnage left behind on the chair. “We can’t leave this in here.”
Hadley agreed and held open the door while he carried the chair out the front door of their cabin and over to the stand-alone water faucet near one of the cabins that hadn’t been renovated yet. He turned on the water full blast, and she aimed the hose at the chair and let loose, spraying it down and washing away what was left of Lightning’s dinner.
He was a few steps away from the water faucet when she pivoted toward him. The water was still hitting the now clean chair, but—judging by the ornery grin on her face visible under the bright light of the full moon—it may not be for long. He measured the distance in a heartbeat. There was no way he could cut the water before she got him. What had he been thinking by letting her control the hose? He hadn’t, that much was obvious.
“Hadley,” he said in warning.
She gave him a cocky wink and then folded the hose, effectively cutting off the water. “Gotcha.”
He hustled over to the faucet and turned the water off before she changed her mind. His grandmother may not have been the touchy-feely kind, but she hadn’t raised any fools, either.
After getting the hose wound up, they started back to their cabin. He shortened his stride so they could walk next to each other, no doubt a holdover from spending the evening handcuffed together, not for any other reason.
Keep telling yourself that, Holt.
Yeah, he didn’t even believe his own bullshit on that one, which was a problem—a big one. Hadley was a problem. She wasn’t someone Web could depend on. When it came to that, he and his brother knew the only people they could depend on was each other. They’d learned that lesson time and time again—all before they’d turned eight and had been shipped off to boarding school for the first time.
Exhaling a deep breath to clear out the memories of that place, he glanced up at the night’s sky and nearly tripped over his own feet in surprise.
The sky was huge, and the moon hung big and round in the middle, surrounded by a million bright, twinkling stars. IMAX had nothing on the real thing of being out here.
“Wow,” he said, slowing to a stop and just staring upward, slack-jawed. “Look at that.”
“It’s the sky,” she said, her boredom sounding a little too practiced to be genuine.
“No.” He closed the short distance between them. Ending up so he was standing slightly behind her—close but not touching, no matter how much he wanted to, despite knowing better. “Stop and really look at it.”
She did, tilting her chin upward. He should have looked back up at the stars, but he didn’t. Instead, he watched as her usual smile softened into one that he’d never seen before, not even when she looked at Web. It wasn’t that it was more genuine or easy so much as it was rare and a little bit sad.
A sudden, sharp jab of regret hit him square in the chest as he watched her, because the truth was he was at least partially responsible for that sadness because of all the shit he’d been giving her since day one. Yeah, he didn’t want to trust her. Yeah, he’d been burned to a crisp by letting himself believe before. Yeah, he never made the wrong call, but that itchy something called doubt that he wasn’t used to was scratching at the back of his brain.
“It’s like a whole other world out here.”
He let out a deep breath. Maybe that was it. It was the ranch and the stars that had gotten to him, not the woman beside him who he couldn’t stop thinking about. “I can’t disagree.”
“A first for us,” she said with a laugh. “Come on.”
They walked back to the cabin under those endless stars, anticipation wrapped around them like a blanket. Once there, Hadley hurried up the steps to the front porch and started looking around the window, testing it to see if it was open. The light spilling out from it was enough that it outlined her, giving him a perfect view of her every curve. She was hot enough to make a drowning man thirsty, and he wasn’t even close to going under the water.
“Checking to see if Lightning is lurking?” he asked, trying—and failing—not to notice the way her ass looked in her jeans.
She shook her head. “Trying to figure out how he got in.”
“The door was closed.” He’d opened it himself, and the latch had definitely been engaged.
“And the front window is shut tight.” She twisted up her mouth and drummed her fingertips on the window frame. “I mean, they can get through even if it’s only open a little, but that’s not the case here.”
Realization smacked him across both cheeks, and he let out a groan. “Lightning could get in through a window?”
She turned, her eyes narrowing. “What did you do, Will?”
He gave her his most charming smile, the one that usually left women a little dazed. Hadley just lifted an eyebrow in a silent demand for the truth.
He braced himself. “I might have left the window in the bedroom open when I changed in there yesterday.”
She let out a groan and hurried inside. Because there wasn’t another choice, he followed behind and caught up to her just inside the bedroom. What had been slightly organized chaos was now a raging disaster. Boxes were overturned. Tools were scattered all over the floor. Claw marks were scratched into the wood. A can of paint balanced precariously on the edge of a workbench.