The Secret (Winslow Brothers 3)

And I feel fucking galvanized.

“Rachel, I don’t… We shouldn’t… I mean…” He tries to explain himself with a tied tongue. I get what he’s saying, regardless, but I’m not about to let up right when I finally have him where I want him.

“I know. I do. I mean, we shouldn’t, right?” I whisper for his ears only. “But I’ve just been thinking about you and me, and…well, I probably shouldn’t say the things I’ve been thinking about, you know?”

I set Ty’s box of cookies on the counter, and he picks them up quickly, stumbling backward into the table behind him as soon as he does. He looks back, as if it’s just been placed there for the sole purpose of tripping him up, and I smother a laugh as I round the counter and head toward him.

He retreats in kind, backing up competently, but only with the help of an almost manic tic of his neck to look behind himself.

“Rachel…”

“Yes, Ty?” I coo, my voice a low grit of sex and promises.

“I-I have to go,” he mumbles, practically running for the door and shoving his way through it. “I’ll see you in class Monday.”

I lean out the door and wave, a tiny pout on my lips to fuck with him a little more—sealing the deal. Rachel Rose officially has the upper hand.

When he finally makes it down the block enough to disappear into the Sunday morning crowd and a new customer walks past me, I step back inside and head back to work as though none of it happened. Although, there’s an evil laugh cooling its heels inside me, waiting for there to be no patrons to scare off.

Lydia stares at me suspiciously, and I don’t blame her. Running customers out the door isn’t exactly protocol from the employee handbook. I don’t know if she actually got a look at who it was either, with the crush of people in front of her. For all I know, she thinks I’m randomly sabotaging her business.

When she clears the customer in front of me, she pulls me to the side and whispers in my ear. “What in the hell was that? Was that Ty Winslow?”

Okay, so she did at least see who it was. That’s actually helpful—less explaining on my end.

“Oh, that?” I say with a sassy smile I can’t seem to help. “That was the sight of your sister taking back her advantage.”

“What do you mean?”

I shake my head, feeling a little guilty at the crease of worry between her eyebrows. Lydia has enough to stress about without help from me.

“Don’t worry. It’s all in good fun, I promise. Ty Winslow knows the score.”

She frowns a little but then grabs my hand and gives it a squeeze. “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”

Me too, sis. Me too. Because I’m smart enough to realize…it might feel good now, but if I’m not careful, I might find myself in a whole lot of trouble.

Monday, February 11th

Ty

It’s been a full week since I ran out of my favorite bakery in the city to the sound of Rachel’s supposed secret fantasies, and sadly, it only took me about a day or two to conclude that she was doing it just to get a reaction out of me.

Sure, I’ve fantasized about her—a lot—but the more I thought about what she said, the pictures she was painting, the more it sounded as if they were designed to elicit a reaction from a man rather than play into the strongest desires of a wanton woman.

I’ve read romance novels before—mostly because Winnie went through a phase in high school and I was really fucking curious what all the fuss was about‚ but partly because, after that, I really enjoyed some of them. Plus, our brother-in-law Wes’s good friend Thatcher Kelly really has a way of sucking people into his shit, and his wife Cassie is trying her hand in the romance author world. All it took were two emails and a threatening but complimenting letter to find myself on one of her beta reading teams, Cassie’s Carebears.

Yeah, I know. But it was like a fever dream, really. I can barely even tell you how it happened.

Regardless, I finally started to calm down when I realized what Rachel was trying to pull. But my hormones haven’t gotten the same memo. In fact, they’ve been raging every time I see her. Since we work together, you can imagine my dick’s been a bit of a loose cannon.

Let’s just say, I’ve done a lot of standing behind things during lectures for the last week or so.

Otherwise, I’ve used a pointed tactic of avoidance. Rachel hasn’t given up, though, trying harder and harder every day to make me crack. I didn’t even go to the bakery yesterday to get my weekly cookies for fear she’d end up pushing my face in between her boobs for a motorboat or something. She’s made a habit of upping the ante, and as an avid fan of watersports, there’s no way I would have been able to turn something like that down.