Too Tempting (The Lewis Cousins 1)

“One, two, three.”

We pushed off and landed in the dirt below, then he held out his hand to get me on my feet and we started running. I heard Jasmine, then Serena, hit the ground behind us, and that fueled me on.

“We’re almost at the finish,” Gabe stated, then asked, “Finish strong?”

Rather than answer verbally, I kicked up my heels and gave it my all. When we reached the finish line, Dillon was drinking water, and Reardon was grinning so broadly that I knew he’d won.

I kept walking, even though all I wanted to do was collapse, and accepted the water bottle that someone offered me.

“Congratulations,” Gabe said as he clapped Reardon on the back, then walked toward me with his hands on his hips. “You okay?”

“I hate you,” I answered, causing him to chuckle.

He wrapped his sweaty arms around my equally sweaty body and dipped his head low.

“No you don’t,” he said, then brushed his lips softly against mine and added, “I’m proud of you.”

“Me too,” I admitted. “Thanks for coming back for me.”

“Always,” he said sweetly, causing my stomach to turn to goo and my heart to pound happily in my chest.

Then I thought about the ropes course and promised myself, I’m still going to get him back, as I smiled sweetly and leaned in to kiss him more thoroughly.

Chapter Nineteen ~ Gabe

It seemed like all of a sudden we’d entered warped speed.

Time was going by too quickly. We’d already had the sports day, my counselors had all arrived, and we’d been working all day on finishing touches for tomorrow’s Opening Day.

I hadn’t seen much of Zoey. She’d spent the day with Jasmine and Serena in the General Store, stocking shelves and making sure there weren’t any last-minute items that needed to be ordered for the first wave of kids.

Now we were getting ready to meet up for a game of two-hand touch, before having a big barbecue to welcome the counselors and say goodbye to Dillon, Jasmine, and Serena. It was always bittersweet for me when my cousins left and the campers arrived, but at least I still had Reardon for another week.

And Zoey…

She’d be with me for one more week as well.

My camp was co-ed, but unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of girls in the twelve-to-eighteen age range who still played football. Which meant there was only one cabin dedicated to the females, and the rest were for the males. I had one female counselor on staff, and she, as well as the women, like Zoey, who came to chaperone would stay in cabins together with the female campers.

Zoey had decided to just move her stuff to the cabin at the main site where she’d be staying for the rest of her trip, that way the counselor who’d be staying in the one she had been sleeping in could move his stuff in right away.

That meant she wasn’t just a few doors down from me, and she’d have roommates for the duration of her stay here. I’d tried to talk her into moving into my cabin for the rest of her trip, but she’d turned me down right away.

“No, I couldn’t do that,” Zoey had insisted when I’d made the suggestion.

“Why not?”

“We don’t know each other well enough to live together,” she’d hissed, causing me to chuckle.

“It’s not like we’d really be moving in together, Zoey. Think of it more like … going on vacation together.”

Her face had softened, but before I could celebrate winning the argument she shook her head and said, “Christopher gets here tomorrow. It’ll be weird enough to him that I hooked up with you while I was here; he’d flip if he showed up and we were essentially living together.”

I understood her point, so I placed my arms over her shoulders and leaned my head down, resting my forehead on hers.

“But you are going to tell him about us, right? We’re not going to try to keep it a secret, because I don’t want that…”

Zoey’s lips tipped up as she replied, “Yes, we’ll tell him, but I’m sleeping in the female cabin.”