Or willing to take directions on how fast or where to go.
“My mom never wanted kids,” she says quietly after we’ve taken two more turns on the path between towering pine trees. “She didn’t want to get married. Her dream was to be free as the wind to go wherever she wanted in the world with nothing tying her down. Work just enough to make ends meet and fund her travels. But when she found out she was pregnant after a short-term fling with a guy who was passing through, she decided to keep me. And she’s never once made me feel like I kept her from the life she would’ve had otherwise even though she hasn’t traveled much since I was born.”
“I always wondered what it would’ve been like to know I was wanted.”
“And not grow up to want to be Super Vengeance Man? I’m sorry, but clearly, your suffering was necessary for the good of the world.” She grins at me, and I nearly go lightheaded.
In the good way.
She hasn’t sparkled at me since Hawaii, and Sabrina Sullivan with teasing mischief twinkling in her bright green eyes takes my breath away.
My steps slow.
Her smile falters. “I didn’t mean that.”
“I know.”
“Everyone should feel wanted.”
“I have people in my life who fulfill my emotional needs.”
“Drink your water.”
“I’m fine.”
“If you pass out on the trail, I’m going back to my car without you and leaving you to the mountain lions.”
“That jives with who you were in Hawaii.”
She stops fully and turns to face me. “I don’t date.”
That muscle in my chest squeezes and dips like I’m on a runaway train.
I don’t want another long-term relationship. I don’t want to date either.
Except I can’t get this woman out of my head, and the more I see her here, where she belongs, doing what she was born to do, the more I want to know everything there is to know about her.
She’s my new research project.
Fuck.
Fuck.
I need to get back to a lab. Give my brain something else to obsess over.
But the thought still hurts too much, whereas the idea of making something right doesn’t hurt.
Or it wouldn’t, if it wouldn’t hurt her too.
“I don’t either,” I assure her with a confidence I don’t feel. “We can be friends who not-date together. Maybe naked sometimes.”
Her pupils dilate, and she sucks in a quick breath.
My dick goes half-mast.
I would absolutely not-date this woman nonstop for the next week if we could do it naked.
And there’s the rest of my hard-on.
Go hike with Sabrina, my brain said.
So we can ask her to get naked, my other brain said.
She bites her lower lip.
I take a half step toward her, wanting to bite that lower lip myself, but she ducks her head and spins back to the trail. “C’mon, Jitter. Sun’s setting too soon.”
I subtly adjust myself, then follow along while Jitter happily leads again, clearly knowing where he’s going.
“This a private trail?” I ask Sabrina.
“Nope. Just not very busy close to dusk.”
“You walk alone out here often?”
She slides me a glance, and I can’t tell if she’s still suppressing a desire to pull me off the trail and do what comes naturally out here in nature, or if that’s just me and my teenage fantasies.
“I’m not alone,” she says. “I have my dog.”
“So you and Jitter have done this a lot by yourselves?”
“Laney and Emma used to come with us a lot.”
“Mm.”
“Laney has a broken leg.”
“I noticed.”
“Emma’s back.”
“I heard.”
“If you see her and say a single dick thing to her, I will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
“You’ll be dead?”
“I’m an overachiever. I can haunt you while I’m still alive.”
“Probably easier that way.”
She cuts another glance at me. “You know I don’t actually believe you’d be a dick to Emma.”
That makes me smile. “Only because we have a common enemy.”
“Why is Chandler your enemy?”
“Wow, really nice hike until you said the Cheese Turd word.”
She coughs, and I’m certain she’s covering a laugh, though I’m not certain if it’s a happy laugh or a desperate laugh, and now I feel like an ass.
I don’t want to hurt her. But I don’t know how to change course without feeling like I’ve let someone else get the better of me again.