Rekindling the Flame (Smoky Heights #1)

Chapter 12

TWELVE

WYATT

What right does she have to show up here looking like that?

A pair of jeans that aren’t the tight little skinny ones I was used to seeing her in before, but these are higher-waisted, looser around the legs, and somehow she looks even hotter in them.

That shirt that’s tight enough to remind me what I’m missing.

Like I’m not reminded every time I close my eyes the past few weeks she’s been back—and, fuck, if we’re being honest, a hell of a lot longer than that.

This is bullshit.

No way OSHA would let her in our garage like that. It’s a goddamn safety hazard how doable she looks right now.

Like I could unbutton those jeans, pull them down past her hips, shove her over the bed of my truck and take her from behind, hard, how I would’ve if we were still together. Whenever, wherever, just because she’s hot as hell, and that pussy was made to have my cock inside it, and we’re way better together than we are apart.

At least, that’s how it was before.

Deep breath, eyes on the woods, the mountains, we’re here to let nature do its thing. For her, mostly, but for both of us. This is one of the very few places life doesn’t suck for me.

Keep that in mind, rather than how tight she’d feel if I were buried inside her, as it takes me a few minutes to get the ATVs started, moved over to the trail, and to refresh her on the controls, let it come back to her how to ride these things.

“Why do they look different?”

Seated atop the red ATV, next to my dark gray one, at the end of our impromptu lesson, she moves her head between our two rides, their handlebars, the drastic differences between them.

“Yours is an automatic. Mine isn’t, it’s got gear shifts and extra shit on it. Yours is simpler, it’ll be an easy ride for you. It’s the one Weston always uses when he’s in town.” I almost wish he were here just to hear that dig at him. Bite back my smirk at the thought before I’m back to her. “You just gotta hold the throttle to go, squeeze the brakes on the right to stop.”

Her engine hums, then roars as she gives it a go, and then she’s ripping off, her entire upper body jolting backward as the ATV lurches forward, and it doesn’t stop.

I race after her, the cool early October air whipping past me, standing upright on my machine to try to keep a better eye on her, ready to jump off as soon as I’m by her side and mount her ride like a bronc at a rodeo, get it back under control.

Before I can catch her, laughter reaches my ears through the wind. Rory tosses her head back as she keeps driving down the open trail, and she laughs . I don’t know how to explain what that sound does to me.

I drop back down into my seat as she slows down to turn her head back to me, asking me wordlessly if I saw her, and I sure fucking did. Give her whatever kind of smile I’m capable of mustering these days.

Eyes on her, not the path, and I miss the pretty big rock that I hit dead-on, and both my four-wheeler and I bounce over it, which isn’t ordinarily a painful thing if I’m ready for it.

And I’m not at half-mast.

As it is, my body bounces painfully, and in the commotion my poor dick gets strangled in the too-small tent in my pants.

I let out a grunt as one hand comes off the handlebar and falls to my crotch, face screwed up in pain, and what does Aurora do? She laughs. Again.

If it wasn’t a sound I’d been waiting half my life to hear, I might realize what a valuable life lesson this is for me.

Get distracted by her, focus on her instead of where you’re going, the path you’re actually on instead of the one you wish you were, and you wind up in pain. Bruised balls, or worse.

Schmuck that I am, I miss all of that deeper meaning, and I just soak up the fact that I made her laugh not once but twice so far, and the day’s only just begun.

The sun shines down on my face, and I feel a genuine smile break out for more reason than one, despite all the dozens not to.

A little under an hour in, and more than just the freckles across the bridge of her nose have returned to her face.

There’s a lightness to her that I thought she might’ve lost for good.

She’s sun-kissed, pink cheeks and forehead already, and she’s laughed more times than I can count as we rode the trails.

Something primal inside of me is satisfied and settles at the knowledge I did this for her. I gave her what she needed. Even if I’m not enough, even if she deserves more, at least I could do this much.

A bit of nature has always done her good, and if you can add adrenaline into the mix? It’s a surefire combo. You just gotta work around her aversion to the outdoors, wildlife, and getting dirty.

She’s got the most beautiful mind I’ve ever known, but it’s never not going at six thousand RPM. She’s constantly red lining, and nobody can survive like that.

I think she forgets what it’s like to have balance. What it’s like to have a break for her mind. Hopefully today is a kill switch that stops her from burning out and running herself to death.

Stopped side by side, staring across the valley and at the peaks beyond, the view couldn’t be any better.

I look to my side and see her there, squinting against the sun, nose crinkled up in a way that’s entirely too close to adorable for someone as fierce as she is.

But I guess even a hellcat purrs if you know how to approach it, where it likes to be stroked and pet. And if there’s anything I know about Aurora Weiss, it’s what she likes. I’m confident that’s a muscle memory that’ll never go away, not even after more than a dozen years, not even if I went into a coma and woke up with amnesia. My body will never forget what hers likes.

After a moment, she looks back over at me, and her serene smile falls as our eyes meet.

“What?” That attitude comes back to defend her the second she feels any scrutiny.

I sidestep the question with a non-lie, non-truth. “You’re burning.” I swing a leg over my seat and dismount, walking over to her. Pull the backwards hat off my head and place it down atop hers, facing forward, to keep some of that sun off of her.

She’s frozen in place for just a second, then she pulls her hair through the opening in the back, so the ponytail is hanging out.

“Thanks.” It’s spoken as quiet as the first couple of leaves are when they fall, but I catch it.

The feel of her head beneath my hands, as I placed the hat there just now, and all the hundreds of other times I’ve touched her less innocently—held those unruly strands as I’ve fucked her mouth, fucked her in every known position and a few new ones—it burns in my memory and I shake my hands out, stretching my fingers to try to chase the feeling away.

Fat chance.

I’ve been trying to forget how good she feels for as long as I can remember.

Memories overtake me, and for just a moment, while I can still breathe her in, I give in. The soft, warm feel of her enveloping my cock as I push into her. The gasp she’d always give me when I bottomed out. The way her eyes would roll back in her head, her back would arch, and those perfect tits would press out, just begging to be sucked and bitten as I withdrew to the tip and pushed in all over again.

My eyes fall down her frame in the here and now, catch on those same tits, and I wonder if she still likes her nipples played with when she comes. I’ll think about it some more in the shower tonight, when I’m painting the tile with my cum. If I think about it any more right now, the way she keeps eyeing me, I’m liable to do something about it for both our sakes.

I roll my head from side to side to crack my neck and try to get the situation beneath my belt under control.

We should really get going again before my dick takes over my entire body here. It’s already getting reckless ideas in its head.

Turn my back to her so I can readjust on the way back to my four-wheeler. “Let’s head back.”

Is my voice always that gruff? Why am I just noticing it now?

“Wyatt?” There’s something like trepidation in her voice and it snaps me out of it. Is she in danger? My blood freezes in my veins, and I turn back to face her.

Her eyes are darting around our environment like they often do, but there’s nothing panicked or neurotic about the way she’s doing it now. They aren’t bouncing, they’re seeking something.

Our path back? She doesn’t need to worry. I know where we’re going. I won’t let anything happen to her, let her get lost.

“What am I supposed to do about …”

About what ? Rising crime rates in New York City? That piece of shit car she’s driving that she won’t take my advice on trading in for something more reliable, because it’s bound to leave her on the side of the road in the middle of the night somewhere someday soon? What can she possibly be worried about solving out here, in the closest thing we’ll get to paradise?

If I can’t keep her mind off her problems with a view like this, with her adrenaline kicked up like it’s been all morning … I can’t do anything for her.

Those brown eyes that captivate me anytime they look my way are looking anywhere but me and I realize she really doesn’t want to say whatever the end of this sentence is. And I thought we were having such a good day. I sigh, shoulders dropping, and ask the question.

“About what, Hellcat?”

She whispers the words, self-conscious and a little pissy, but with nothing else out here but a light breeze, I hear them.

“About a bathroom!”

And then, I tip my head back, and a laugh roars out of me for the first time I can remember in an age.

“Wyatt!” It’s part whine, part reprimand, and it only makes me laugh harder, my shoulders shaking in a way that’s bizarrely familiar when I’m with her.

She’s worried about where to pee?

With all the problems in the world, while we’re surrounded by woods, where every animal known to man relieves themselves since the beginning of time. Where, for thousands of years, this is as sophisticated of a restroom as Homo sapiens had.

This is what has her freaked out?

I’m laughing so hard I can’t even tell if this is funny or not anymore, but it’s like the dam burst, and all the years I missed of laughter are coming back to me in this one instant.

I hope it’s not permanent.

“Stop laughing at me!” Rory wheedles from across the short distance between us, but there’s a break in her words, like she’s starting to laugh too.

I extend my arms to the sides, gesturing to the endless woods on almost every side.

“We’re literally surrounded by more places to take a piss than even Buc-ee’s. Take your pick, Aurora.”

She protests, but I guess she eventually decides the only thing worse than peeing in the woods is talking to me about it when there’s no other option.

I offer to keep her guard while she goes, but that gets me the dirtiest scowl yet, so I step back and wait about fifty yards away, turned away from the section of woods she chose for modesty—like I don’t remember every single inch of her bare skin, anyway—but ears tuned in for those impressive lungs of hers in case she sees a squirrel or some other threat to national security.

When she’s back, looking like she’s seen things Jack Bauer would be scarred by, patting her lower half down repeatedly, then hugging herself, I hold out a bottle of water I took out of the trunk on the back of my four-wheeler as she approaches.

She shakes her head, wrapping her arms tighter around her upper body, stepping away from me.

“You crazy, Grady? You think I’m gonna take a drink and risk having to … do that again?” She shudders, and I can’t tell if any of it is a joke or not, so I withhold the urge to laugh again.

“You at least wanna rinse your hands off?” I ask her dryly, and she unwraps her arms instantly, running over and cupping her hands in front of me like an orphan in a Dickens novel we had to read in school.

“Oh, fuck yeah,” she says eagerly, and why does that sound sexual to my poor dick? It’s not like he doesn’t get any action, although he hasn’t seen anything but my own palm and five fingers since she’s been back. Still. He needs to settle down. Even if giving her more of what we both know she needs is starting to sound better and better.

I tip the bottle so water pours out onto her hands, and she rubs them, doing the closest thing she can to a full wash out here in the wilderness. Once she’s shaken out her hands like a dog coming in after the rain—I’ll never admit to her I said that—and dried them as best she can on the sides of her jeans, we hop back on the trail to continue the only kind of relief I can offer her these days.

The sun sinks below the distant skyline, rays of light darting between drifts of clouds and mist and streaking the sky in watercolor, the Smokies hazy in the blue shadow being cast by it all.

“Don’t have sunsets like that in New York, do you?” I have to shout a bit to be heard over the roar of the engines, but the exhaust silencers on my ATVs cut out a lot of that noise, and I know she catches the question.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Got a shitty, tiny apartment that doesn’t even have a window or what?”

She doesn’t answer but tilts her head back for a second as she rides, letting the wind grab her hair. My hat looks good on her. More of me would look good on her too.

“Or does it overlook an alley and all you can see is straight into another window, nothing but a view of your neighbor’s hairy ass as he bends over to pull his muffins out of the Easy-Bake Oven, or what?”

She looks over her shoulder at me, a come the fuck on expression plastered all over that gorgeous face, but at least I get a response out of her.

“No, asshole.”

“Ooh,” I joke. I joke . “I see we’re both back to our cutesy nicknames. It’s like you never left.”

She looks over at me and snorts but shakes her head and faces ahead again as she navigates the rocky path. Her voice reaches me above the hum of the vehicles when she speaks again.

“I don’t know what the sunsets are like in New York because I’m usually in my office when it’s going down, or if I’m lucky, maybe grabbing something from Duane Reed or the bodega by my building that legally passes as a meal before I pass out and do it all again.”

I can’t even imagine. To not even appreciate the best Mother Nature gives us? They say it’s the simple things in life, and I’d wager a guess there’s not anything simple going on in that woman’s life, but to not even be able to take a breath and reset with the passing of time … She deserves to appreciate the natural beauty in her life.

“Come on, Hellcat. You seriously have never watched the sun set since you’ve been in New York? Is the only thing you do work?” Rory’s superpower has always been her focus, her determination, how when she puts her mind to something, she gets it done. I can only imagine what she’s like when she unleashes that at the job she spent so many years working to secure. But she deserves to enjoy life, too, and I’m starting to wonder if she does.

She thinks about it for a minute, takes her time answering as we round a curve, taking a fork in the path that leads us the right way. I’m surprised she remembers how to get back. We did a hell of a lot of forking off earlier—and I was glad for the extra time it added to our day—but it’s not like she’s run these trails recently, if ever. Seems there’s a little Southern in her, yet.

“I do kickboxing sometimes. Maybe even a yoga class or two.”

“Kickboxing, huh? You got a signature badass move?”

“The nut shot.”

I think that’s a vein of humor in her voice, but my balls twitch anyway. Or maybe that was my cock, at the thought of her getting near it.

Her eyes slide to the side to find mine again, and she cracks a smile. Earning her smiles today feels better than anything else I can remember in a long, long time.

I make the decision a good tour guide would, and pull us off at the next clearing, which happens to be on top of a cliff that overlooks the range. She might’ve had everything she thought she wanted in Manhattan, but she’s forgotten the simple things that are worth enjoying, and I’m gonna remind her of those. Show her she can have something almost like a good time while she’s here. Starting with this sunset.

“Fine,” she sighs the word out on a weighted exhale, but it’s a good one. “That was worth spending my time on. Are you happy?”

“Fuck yeah, I’m happy. If you could use one word to describe me, I bet you’d pick happy , wouldn’t you?”

She rolls her eyes at my dry line, but I smirk at her and then stand up from the ground, extending a hand to help her up as well, before turning to head back to our rides. She dusts her bottom off, and I do my best not to look, with her backlit like that in the post-sunset glow that’ll last another hour or so. Plenty of time to get us back to the cars before it’s too dark for her to feel safe out here on the trails.

Throwing one leg over the single seat of my ATV, I straddle the machine and start ’er up. The same rumble doesn’t echo from my left, and when I turn to check on Rory, I hear the telltale clicking with no turnover as she tries to get the machine going. The sign that a vehicle won’t start.

A lead ball forms in my stomach and drops down, something inside me just knowing it’s not something that’s going to fix right now.

That same shrewd instinct also tells me my brother had something to do with this.

How?

I don’t know.

But I do.

She dismounts and steps aside while I inspect the four-wheeler and attempt to diagnose it on the fly. It takes some impressive moves to diagnose (that, were I in a less shitty mood after this wrench in the works, I’d be pretty proud of), but I manage to find the problem, tucked deep inside the heart of the four-wheeler. A crack in the gas tank, and it’s not new from the looks of it.

What gives it away, you ask?

The bit of flex tape—you know? From the infomercials, and the memes?—still holding on to one side of the crack, that appears to have flapped loose and is just barely hanging in for dear life there. Unfortunately, it’s no longer holding the gas in the tank.

This has Weston written all over it.

My blood pressure reaches dangerous levels, and on instinct I reach for my phone to send a threatening text about the safety of his nuts next time he’s within arm’s reach of me. But my back pocket is empty because I left my phone in the truck. Why would I need a phone when I’m out on the trails? Short of a medical emergency, but I know she’s got hers on her, so why would I bring mine?

Thumbs in my front pockets, I drop my head and shake it side to side, a dark chuckle that I hope he feels from wherever the fuck he is this month and starts running before I find him.

He took that ATV out last time he showed his face around here. Not only did he drain my can of gas, now I know why. He cracked the tank, probably rode it like a damn baboon and got a stick stuck up there or something, and drained the gas. Somehow he slapped some flex tape on there—God knows how he got up in there, honestly—and then refilled it with my spare can, and left my ATV broken, my can empty, and didn’t even bother to tell me.

This is such a metaphor for his janky ass life, it makes me snort what twenty minutes ago would’ve been an actual laugh. Now it’s something derisive that makes my blood boil.

Weston is that guy from the meme.

Got a major issue?

Slap some tape over it, ignore the root cause, and move right along!

It’s his approach to anything in life.

Rory draws in closer to me cautiously, probably worried for my sanity, I must look like a Disney villain over here, plotting how to make my brother pay in the most painful way as I stare down the out-of-commission unit.

“Did you figure out what’s wrong?” Her voice is kind, but strong.

Some part of me vaguely recognizes that this is already growth and change from our former selves. Used to be when one of us got mad, the other did too, instantly, no matter what the circumstances. But here I am, losing my cool, and here she is, keeping hers.

What chance might we have had as kids if we weren’t so toxic? If we were a little more mature and less volatile, at least some of the time? Without a Time-Turner, I’ll never know, but it’s bittersweet to know we might’ve had the capacity to work out if we were more like this back then. That maybe she wouldn’t have left if I’d grown up sooner.

“Wyatt?” Her voice brings me back, reminds me of her question.

What’s wrong?

What’s wrong?

What’s always wrong?

“Weston. That absolute fuckup. That’s what.”

Her eyes move slowly between mine and the four-wheeler, like she’s looking for Weston to appear and start laughing, revealing some prank he pulled on the two of us, like this is fifteen years ago.

“Is Weston here with us now?” she whispers in a ridiculous voice, like I said I talk to the ghost of a Victorian girl who lives in the attic or something.

You know what, fucking bless her, it actually breaks the tension for me, and I shove my hands in my pockets, turning to face her fully.

“No, smart ass. But he used this ATV last time he was in town, and he damaged the fuel tank. Badly.” I shake my head. “I don’t even know how he managed to do it.” Blow out a heavy exhale. “I’m gonna have to come back later with Ronnie and try to fix it or else tow it.”

Look between the two ATVs again, like I don’t know exactly what I’m looking at, and scratch the back of my head, putting the inevitable off for just a few more seconds.

This is worse than having to share one horse. My four-wheeler has a trunk on the back, and there’s just the one seat. No room behind it for a second body, thanks to the gear there. She’s going to have to wedge herself in front of me, sitting on top of the fuel tank, and I’m going to have to hold her there to try to keep her as safe as possible the entire way back. It won’t be a comfortable ride pressed up against that thing, but it’s our only option.

And us? That close? Historically that only ends one way.

I take a deep breath and prepare for the worst as I tell her our fate.