Page 30 of The Woman By the Lake

Riggs had steered the conversation out of the heavy.

He told her about his team, how he took jobs, and they worked them, twelve-hour days, six days a week, until they were done. Then they’d come home for a break that was never less than a week, though the longer the job or string of them, the longer the break before they headed out again.

He also told her his last job started the day after he met her on his run and ended the day before.

She’d asked how long he was in town now, and he’d loved and hated how the little wrinkles around the edges of her lips formed when she was trying not to smile when he told her a month.

On her side, she’d told him shit he knew, but he didn’t tell her he knew.

That her husband died of cancer after a short marriage (she didn’t dive deep into that, this time, because he guided her out of it). That she was thirty-three years old. And that she’d taken a year’s sabbatical from her teaching job to come to Misted Pines to “get away from it all.”

He talked more than she did, mostly in an effort to put her at ease.

In fact, he talked more that night than he ever did, with any woman, or man.

Now, they were out on the back porch in her loveseat with the last of the wine, sitting close, both their feet up on the coffee table, and Riggs was studying that view. Her legs shorter than his, and they had a shine to them, showing she’d shaved and recently. Her toes were painted a creamy, pale yellow that he found somehow more feminine and sexier than red. This juxtaposed against his faded jeans and scuffed, brown, lace-up boots.

Straight up, it was a fucking turn on, one of the biggest ones he’d ever experienced, seeing their legs like that, entirely indicative of all that was him, all that was her, and hinting at what it would feel like if his legs were tangled with hers, or hers were wrapped around his ass.

It didn’t help he could feel the soft flesh of her hip against his and smell the flowery, powdery, supremely female scent of her perfume.

But that wasn’t where this could go.

He’d fucked his way through half the attractive women in this county, so it wasn’t like he was above shitting where he lived.

But she was there to escape something brutal and tragic, and she didn’t need her neighbor making moves on her.

It was more than that, though.

There was something about her that told him he couldn’t take it there. She’d let down her shield that night, the ice queen was gone, and the sometimes shy, all the time sweet, definitely vulnerable woman who had pain shadowing her eyes, was not someone he was the man to wade into.

He was a good-time guy.

He could take her for a ride on his bike so she could feel the wind in her hair. He could cook her an excellent brat, not on his grill, in a skillet filled with brown ale. He could get her drunk and make her laugh hard, then later, make her come harder.

But he’d learned along the way he wasn’t the other kind of man for a woman.

You wanted to get loose or get high or get off, Riggs was the guy for you.

You wanted more, he wanted no part of it.

She moved her foot and the side of it skimmed the leg of his jeans.

He didn’t feel it, but he felt it.

Jesus, he had to get out of there.

“So, um…I take it your other neighbors were less, we’ll say, dedicated to their sleep than me.”

He turned his attention from their legs to her face at this comment.

“Sorry?”

“Whoever rented this cabin before me,” she explained.

“No one’s been in this cabin before you. At least not while I’ve been in my house.”

She was fucking with his head so much, the words were out before he realized he shouldn’t have said them.

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