Page 35 of Wildest Dreams

“What’s in the bag?” Hunter asks, eyes sliding down to the brown paper in my fist.

“Breakfast muffin,” I grunt. “And my pride.”

He half-smiles and looks back up at his girlfriend, jerking his chin at her when she turns her full-watt smile down on him.

He jumps the steps two at a time and tugs her roughly against his chest, pressing a hard smug kiss against her happy dimpled cheek.

“Hey baby,” he murmurs, hauling her up as she melts against him.

I turn my attention to Aisling’s perky little butt as she struts purposefully into the lake house.

She doesn’t slam the door in my face so I decide to follow in after her.

While she’s busy acting like I don’t exist I give myself a couple of seconds to check her out, raking my eyes up the backs of her bare legs until I reach the shorts of her denim overalls. I tug at the neckline of my shirt, roll my shoulders back, and bite the bullet.

“Aisling,” I say gruffly, widening my stance as I wait for her to turn around.

I glance briefly down at the take-out bag in my hand and my forearms flex in nervous anticipation.

I got her a breakfast muffin – strawberry, her favourite.

I hope that the butter-cream icing hasn’t smudged too bad.

When I return my stare to the back of her curly bun she’s still completely preoccupied, placing things out on the kitchen counter.

I frown, a muscle rolling in my jaw, suddenly realising that a breakfast muffin is nowhere near a good enough peace offering. Not when I want her to walk with me on our hike today. Not when I want to fully put my past behind us.

The back of my neck starts to get hot as I realise how stupid this was – me thinking that I could win her back when I haven’t done anything to prove my intentions yet.

I rub roughly at my forehead.

Who buys their crush a breakfast muffin? I should have bought her roses.

When she turns around she actually jumps as if she didn’t know that I was here, the three take-out coffees that she’s holding over-spilling a little beneath their caps.

“Oh my God,” she breathes, shaking her head and squeezing her eyes shut. “Sorry, I didn’t realise that you were there. I was totally busy trying to–”

She suddenly stops herself when she finally notices my taken aback expression. I mean, besides the fact that she didn’t hear me say her name out loud like a normal human being, she’s talking to me right now like I’m a guy who she doesn’t hate.

She swallows the rest of her sentence and looks up at me with a slightly embarrassed blush.

It’s fucking beautiful.

“How are your knees?” I ask, briefly checking that they aren’t still bleeding. There’s still one Band-Aid in place, which makes me suspicious that she reopened one of her cuts with more floor-scrubbing, but other than that they seem to be back to their perfect selves.

I get a flashback of sliding my hands beneath those knees and I quickly avert my eyes, shuffling my feet and grunting.

“They’re fine,” she says breathlessly, bouncing agitatedly in her sandals. As if maybe she’s just had the exact same flashback as I have.

I swipe my tongue over my bottom lip, psyching myself up to ask her to hike with me, when the coffees in her hands finally register in my brain. As in, there arethreecoffees in her hands.

Aisling and Fallon make two. So who the hell is the third one for?

I shove my tongue in my cheek and jerk my chin towards the cup-holder.

“Who’s the coffee for?” I ask, my chest tense and expanding. Because even though I’m a positive guy, I can’t help but wonder if it’s for Tristan.

My cheeks go damn near crimson as I think about the strawberry muffin in my fist, while Aisling’s out here moving onto other men. I mean, as she fucking should. It’s not as though we were ever even together.

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