Page 28 of Love, Hate, Love

I was knotted up waiting for her to accept the offer. If she didn’t, if she truly hated me? I wasn’t sure I could handle that.

“How would that work? What if you’re not home? Then what? I can’t shower?”

The fact that she’d already gotten to the technicalities let me breathe again. She hadn’t said no. She wasn’tthatrevolted by me. “I don’t lock the door to the house. Just go in when you want to shower.”

“You said?—”

“I know. I changed my mind.” I remembered all the things I’d said, even when I didn’t want to.

She shook her head and rolled her pretty blue eyes at me, as if that was supposed to annoy me. All it did was make me itch to pull her hair out of that ponytail and thread my hands through those beautiful locks. Even now, it was as if she were completely oblivious to how unbelievably sexy she was in just a pair of jeans and not an ounce of makeup.

“We have a deal?” I asked.

“Yes, I guess so if you’re going to be crazy about it. It wasn’t that big a––”

“I can’t have that happen again,” I said, for the sake of my sanity and the guys’ health. “Come up when you’re ready and I’ll show you around.”

She gave me a halfhearted nod.

I turned to leave but couldn’t until I said it again and knew she’d really heard it. “Just for the record, I wouldn’t just kick you out of here.”

“Not that I care, but how am I supposed to know what’s going to piss you off enough when just having a heartbeat seems to do it?”

“Because I wouldn’t do that to you.” I sounded harsh, but how could she even imagine I would let her get thrown in prison? Did she think I was so different from the man she’d known ten years ago? Whether either of us liked it, there was a history between us that was hard to walk away from, and I was finding it harder by the day.

Chapter13

Leah

I stoodon the threshold of the house, regretting that I’d agreed to shower here, and I hadn’t even done it a single time yet. Being here every night to shower was going to make it harder to avoid him, and that was penciled in at the top of my to-do list right now. For some reason, he came within fifty feet of me and all the calm composure I’d perfected in the last ten years melted away. I went from being carved out of granite to an unwrapped chocolate in a five-year-old’s sweaty hand.

If he said one word out of line, I was going back to the bunkhouse bathroom, in spite of the fact that they never put the toilet seat down and the water was usually cold. And if I flashed every single one of them on a weekly basis? It was a small price to pay for my sanity. Why did Kade care about that anyway? It was my body. If I wanted to walk around topless, I could. As far as I remembered, there was no clause in the contract about nudity.

I was about to force myself to knock when he swung the door open and stepped out of the way for me to walk in.

I stayed on the porch. “I was thinking?—”

“If you’re going to shower here, you need to just come in.”

My plan of staying on the porch was thwarted by his hand on my back, steering me inside. That gooey chocolate was now turning into a syrupy mess. I might’ve resisted with some distance, but when his hand touched me, something short-circuited inside, frying all my neurons until they no longer functioned. It felt like they were all stumbling around my brain like drunken sailors on a long weekend.

“You did tell me not to so much as even knock on this door,” I said, trying to put enough edge in my voice that it would disguise how my body was butter in his hand.

“And now I’m telling you to do it.”

If he didn’t sound almost defensive, wasn’t running his hand through his already tousled hair, I might’ve walked out. Instead, I stayed put, not backing uporwalking in, my instincts battling it out and coming to a stalemate. It felt like there was some strange line I was crossing, and I couldn’t figure out whether I should take that step or not.

“I’ll show you to the bathroom you can use,” he said, taking a few steps and then waiting to see if I’d follow.

I hesitated for another second and then forced myself to move another foot.

I’d caught glimpses of the inside, but standing in the living room, the heart of Kade’s home, somehow felt different. It wasn’t anything like how it used to look when we were kids, and it wasn’t what I’d have expected from this man. Everything was well done but not to the point you were afraid to touch anything. The weathered leather of the couch lured you over to it, and the thick wool area rugs broke up the wide-planked wood floors, looking warm and inviting. Even the fireplace, currently burning through a stack of logs, filled the place with a lived-in scent. The most shocking thing about it was just howwarmthe place was, and not just in temperature. It was exactly how I would’ve imagined the old Kade might decorate his home and completely at odds with the man he’d become. I didn’t know the man who stood before me anymore. And what I did know didn’t mesh with this place.

“This place is really nice,” I said, glancing around.

“Thanks. This is still the main room that was always here, but I gutted it and expanded. Same with the porch.”

I’d already known that. I’d spent so many hours on that porch that I recognized every ding in the wood, even now. After my father had died, one of the things that comforted me most was sitting with Old Man Hawk on the porch. He’d make me hot cocoa and give me cookies. He’d tell me stories about the history of Montana and, most of all, justbethere when so many others in my life seemed to be falling apart. When my mother wouldn’t get out of bed all day and my brother was off trying to figure out how he was going to survive, he was here for me. That was before he’d gotten sick, though. Then I’d come here and slowly started to trail behind Kade, handing him tools as he fixed things, even though he wasn’t much older than me.

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