Page 71 of In Your Dreams, Holden Rhodes

“Anything.”

She lifted the pizza box with a serious expression. “I got the extra large again.”

A smile curled on my mouth and the tension eased from my shoulders. “That’s too much food for you.”

She held my gaze and raised her eyebrows. “It’s economical to get the biggest size. Help me with it?”

Ten minutes later, we had set up in the sitting room. Heat radiated from the fire in the wood stove and we had our feet up on the coffee table.

“How was the bar tonight?” I asked.

She finished chewing her bite of pizza. “Fine. Kind of quiet without you there.” She elbowed me. “Sorry.”

I shook my head. “I deserved it.”

“You did deserve it. I would have served you a beer full of foam anyway.”

I shook my head, smiling.

“What’s the deal with Finn and Olivia?” she asked before she took another bite. “I’m not allowed to ask Olivia about him.”

I sighed and settled back into the couch. “I don’t even know where to start. You remember she lived next door growing up?”

She nodded, chewing.

“They were best friends until they were eighteen. Went to prom together and everything.”

She studied my face. “What happened?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know. No one does. One day they stopped talking and neither of them will say why. Olivia left for university in Vancouver and came home every summer to work at the bar, Finn did his firefighter training and got a job here in town, but in the summers, he’d volunteer to get dispatched around the province.”

She made a thoughtful humming noise.

“Finn’s a lot,” I told her. “He’s impulsive and he loves an adrenaline rush.” That familiar stab of guilt hit me in the stomach. I made him like that. “Even when he was a kid, he loved a thrill. My mom calls him the devil because he finds trouble wherever he goes.”

Sadie’s mouth curled up. “He’s your opposite. You’d hate an adrenaline rush.”

I raked a hand through my hair. “I had one today, when I found out you almost fell.”

Her hand came to my arm, warming my skin through my shirt. The inn was silent except for the wood cracking and popping in the wood stove, and the beat of blood in my ears.

“Finn fell when he was a kid,” I admitted to her before telling her the full story.

“Oh my god,” she breathed. “That’s awful.”

“I was fourteen, so I should have known better. He was only ten.”

She frowned, staring up at me, before she shook her head. “No, Holden. It was an accident.”

“I should have been watching him,” I repeated. “My parents trusted me to watch him and I fucked up. He could have died.”

She shook her head again. “You made a mistake. We all screw up. Even if I did fall off the trellis, it wouldn’t be your fault. It would be mine for being stupid enough to climb a rotting trellis.”

I held her gaze. “If you got hurt, I don’t know what I would do.”

Her eyelids fluttered and she bit her lip before her gaze dropped to my mouth. My pulse sped up. I shifted to face her and my gaze flicked between her eyes and her mouth.

Fuck, I wanted her so goddamn bad.

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