Page 8 of Bolt To Me
“Used to?” His gaze deepened, holding hers like a rope in both hands. “Sweetheart, I never really stopped.”
Before she could gather a reply, the low crunch of tires on gravel cut through the air. A dusty white SUV pulled into the drive, dust curling up behind it. Carli’s stomach dropped. “Oh no,” she moaned.
“What?” Cory gazed at the vehicle, shaking his head in confusion. He didn’t recognize it.
“That’s Aunt Rosie,” she whispered. “The family reconnaissance team.”
Cory’s eyebrows rose, his lips twitching. “You want me to hide?”
A slow, dangerous smile pulled at her lips. “No. No, I don’t want you to hide.” She picked up the mason jar and took a sip of her tea. “I want you to stay right there, and I want you to stay shirtless.”
His laugh was deep, easy, the sound curling around her like smoke. And as Aunt Rosie climbed out of the SUV, clutching her handbag like it might ward off sin, Carli braced herself. “Hell, they’re already gossiping, so now we’ll really let the gossip games begin,” she muttered as she stood up. She wasn’t going to face off with Aunt Rosie sitting down.
Cory leaned just slightly closer, his voice pitched low. “Let’s give ’em something to talk about.”
Before she could question him, his hand slid to the small of her back, firm and warm, guiding her just enough to make her breath catch. Then, without hesitation, he dipped his head and kissed her. It wasn’t tentative. It wasn’t polite. It was a kiss that staked a claim, one that burned through every nerve ending she had, curling her toes and scattering her thoughts like leaves in the wind. The kind of kiss that says you’re mine, even if just for now.
When he pulled back, his grin was pure trouble. “That oughta keep the rumor mill spinning for a while.”
Aunt Rosie cleared her throat from the driveway. “Well. I see you’re… adjusting.”
“Hi, Aunt Rosie,” Carli managed, her voice a little breathless.
“Young man,” Rosie said to Cory, eyeing his bare chest as if it were a direct affront to public decency, “you’d better be planning on putting a shirt on before the church picnic Sunday.”
Cory winked. “No promises, ma’am.”
Rosie’s eyes narrowed a bit, and she looked at Carli. Her expression softened just the tiniest bit. She huffed and headed back toward her car. Carli turned to him, still feeling the heat of his hand at her back. “Did you just kiss me on purpose in front of my family?”
His smile was nothing but unapologetic. “Sure did.”
She narrowed her eyes, though the corners of her mouth betrayed her. “You’re dangerous.”
“I warned you.”
And for the first time in days, Carli Santana laughed. It wasn’t the brittle, polite kind she’d been practicing since the wedding disaster, but a full, unrestrained, belly-deep laugh that rolled through her until she had to lean against the porch railfor balance. Maybe she was losing her mind. Or perhaps she was finally starting to live.
Campfire Confessions
The fire was the kind that seemed to breathe, pulling in the darkness and exhaling it in ribbons of orange and gold that licked the night air. Its glow spilled across the clearing behind the guesthouse, staining the grass with warm light and catching on the edges of the mesquite branches swaying overhead. The breeze was slow and lazy, carrying with it the dry, familiar scent of Texas dust, the faint spice of cedar, and the scent of honeysuckle. And there was a lingering electric hum that had been pulsing between them since that kiss on the porch. Above, the stars scattered themselves like salt across a black tablecloth, so sharp and bright it was almost too much to take in, but it was the man across from her who kept stealing her breath.
Cory leaned forward in his chair, the firelight carving shadows across his cheekbones, gilding the edges of his jaw. He tossed another log into the fire pit with a casual flick of his wrist, but the movement was practiced, deliberate, like the kind of thing a man does when he knows he’s being watched. He was injeans and a worn T-shirt now, but the memory of him shirtless in the pasture still burned at the edges of her thoughts. The way his skin had caught the sun, the way his muscles moved like a language she almost understood. She could still feel that kiss, too, the unapologetic claim of it, the way her body had leaned in before her mind could argue.
She was wrapped in one of his flannel shirts, the fabric soft from years of wear, smelling faintly of him: sun-warmed leather, cedar, the ghost of whatever cologne he used when he bothered. The sleeves swallowed her hands, so she curled her fingers into the cuffs and pulled them tighter around herself, trying to look like the cold was the reason for her shiver. “You always build fires for your houseguests?” she asked, her voice lighter than she felt as she took a sip from the bottle of Shiner he’d handed her earlier.
“Only the scandalous ones,” he said, leaning back and stretching his legs out toward the fire. He reached down and picked up his bottle of beer and took a long drink.
Her mouth curved despite herself. “You know that kiss in front of Aunt Rosie didn’t help, right? Half the town’s probably staging a prayer circle as we speak.”
Cory smirked, tilting his bottle lazily in her direction. “They were already talking. Figured we might as well give ’em a story worth repeating.”
She looked away, toward the shifting flames, pretending his words didn’t land like a warm hand at the small of her back. “Still,” she said softly, “you didn’t have to do that.”
“No,” he agreed, watching her over the firelight. “But I wanted to.”
It was the kind of answer that didn’t leave room for anything else. The quiet between them swelled, thick and charged. The air smelled like burning wood and the sharp sweetness of her beer, but underneath it all was somethingolder, something that went back years, to summers spent on back porches and dusty roads, to the sound of his laugh through an open kitchen window when he came over for Luke. Cory was the charming one whose grin could talk its way out of anything. Trouble wrapped in a voice that could make a girl believe she was the only one he’d ever look at that way.
She pulled her knees to her chest, resting her bare feet near the fire pit. “You ever feel like you’re living your life for other people?” she asked suddenly, surprising herself with the honesty in it. “Like, even the things you do to rebel are just… expected?”
