Page 46 of There's Pumpkin About You
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because like I said, I don’t regret it.”
I watch him as intensely as he watches me, brown eyes blazing and screaming so many emotions that I can’t make out a single one.
“I don’t understand,” I say in a whisper, but he can hear it clear as day when surrounded by the noiseless bubble he has me trapped in.
He groans once more, as if what he’s saying should be obvious. “There’s nothing to understand. I don’t regret you breaking into my barn and bugging me to work with you.”
“But why not, August? So far, you’ve gained nothing from it.”
“Not true,” he argues.
“Oh, really? Tell me one thing so far that has worked in your favor. You’re still behind on the harvest and the paperworkandyou have an incomplete barn. What the hell could you have gained?”
“I gained you, idiot.”
Time stands still as my eyes almost bulge out of my head. There are a lot of things that I expect from August Finch—what can be either a vacant or bored expression, a complaint, an insult, but never… this. What even is this? Is it a compliment? How does he expect me to know when he says it like he says everything else; like it’s the most basic fact known to man?
“Me?”
The man who hates eye contact holds me captive with an intense gaze. It makes the room feel smaller and hotter having his attention so fixed on me. Never before have I held the attention of someone else this easily, as if just my breathing is something he finds so interesting. Every part of me stands to attention, waiting for a response, a movement, anything that will end my suffering. The zip of electricity that fires across every nerve is almost pleasurable under his gaze.
Eventually, he speaks again. “Like I said, Wren, I don’t regret anything.”
I smile but Gus cuts off the reaction with a raised hand. “But, if you keep looking at me as if I’ve just asked you to marry me then I will regret letting you in my house.”
My smile is immediately replaced by an exaggerated roll of my eyes. This man really can be dramatic at times.
Gus’s sofa has a matching foot stool which I roll towards him. Before he can protest, I lift one foot at a time onto the stool. Just for today, Doctor Shakari has wrapped his feet in a bandage specifically meant to protect healing burns. She’s instructed him to wear it for the first twenty-four hours.
He glares at me, but after all that he’s just said, I’m desensitized to it.
“What?” I ask. “You shouldn’t be putting pressure on your feet and you know it.”
“Can you just sit down?” Gus sighs.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“What does that have to do with you sitting down?”
“Well, you can’t stand up and make yourself food, so someone has to.”
“Then I’m not hungry,” he says matter-of-factly.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re stubborn?”
“Funny, I was thinking the same about you.”
“I prefer to think of myself as sensible.”
Gus smirks in a way that sends a tingle down my spine and between my legs. “Am I not sensible, Southwick?”
“Nope, you’re stubborn as previously mentioned as well as extremely grumpy.”
He’s subtly leaned forward, his face now just inches away from mine. So much so that I can see the way his brown eyes darken to inky black as he smirks, and the fact that his beard has hints of blond in it. I can see the long eyelashes that are so effortlessly full.
I can feel his breath fan my lips, and that mixed with the fact that he’s only dressed in his sweats and an unbuttoned shirt makes this entire moment feel so abundantly intimate that I can feel each breath shorten. In the heat of the moment, there was no time for me to notice the corner of a tattoo that peaks out from under his shirt.
