Page 56 of Little Bird
Because he hasn’t had his shirt off in my presence since we were sixteen, a voice tells me. It’s been winter, and I haven’t seen him in anything but long sleeves.
And holy fuck is he gorgeous without them.
The ink crawls from his hands up heavily veined forearms and onto his biceps, a trail of design that I can’t make out from here. It curls around his arms and up to his shoulders, though, and I catch my lower lip in my teeth. The tattoos are moving and shifting as he swings until they look almost alive, and I have the sudden and insane thought that I want to run my tongue along them. See exactly how his skin tastes.
Watch his eyes as I tease him.
I’m so shocked that I nearly hit myself in the nose when I jerk the camera back to my face. I take a moment to settle myself and focus in on him, and then start shooting. I take shot after shot, zooming in on his face. His arms. His chest. I take several steps to the right to get the trees in the background, then focus on the axe hitting the wood he’s breaking up. When he glances at me and stops, I catch the flash of blue eyes. The crease of surprise on his forehead. The sudden grin.
“What do you think this is, a show?” he asks, laughing.
I laugh back and drop the camera. This is the first time I’ve seen him smile since the snowball fight. Lord knows he hasn’t been doing it much since we got snowed in.
“Obviously,” I answer. “Why else would you be out here without your shirt on?”
“Because it’s hot,” he returns slowly. “And having my shirt off makes it easier to move.”
I lift a brow. “Or maybe you like the idea of someone coming across you with your shirt off. Showing off with all that wood chopping.”
“You’re right. People always wander through the woods looking for half-naked lumberjacks. I’m just trying to satisfy their needs.”
It’s supposed to be a joke. I know it is. But the way he says ‘satisfy their needs’ takes his voice down into a low rumble, and it strikes me somewhere in my lower belly.
“Lucky for you I found you first then,” I murmur. “Keeps you from having to satisfy anyone else.”
His eyes grow suddenly darker and shoot down to my mouth, then back up. And fuck if my body doesn’t tense up, drawing in on itself and lighting a fire in my belly at his very presence. When the fuck did my stepbrother start turning me on with a look?
When the fuck did he get so sexy my mouth gets dry at the sight of him half-naked and chopping wood?
He breaks the eye contact first and looks down at the wood, a flush crawling up his neck and into his face. “Um, what are you doing out here anyhow?”
I am both thankful for the interruption and frustrated about it.
“Bored,” I say. “So I came out to take pictures. Then I saw you and...”
“And you thought you could get a show,” he finishes, looking up at me again.
I see now that his eyes have shutters down over them, his expression closed to me.
Terrific.
I put the camera back to my face. “Exactly. Local lumberjack poses in the forest as he’s chopping wood. Artist prepares his canvas.”
I drop the camera, the thought hitting me so fast that I feel like I might fall over.
“Oh my God, that’s it,” I mutter. I put the camera back to my face and look through the viewfinder, changing the angles and mentally laying text over the pictures. Local artist doing his next project. Artwork that starts from the bottom. See your table taking shape before it even gets into the shop.
If I was writing a marketing campaign for them, this is the one I’d write.
Not that they’ve asked me.
But it is what my degree is in, and once I have the idea, I can’t stop thinking about it.
Through the finder, I see Gabe drop the axe and walk toward me. “What’s it?” he asks.
I move the camera and watch him walk to me in person. “I know your business is struggling,” I say honestly. “I know you need a better marketing plan. And I think I have an idea.”
He snorts. “Good luck convincing Gunner to try anything new. He’s so stuck on the idea of people finding us organically that he can’t see anything else, and it’s destroying the business. But every time I try to talk to him about it, he tells me it’s not my place.”
