Girl in Love(72)

“I’m going back to bed.” She turned to storm back to her room, but he caught her by the arm before she’d made it out of reaching distance.

“Oh no you don’t. Look, we can do this the easy way, where you throw on some pants and bring your ass on. Or I can carry you out of here kicking and screaming and tomorrow you’ll have to borrow something from Rae to wear.” He shrugged. “Come to think of it, doesn’t actually make much of a difference to me either way. Welp, up you go then.”

He bent down to grab her again and she gave him a solid shove.

“Okay, okay. I’m coming.”

“Sure, we can make time for that too.” He reached for her again and she slapped him away.

“Dammit, Trace. Can you stop acting like a fourteen-year-old for five damn minutes?” She could feel her blood pressure rising. “I can’t do this if I have to constantly think about everything I say being turned into innuendo.”

“Doesn’t matter what you say. I’ll turn it all into innuendo regardless.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “Great. And when will you be stopping that childish habit exactly?”

He made a big show of appearing thoughtful. “When you admit that you still have feelings for me, you still think about me, and that you missed me terribly every second that we were apart.”

“There’ll be figure skating competitions in hell before that happens.”

He nodded as if it made no difference either way. “Well, then I hope you enjoy my little jokes. I got plenty.”

She was getting a headache from all the glaring so she decided to give him a taste of his own medicine. “Actually, I do have a confession to make. It’s kind of embarrassing though.”

He turned his head slightly. “And what’s that, darlin’?”

She took a step toward him. “Do you remember that night on the bus, that one night when you told me to go back to my room and lock the door?”

She watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall as he swallowed. “Vaguely. Why?”

Steeling her own nerves so she could go through with her plan for getting him to back off, she reached out and ran a finger down the front of the tight gray T-shirt he was wearing.

Lowering her voice enough to be seductive, she glanced up at him from under her eyelashes. “Well, sometimes…at night…and even sometimes during the day, I think about you and I…I touch myself.”

His eyes went wide and then narrowed with suspicion. “You do?”

“Yes. I do.” She paused to bite her bottom lip. His eyes dropped to her mouth and she grinned. “I rub my temples. Because you give me a migraine.”

His mouth eased into a slow smile while she grinned triumphantly. He shook his head and touched her lightly under her chin. “You’re something else, pretty girl. You ready to go or you want me to see what I can do to take your mind off that migraine I cause you?”

Locked in his gaze, all sense of having finally beaten him at his own little play on words game vanished. The truth was, she may have finally made it to equal ground where their careers were concerned, but where anything physical was involved, she knew he would win every time. He’d shown her many, many times the way he could rob her of every single ounce of self-control she had with just one touch.

She took a deep breath and stepped out of his space—relenting because she knew he wasn’t going to.

“Give me two minutes. I’m gonna go grab some pants.”

“Don’t bother on my account. I prefer you without them,” he called out after her.

She did everything in her power to ignore the way her heart raced. Flirting with him was a terrible idea—one she had no recollection of deciding on and wished she could take back.

She lost control of herself around him, a control she’d worked so hard to keep her white-knuckled death grip on. Her heart was doing its best to try and warn her. It had taken it a year just to regain the ability to function normally.

It definitely wasn’t strong enough for anymore of the Trace Corbin heartbreak special.





HE HAD the fire started by the time she got off the bus. Giving her a quick glance over his shoulder, he saw she’d pulled her hair up into a messy bun and put on jeans that begged to be peeled right back off her.

“Um, what’s this?” She gestured to the fire as he pulled out a plastic chair for her to sit in.

“We’re having a bonfire. It is a campground after all.” Without any further explanation, he tossed the book he was holding into the flames.

“I was reading that!”

“Yeah, I know you were. That was the problem.” Trace handed her a stick. “You like s’mores, right?”