Where It All Began (Phoenix Falls Series)

As soon as I hear Kaleb drive off in the Chevy I slip into my sports bra and a tank, and I stride out of the back door of the cabin. I catch sight of Madden measuring some loose planks by the barn, using that handy blue collar brain of his as he thinks about how to fix up the broken bits whilst he’s here. How metaphorical.

When he notices me he does a double take, his eyes lingering momentarily on the text emblazoned across my chest.

“You look…” He lifts himself up from his crouch by the wood and he takes a few heavy steps towards me.

On the inside I’m laughing. You’re gonna treat me like a child when we’re with my brother and then act like I’m a big girl once he’s gone? Right.

“You look… really, really good,” he finishes, stopping to stand about two feet away from me.

I give him a quick smile. “Thanks.” Then I breeze straight past him and start sprinting up the incline, heading for the protected canopy of the forest up ahead.

“Hey! Kitty, wait!”

His call is somewhere far behind me, along with all of the shits that I give. I’m immediately exhilarated, feeling the midsummer air against my skin, the stinging expansion of my lungs, the insane pounding of the man racing behind me.

I glance at him over my shoulder. So much for my Maria moment in the mountains.

“Quit chasing me,” I shout to him. “Kaleb won’t be gone for long and there are some private things that I need to do right now.”

His cheeks are flushed red with exertion and he gives me a bewildered look from under his fringe. “What the hell kinda ‘private things’ you plan on doing in the forest?”

“Never you mind, stalker.” I up my pace and try to ignore the fact that he’s right behind me.

Why should I have to scupper my daily routine just because two dudes want to keep me under lock and key?

“Kitty,” he huffs out, closer than before. I’m impressed that a man so built can keep up with a body as lithe as my own. I add an extra flair to my strides so that I can kick back some dust on him. “I can run with you, all you have to do is ask. I’m here to look after you, not to be a shackle.”

Yap, yap, yap. I rev into full throttle.

“I don’t want a bodyguard, nor do I need one.” He’s irked me so much that I’m talking like a Brontë. “You’ve been relieved of duty, Officer. Scram.”

Somehow he manages to match his pace to mine, running right beside me with a focused look on his face. The morning sunlight dappling through the leaves overhead make his eyes look striking and quartz-like.

“I thought you’d want to make the most of Kaleb being gone,” he heaves out, brow furrowed in concentration. “Not run away from me the first moment you got.”

“Well, we all make mistakes.” I flash him a look and, so affronted, he stumbles.

Okay, now I feel a little bad. I slow down and back-step towards him.

“I’m kidding, Madden. That was mean, I’m sorry.”

He bends over at the middle, hands on his knees as he catches his breath.

“How the hell are you talking when you just sprinted that fast?” he chokes out, tugging a hand through his hair and then standing upright again.

Even stood below me on the forest incline he’s somehow still towering over me. I chew at my lip. Why does he have to be so darn good-looking?

“I have some secret things that I need to do out here and they don’t involve you. We’ll have other opportunities to hang out. And, no offence, but couples jogging could really give me the ick.”

His eyes whip to mine, picking up on the one part of that sentence that I immediately wish I could undo.

“Couples, huh?” he teases.

I blanch, mortified. “It’s just an expression.”

“An expression that people use when they’re referring to a couple,” he grins.

I shake my head. “I didn’t mean it like that, you know what I meant.”

I’m spiralling like a neurotic prey animal, which seems about right.

My head’s about to pop like a grain of corn when Madden grips a heavy hand over my shoulder, immediately grounding me. He looks deep into my eyes and says, “Hey, I’m just messing with you. It’s okay, I didn’t mean it.”

I don’t know if I like that anymore than if he did mean it.

“Hey,” he says again, palms sliding up the sides of my neck. His eyes black out as he feels my six-billion-beats-a-minute pulse. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be teasing you. I’ll keep my mouth shut, okay?”

He cocks a small smile at me and then leans forward towards my ear, the scent of his heady pine body wash instantly infiltrating my bloodstream. The common sense in my brain vaporises into a cotton candy cloud of neon pink hearts and hot steaming lust.

“You tell me when you want me to talk.” He dips his head to the crook of my neck and takes a heart-stopping inhale. “I know my place,” he whispers.

Alarmed, aroused, and completely off my head, I stagger into his embrace and totally lose my balance. My foot slips on a sprouted seedling and, instead of clinging to the man-mountain in front of me, I throw my hands backwards and land on my ass.

My coccyx is screaming, my legs are akimbo, and my hands are instantly scratched up as they scrape across a decade’s worth of twigs and branches.

“Oh my God, Kitty-” Madden drops to his knees and tries to regroup my limbs. I’m like a newborn deer only with less bodily control. “Kitty, I’m sorry, here-”

He attempts to wrap my arms around his neck when I suddenly feel a sharp sting in my left palm.

“Ouch,” I whisper, bringing my hand under my chin so that I can inspect it at a closer range. I squint down at it, my vision still a little blurred, until I make out a tiny sharp splinter embedded in the soft flesh of my hand.

Madden sits back on his haunches, denim-clad thighs splaying obscenely between my knees, and then he wraps his fists around my wrist, bringing my palm gently towards him so that he too can examine it.

“Splinter,” he mutters.

“Duh,” I mutter back.

He gives me a sharp look from beneath his dark spiky fringe and then gently circles his middle finger around the affected area. He bites and sucks at his lip ring as he contemplates my palm.

“We need to get it out,” he murmurs.

Of our systems, I don’t add.

“I don’t think my fingers can-” He stops talking so that he can concentrate as he tries to extract the chipping from my flesh. He really does have the world’s largest hands, so unlike the artistic musician stereotype. His nails are neat and trimmed short, making them unable to grip at the splinter, and his fingers… well, they’re the kind that were made to grip logs and bare knuckle fight so, to put it plainly, there’s no way that he’s squeezing a millimetre of wood out of me.

“You can’t do it, it’s okay-” I start, but he cuts me off with a look.

“I can do it,” he says, a double-meaning that I’m not getting burning behind his molten irises.

He pauses for a moment as if I’ll come to some conclusion on my own but, seeing that that’s not about to happen, he fills me in.

“I can do it,” he repeats, a little hesitant this time. “Just not with my fingers.”

Not with his fingers? I give him a cautious once over, trying to work out what the hell that means.

Am I crazy? Is he going to fuck it out of me or something?

“I can… suck it out,” he finishes quietly, eyes on the scuffed flesh of my hand. “I can get it out using my mouth-”

“No, absolutely not,” I stammer. “That definitely won’t be necessary, but thank you-”

“Kitty,” he breathes. His voice is so low it reverberates through me. “Kaleb isn’t going to know. Unless you’ve got cameras up here in the trees too-”

I’m breathing harder now that I’m stationary than when I was sprinting fifty miles per hour.

It’s been less than twenty-four hours since I suggested that we keep this ship afloat under the guise of friendship and now he’s about to suck something out of my body? Did I accidentally reverse-manifest this?

“Madden, please.” I try to ignore the butterflies fluttering in my belly. “I can try to get it out myself, I’m sure it isn’t a big deal.”

He hooks his left arm around my lower back, pulling us slightly closer together. “I used to work in construction, Kitty. Injuries like these can become infected.”

“What are the chances that it’ll actually become infected?” I argue.

“None,” he argues back. “If you let me suck it out of you.”

We’ve reached an impasse. He stares down at me like I’m his life’s mission and I scowl up at him like he’s a pain in my ass. Unfortunately the pains that I do currently have in my ass are not Madden related.

After a tense ten seconds of mutual glowering I finally roll my eyes, submitting, and he lets out a relieved sigh.

“Fine, you can-”

I stop talking the second that his mouth meets my skin. It’s warm and wet and more gentle than I was expecting. He grazes his teeth gently around the point of soreness and then slowly, painstakingly, he begins to suck.

My face scrunches up as he begins working the foreign-body out of me because it hurts in a way that’s both good and bad. Combining that with the smooth rub of his lip-ring against my skin, my thighs are twitching with heat and daggers.

Sensing my discomfort he slows down on the suction and gives me a much needed distraction. The hand that’s not gripping my wrist gently caresses its way up my back, Madden’s warmth seeping into my skin like a heat pad, and he briefly glances up at me through his long black lashes, gauging my pain from the pinch in my brow. He works his fingers under the hem of my tank and slides them upwards until he reaches the back of my sports bra, tracing his fingers back and forth. After a moment he bows his head again, his fringe shielding his eyes in fluffy disarray, but I can still hear the low noises coming from the back of his throat as he miraculously teases the splinter to the surface.

Before I’m ready for him to pull away I feel the sting of the wood being released and then Madden’s sitting upright, one fist still suspending my hand in the air.

He turns his head away from me and spits the splinter out of his mouth, then wipes his lips across the large swell of his shoulder. The stubble on his jaw scrapes roughly against his shirt. I fantasise about him doing that up my belly.

When he looks back down at me I’m suddenly aware of how compromising my position is, so I bunch up my knees and tuck them to my chest, hopefully looking a little less exposed.

Madden gets to his feet and then tugs me up by my elbows, breaking the silence.

“Done,” he grunts, breathing deep and heavy.

“Thank you,” I reply quickly. Then, too aware of how close we’re standing, I add on the word, “Friend.”

At least my mouth seems to have some self-control. If this was up to my other body parts, this conversation would definitely be over.

“‘Friend’,” he repeats, a quietly amused look on his face. “Is that our safe word?”

His hands slip from their grip on my elbows and slowly work their way around my back. When he reaches my shoulder blades he splays out his palms, and my head grows woozy when I realise that his two hand-spans? Yeah, they’re bigger than my entire back.

Trying to bring us back down to Earth I ask casually, “How’d you learn how to do that?”

“The splinter thing?”

“Yeah.” A thought enters my mind and I give him a dimply smile. “You been kissing splinters out of all the guys at Coleson’s construction company?”

He smiles back at me. “How’d you think I got the job?”

A laugh bubbles out of me and I scrunch up my nose, trying to ignore the little exploration that his hands are currently enjoying around the narrow frame of my shoulders and up the curves of my neck.

“Another fascinating tank,” he mutters dryly as his fingers tangle in my hair.

I look down, appraising the word RAWHIDE printed in bold across my chest.

“I’m a cowgirl, every cowgirl likes the Blues Brothers,” I say defensively.

I’m lying of course. I wore this tank purely to befuddle that pretty boy brain of his.

He swallows but omits further commentary, avoiding my eyes and my chest. Turning his face slightly away from me he reaches into the front pocket of his jeans and then pulls out the baby pink lollipop that I’d forgotten he’d picked up last night. He unwraps it, pockets the clear plastic covering, and then holds it in front of my lips like I’m a kid who’s just had a successful trip to the doctor’s office.

My lips quirk into a little smile.

“Why’re you trying to give that to me now?” I ask, my head shaking in amusement.

His expression is no longer blushing and boyish.

“’Cause I wanna kiss you.”

His eyes burn into mine and the peaks of my chest begin to ache.

“But I know you wanna go slow,” he continues. “So if you put this in your mouth then I can’t… I won’t be able to…”

I pinch the stick of the lolly, unable to avoid brushing his thick fingers with the soft pads of my own, and when he lets it go I tuck it into my mouth, throwing it into my right cheek pouch like a hamster.

“Thanks,” I say, weirdly enjoying how good it feels to be cared for.

With the sun shining right behind him a golden halo circles his spiked ebony hair, contrasting so starkly to his face shrouded in shadows.

He nips the stick that’s jutting out of my mouth and I stop swirling it as he begins to tug. Understanding what he’s doing, I marginally part my lips so that he can slide it out of me.

Beneath my tank, my nipples pinch and push against the fabric. What the hell? It’s barely eight in the morning and he’s already turning me on. On his second day of being here.

I don’t think that I’m going to be able to survive a whole summer of this.

Madden twizzles the stick between us, its glossy head sparkling when it catches a break in the canopy overhead, and then he holds it up higher – not returning it, but retrieving it.

He shoves it into his mouth and compresses me against his chest. My eyes grow wide as I try not to go all Bambi-limbed again.

After sucking on it for a few seconds he slips the lolly out of his mouth with the hand that’s not rubbing circles in the small of my back and he gestures with it to the forest running uphill behind me.

“Kaleb will maul me if I let you run out here on your own,” he states.

“Maybe I’ll maul you if you don’t,” I reply.

He looks down into my eyes and there’s a twinkle sparkling in his icy depths. “Maybe I want you to,” he teases, and then crushes me against him tighter.

Feeling brave, I scratch a nail roughly up his abs and he throws his head back in pseudo-pleasure. “Oh yeah,” he groans, his mouth tilted up in a grin. We’re joking together and it feels good, but it definitely doesn’t feel like friendly joking. My eyes travel down the thick column of his neck, entranced.

He dips his head forward again so that he can look down into my eyes and he tosses the lolly back into his mouth.

“I’m sorry about this morning, in the kitchen with Kaleb.” He squints his eyes as if cringing at the memory and adds, “We were jackasses. I didn’t want to fight him on it because I didn’t want to draw any attention to… us… but…” He twists the lolly around with his tongue as he contemplates the rest of his sentence. “I should have. I should have been on your side there.”

I pull the lolly out of his mouth.

“You don’t need any more of this,” I whisper, twirling the stick like a magic wand. “You’re already too sweet.”

Twin creases appear in his cheeks and his face breaks into the most stunning grin that I’ve ever seen. Laugh lines crease around the edges of his eyes, and then he dips down so that he can rub his forehead into my shoulder.

“Princess, you’re the sweet one,” he mumbles, his soft hair tickling me as he brushes it side to side.

I’m really not. Or, if I am, I don’t want to be. The more that I allow myself to like Madden the worse this is going to be for me when he leaves. I really have got to try and keep him at arm’s length – at a nice friendly length.

But before I can push myself out of his arms we suddenly hear a rustle at my rear, somewhere farther up the incline and deeper into the forest.

I whip around, startled, and Madden’s arms lock me against his chest like a seat-belt. He quickly turns us so that he’s now the one closer to the sound, and his eyes are hard as he scans through the trees.

“The hell was that,” he mumbles, his chest rising and falling in large steady pumps.

I shake my head to signal that I’m not sure, but really I’m lying. I saw the flash of fur, and I’m betting that Madden did too.

We’ve been talking in hushed tones and we aren’t in the sunniest spot, so I don’t doubt the fact that some animals would risk a prowl if they suspected the area was safe. Okay, it wasn’t a bear but it was big enough for me to know that Madden wants it nowhere near me.

Madden swallows and looks down at me, adrenaline rippling through his arms and making him clutch me tighter.

“Please, for the love of God,” he says, his voice dangerously low. Predatorily low. It’s a good thing that whatever was out here just shot back to wherever it came from because Madden is no longer in a friendly mood. “Whilst I’m here – whilst your parents are away – don’t do your running up here. Please Kitty, for me. It’s not safe. And I’m not opposed to the idea of hauling you over my shoulder to stop you.”

Is that supposed to discourage me? I want to make a joke out of it but I can see from the hard set of his brow that he’s being totally serious.

“I don’t want you in harm’s way. I don’t want to lose-” He groans and shakes his head, discarding his sentence. I’m not sure what nerve we’ve hit but I decide that the best tactic is distraction.

I take the lollipop from his hand and give the head a little suck. He watches me, agonised, and when I hand it back to him it goes straight into his mouth.

Yeah, we’re going to make a pair of really great friends.

“Fine,” I say, agreeing to his terms. “I won’t run up here whilst you’re in town.”

I push my body out of his arms and then reacclimatise my footing to the downward track. After a quick glance over my shoulder I can tell that he’s already feeling a little better, his expression much calmer and more relieved.

“You can tail me,” I say as I begin my descent, more cautious than before after my incident with the wood chipping.

“I would love to tail you-”

I shoot him a glare and he responds with a look that is definitely not sorry.

Friends for now, I think to myself, trying to ignore the fluttering in my belly.

And then we run.