Crushing on Love (The Bradens of Peaceful Harbor, Book Four) (21 page)

“Excuse me, Grandpa Hal. Are you done?” Adriana, wearing a pretty blue dress and cowgirl boots, twirled right into the middle of the barn.

Treat reached for Max’s hand with pride in his eyes, and something inside Steve shifted and settled. For the first time ever, he wanted more than his life on the mountain. He wanted this—babies, family, and a sense of belonging. He scrubbed a hand down his face with the startling revelation, but was unable to temper the smile tugging at his lips.

“Yes, darlin’. I’m done.” Hal patted her on the cheek and gave Steve an approving nod.

Adriana turned adorable doe eyes up to Jack. “Uncle Jack, will you please dance with me?”

“I would be honored.” He took her hand and shot a warning look at Steve. “Careful with my wife there, Johnson.”

“Trust me, after she sees me dance, she’ll be running for the hills.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Savannah said with a smile. “We’ll practice until you’ve got it right.”

“Shannon cannot know about this,” he reminded her.

“I know. We’ll figure it out.” Savannah exchanged glances with Max and Jade.

“Oh yeah,” Max said with a determined look in her eyes. “Project
Teach Steve to Dance
is on!”

Steve looked at the door, debating making a run for it.

Jack clamped a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t even think about it. You’ve come this far.”

He’d walked into the barn asking a friend for help, thinking he’d never learn to dance. Two hours later he left to meet Shannon and make the campaign video, knowing there was no way his friends would let him fail. The girls had come up with a perfectly planned scheme that made Steve wonder if they were really CIA. Their husbands were willing participants, agreeing to watch their children while their wives helped Steve turn his second left foot into a righty, no matter how long it might take. They had code words for texting to alert Steve to meet them at the barn in case Shannon saw the text, he had a mental list of dance steps he was supposed to practice, and he had new appreciation for every man on earth who knew how to dance.

When he pulled up to the cabin, Shannon was standing on her tiptoes, reaching above her head, hanging a bird feeder in a tree. Three more bird feeders hung from the low branches of other trees.
Bird feeders
. He’d lived there for more than a decade, admired the birds every single day, and never once had he thought to hang bird feeders. Maybe that was because there were bears in the area.
Only my butterfly…
He wasn’t about to crush her beautiful spirit with that little fact.

He stepped from the truck and tossed his keys on the porch, noticing another new item. A welcome mat. They’d moved all of her things into his cabin the other night. He’d felt hope bloom inside him that one day he and the mountain might be enough for her. He’d known it was a dangerous thought, and seeing the mat and the bird feeders magnified that hope. He was setting himself up for a hell of a painful goodbye, but it was no use trying to change directions. His feelings for her, like the hope seeping into his very bones, was unstoppable.

He wrapped his arms around Shannon from behind and breathed her in.

Sunshine and seduction
.

“A welcome mat? Are we expecting company?”

She leaned back against him, sighing happily, and she melted like he’d seen Jade melt against Rex.

“In case you ever want to be social.”

“You’re all the company I need, Butterfly.”

SHANNON SAVORED THE feel of Steve’s strong arms wrapped around her. She’d missed him more than usual today. She’d spent the day researching the Cumberland property so she could include a bit of history on the website, and every article had brought her thoughts back to Steve. When she’d read about the Cumberlands’ ancestor working in the mines in the 1800s to save money to fulfill his dream of ranching, she’d wondered about Steve’s family’s history. When she read an article in the elementary school paper featuring a field trip to the Cumberland ranch to see the animals, she’d imagined Steve as a boy, on such a field trip, bonding with the animals and gazing out at the mountains, imagining living on them one day.

He turned her in his arms and butterflies fluttered in her belly.

“Oh, Grizz,” she said breathily. He was always gorgeous, but with his hair slicked back off his face, his smoldering slate-blue eyes looked twice as seductive. Unable to form another word, she ran her hands through his short hair, over his jaw, and around to the back of his neck. Without his long hair hiding his cheeks, his dark scruff made his chiseled features appear even sharper, more defined.

“You’re…
Look
at you. Will you hate me if I say you’re beautiful?”

His brow wrinkled. “I could never hate you, but…”

“You’re just so
hot
. Like,
forget the video and take me right here
hot.”

“Now we’re talking.” He clutched her ass and pulled her tight against him. He nipped at her lower lip and she felt her nipples pebble. “Glad you like it, baby. Skip the video?” He backed her up against the tree, kissing her deeply.

Her thoughts began to unravel, but they were running out of time. She forced herself to pull away. “We have to do the video.”

“Later?” His talented mouth claimed her neck, wreaking havoc with her ability to think straight.

“Yes,” she said breathily.

He pressed his arousal against her, and she heard herself moan, felt herself arching against him.

“Wait.” She pushed back again. “No,” she said with a laugh. “We
have
to do the video.”

He kissed the corner of her mouth. “Fine, baby. You can video us if you’re into that.”

She laughed and grabbed his face—the heated look in his eyes had her biting her lower lip. How could she turn him down when she wanted him so badly? He must have seen the fissure in her resolve, because he claimed her in another mind-numbing kiss, groaning with desire and driving her right up to the breaking point.

“Grizz,” she whispered against his lips. “The video.”

With a loud sigh he touched his forehead to hers. “You’re right. It’s just… I can’t get enough of you, and our time together is like a ticking time bomb.”

“I know.” She’d been thinking about that, too. And hating it.

“Maybe you should consider staying until winter.” His hopeful smile climbed all the way to his eyes. “To figure out what you want to do with your life.”

She ached at their looming reality. “I wish I could, but I have a whole life back home. Family, friends, my apartment.”

He took a step back and ran a hand over his short hair, regret swimming in his eyes as he muttered a curse. “I was only messing with you. Let’s do the video. You wanted to do it at the overlook, right?”

“Wait, Grizz.” She reached for him, but he kept walking. She followed him through the woods. “Shouldn’t we talk about this?”

He slowed and reached for her hand. “Shannon, it slipped out. Really. We both know we have
now
, nothing more. It was a silly comment.”

“Was it?” She searched his eyes, but they were shuttered. Unreadable.

“Of course. Come on. Tell me about your day on the way to the overlook.”

Reluctantly trying to let his comment go, she told him how she’d spent her day, but she
couldn’t
move past it.
I was messing with you
. He’d said that to her before, and he definitely hadn’t been messing with her then. How could she be sure he was now?

They chose a spot on an overlook with glorious mountain views and endless blue sky. Steve read over the script she’d written one last time.

“Treat said it’s perfect,” she said to his back as he looked out at the mountains. His shoulders rode high and tense. His arms were crossed, his biceps straining against his cotton shirtsleeves.

“He’s right. The way you’ve scripted it, if I weren’t involved, I’d give my left arm to be part of this project. You’re really talented, Shan.”

She placed her hands on his shoulders, kneading the tension from them. “Nervous?”

He scoffed. “Hardly. I just hope it works. But we both know what people want one day they don’t necessarily want the next.”

She couldn’t help but wonder if he was referring to her.

SHADOWS FROM TREES danced in the moonlight, cutting across the cabin floor. Country music streamed from Steve’s laptop as he weeded through the campaign’s Twitter feed.

“This is good, right? These tweets from other people?” Steve pointed to the Twitter stream. He and Shannon had been hunkering over their laptops ever since Treat had approved the video and they’d uploaded it and activated the crowdfunding campaign.

Shannon’s side was pressed against his. Her laptop was open beside his, with windows open to the campaign, Facebook, and the website’s email.

“Those are retweets and questions.” She typed in a response. “Retweets are good. Every time our tweet is retweeted, we capture that person’s audience. Then hopefully someone retweets and we gain the eyes of their followers.”

Steve nodded, wringing his hands together, his eyes shifting to the to-do list they’d created before making the campaign live. “Now that we’ve sent emails to all these contacts and asked them to spread the word—”

“And my family. They’re sending a link to their contacts, and Treat and his family are, too. Now we wait.” She typed in another tweet, then clicked over to Facebook while Steve replied to a question about the land.

“This is so stressful,” he said, moving back to Twitter. “Look at all the negative shit people say to each other. This one’s ragging on some model’s waist size. This one’s arguing about something Kanye West said. Don’t these people have lives? And how is this going to tap into the people we need to find? You worked so hard, and those tweets go so fast. How do people even focus on them?”

Shannon chuckled. “The world moves fast, Grizz.”

“No, baby. People’s attention spans are short, so
people
make things fast, not the world.”

She sighed, pushed him back against the cushions, and straddled his lap.

“Stop worrying. We’re following all the right people and the right companies and activists. We’ll get there.”

“I feel like I should be
doing
more. When something goes wrong on the mountain, I take care of it. An injured animal, partiers wreaking havoc, poachers, fragmenting habitats. Animals don’t know about boundaries, and when they venture outside the parks to feed, mate, or migrate, I do my best to protect them, to bring them back so they’re not killed. I take action; it’s what I do. This feels wrong, sitting back and
tweeting
.”

He gripped her hips and rocked his pelvis beneath her, but his body was too riddled with tension for him to fool her into thinking otherwise. His muscles were so tight she could bounce a quarter off of his bare chest.

“This is how the system works,” she said, gently stroking his clenched jaw. “Think of it like this. Someone spots a bear ambling onto the road. News travels via cell phones and radio, and a team shows up to get him back to safety.”

“Right. There’s order and processes in place.”

“Now, imagine that same bear ambling down the road. Someone posts a picture on Facebook, someone else posts a video on Twitter, and within fifteen minutes you have animal rights activists arguing with hunters who think they’ve found an easy target—and yes, you’ll have idiots who think they can get there before the proper authorities to pet the bear, but you also have those activists I mentioned. And you know, now that five thousand people have seen the video, some are from around the area, because audiences usually start local, and suddenly, there’s
action
. The activists stop the hunters, the police block the dummy who wants to pet the bear, and not only is the bear coerced back to safety, but now we have activists who are fighting to put up fencing so that doesn’t happen again.”

“Sounds chaotic, baby.”

“It is, but it’s also progress.” She leaned down and kissed him. “And it’s what’s going to make this campaign succeed.”

“Then I need to be distracted, because if I have to weed through the nonsense these people are tweeting about, I’ll lose my mind.” A devilish grin spread across his lips, and he began unbuttoning her shirt. “I know just the thing.”

She felt him go hard beneath her, and when he pressed his warm lips between her breasts, she closed her eyes.

“I’ve been aching to be inside you all day.” He finished unbuttoning her shirt and drew it off her shoulders. It drifted to the floor, and he ran his finger along the edge of her pink lace bra. “You’re so beautiful, baby.”

He lowered his mouth to the swell above her bra, fondling one breast while still clutching her hip. “I love kissing you.”

She was breathing too hard to respond. He unhooked the front clasp, and she arched forward, wanting his mouth on her. He slid the cups from her breasts, and she felt her nipples pebble against the cool air seconds before he took one in his mouth. Grabbing his head, she held him right where she wanted him, and he grazed his teeth over her nipple.

“Steve—” she pleaded.

He pushed her breasts together, flicking his tongue over each taut peak, and she couldn’t hold back a needy moan. When he sucked one nipple into his mouth, then the other, spikes of lust darted through her. She dug her fingers into his skull. Just when she didn’t think she could take another second of the exquisite pleasure, he tore her bra off and lifted her from his lap with a sinful groan. He rose to his feet, pressing their bare chests together, and took her in a punishingly passionate kiss. Thrusting his tongue to the same rhythm as he ground his hips, he made love to her mouth, hungrily and passionately, and it made her want to give him the same pleasures elsewhere. She cupped him though his jeans.