FULL NOVELXO In Your Dreams, Holden Rhodes: Chapter 27
I WAS in the middle of deadlifts at the gym when my phone buzzed.
Where would I buy smaller pieces of wood? Sadie texted. Like on the trellis outside the inn.
Sweat poured off of me while I caught my breath. Hardware store should have it. Is it rotting?
That trellis was old. West coast winters were mild and wet, and it needed a new coat of poly to protect it.
The typing dots appeared. I broke a piece. Forgot my keys at the bar last month and had to climb into a window upstairs.
My heart stopped. I saw a thousand images at once. Sadie climbing. Sadie slipping, falling, hair flying everywhere as she fell until she hit the ground with a sickening crunch.
It was Finn’s fall, all over again. My heart thudded in my chest and my hands shook.
She answered on the first ring. “Hi,” she chirped.
“What the fuck were you thinking, climbing the trellis?” I bit out. Blood pumped in my ears and terror suffocated me. People around the gym glanced over at my sharp tone.
The other end of the line was silent.
“Sadie,” I snapped.
“Don’t yell at me.” Her voice was just as sharp.
“That was a fucking stupid thing to do.” I dragged a hand over my face. My stomach was in knots. My shoulders were up by my ears. “That thing isn’t a ladder. It’s not designed to support someone climbing on it. Fuck. What the fuck were you thinking?”
“Oh my god, relax, Holden.” She huffed a defensive laugh. “You’re so uptight about everything.”
“This is serious,” I insisted.
“I’m fine.”
She could have been hurt. She could have broken something. What if she had dropped her phone and it broke, and she couldn’t call for help? What if she had a concussion like Finn did?
What if… worse?
The idea of Sadie getting hurt made my veins freeze.
I should have checked the lattice. I hadn’t inspected it in years. Fuck.
“You could have landed on a bush,” I spat out.
She paused. “A bush,” she repeated.
I sounded like a fucking asshole, but I couldn’t stop myself. The idea of her getting hurt made me sick.
“That Japanese maple out front has been there for over ten years,” I continued, because I couldn’t seem to shut up.
“Wow,” she drawled. “Well, thanks for your help on the trellis. Don’t bother coming to the bar tonight unless you want bleach in your beer.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Sadie, wait—”
She hung up.
I WAS WAITING on the porch when she got home that night.
She craned her neck to look at the garden on the side of the inn. She held a pizza box. “Is the Japanese maple okay? Thank god you were here to guard it.”
She shot me a cold look and I stood up. “I’m sorry. I was a dick.”
“Yes, you were.” She wouldn’t look at me as she climbed the steps and tried to pass me.
I put my arm out to stop her. “Hey, hold on a second. Let me apologize properly.”
She sighed and raised her gaze to mine. She shrugged. “Go ahead.”
I kept my hand on her upper arm while I raked the other through my hair. My stomach twisted. “I don’t like when people get hurt. Finn’s fucking insane, he gets into dangerous situations all the time and it freaks me out.”
I pictured her falling, falling, before the crunch, like I had been all evening, and a shudder rolled through me. The chill in her gaze melted a bit and she frowned.
“I don’t like being snapped at like that.” Her tentative gaze flicked up to mine. “I was really tired that night and I didn’t want to go all the way back to the bar.”
“You could have called me.” My tone was soft. “I would have come running.”
She snorted. “No, I think you would have been happy to get rid of me.” She smirked.
I glared at her. “Don’t say that.” I swallowed past the rocks in my throat. “I would never want you to get hurt. If you get locked out again, you call me, okay? Call me if you need anything, ever.”
She watched me for a second.
“Please say yes,” I whispered.
She nodded. “Okay.” She slanted me a look. “Actually, I do need help with something.”
“Anything.”
She lifted the pizza box with a serious expression. “I got the extra large again.”
A smile curled on my mouth and the tension eased from my shoulders. “That’s too much food for you.”
She held my gaze and raised her eyebrows. “It’s economical to get the biggest size. Help me with it?”
Ten minutes later, we had set up in the sitting room. Heat radiated from the fire in the wood stove and we had our feet up on the coffee table.
“How was the bar tonight?” I asked.
She finished chewing her bite of pizza. “Fine. Kind of quiet without you there.” She elbowed me. “Sorry.”
I shook my head. “I deserved it.”
“You did deserve it. I would have served you a beer full of foam anyway.”
I shook my head, smiling.
“What’s the deal with Finn and Olivia?” she asked before she took another bite. “I’m not allowed to ask Olivia about him.”
I sighed and settled back into the couch. “I don’t even know where to start. You remember she lived next door growing up?”
She nodded, chewing.
“They were best friends until they were eighteen. Went to prom together and everything.”
She studied my face. “What happened?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know. No one does. One day they stopped talking and neither of them will say why. Olivia left for university in Vancouver and came home every summer to work at the bar, Finn did his firefighter training and got a job here in town, but in the summers, he’d volunteer to get dispatched around the province.”
She made a thoughtful humming noise.
“Finn’s a lot,” I told her. “He’s impulsive and he loves an adrenaline rush.” That familiar stab of guilt hit me in the stomach. I made him like that. “Even when he was a kid, he loved a thrill. My mom calls him the devil because he finds trouble wherever he goes.”
Sadie’s mouth curled up. “He’s your opposite. You’d hate an adrenaline rush.”
I raked a hand through my hair. “I had one today, when I found out you almost fell.”
Her hand came to my arm, warming my skin through my shirt. The inn was silent except for the wood cracking and popping in the wood stove, and the beat of blood in my ears.
“Finn fell when he was a kid,” I admitted to her before telling her the full story.
“Oh my god,” she breathed. “That’s awful.”
“I was fourteen, so I should have known better. He was only ten.”
She frowned, staring up at me, before she shook her head. “No, Holden. It was an accident.”
“I should have been watching him,” I repeated. “My parents trusted me to watch him and I fucked up. He could have died.”
She shook her head again. “You made a mistake. We all screw up. Even if I did fall off the trellis, it wouldn’t be your fault. It would be mine for being stupid enough to climb a rotting trellis.”
I held her gaze. “If you got hurt, I don’t know what I would do.”
Her eyelids fluttered and she bit her lip before her gaze dropped to my mouth. My pulse sped up. I shifted to face her and my gaze flicked between her eyes and her mouth.
Fuck, I wanted her so goddamn bad.
“We shouldn’t,” she whispered, eyes on me.
“What if we did?”
She bit her lip and her gaze dropped to my mouth again.
I knew we shouldn’t. Her life was in Toronto, where she had friends and a neighborhood she loved and her dream job waiting for her. We didn’t want the same things, and the responsible thing to do would be for me to stand up and leave.
I was so fucking sick of being the responsible one, though. For once, I wanted to do the dangerous thing.
I wanted Sadie.
My hand came to her jaw and tilted her face up to mine. “Why are we fighting this?”
Her eyes glazed over, unfocused and adorable. “I can’t remember,” she murmured.
A smile curled on my lips and I lowered my head. “Me neither.”
When I kissed her, she sighed with relief, like she’d been thinking about it as often as I had been. My hand came to her hair, and the other wrapped around her back, pulling her to me. Her mouth was sweet and soft, but desire flared inside me, and I tilted her head back to open her up more before I tasted her.
“Been thinking about this nonstop.” I sucked her tongue and her back arched as she moaned. Blood rushed to my cock and my head swam as I inhaled her scent. I pulled her up to straddle my lap, running my hands over her hips and ass as she kissed me.
She nipped my bottom lip and my eyes rolled back in my head.
“Love it when you do that,” I murmured, my voice low. My hand moved up to her breast and I toyed with the stiff peak through her bra. She gasped.
“Oh my god.” Her hips bucked against me.
I bit back a groan as she worked my length through my jeans. “I guess that toy’s not doing it for you, huh?”
“It’s doing it just fine,” she said against my mouth.
“Show me.”
She pulled back with an embarrassed smile on her face. “No.”
“Let me use it on you, then.”
Her mouth fell open while amusement lit up her face. “No.”
Both of my hands were now on her tits, rubbing, pinching, tugging.
Her head fell back. “I can’t think when you do that, Holden.”
The way she said my name lit my control on fire. This little dance around each other was done. Every time we kissed, we both knew it was inevitable.
“So don’t think, Sadie. What do you want? Tell me.”
“I don’t know,” she breathed. One of my hands slipped down between her legs and stroked her over her jeans. “Oh my god.”
“You want my hand?” I asked in a low voice. “My mouth?” I stroked her again, slow with firm pressure, and her back arched as she pressed herself against me. “Or my cock? I promise I can make you come with any of those.”
She snorted with disbelief, still rocking against my hand. “Every guy thinks that.”
My eyebrows pulled together. “Don’t fucking test me, honey. I’ll give you one of each option, right after the other, until you’ve come too many times to think.” I wrapped my arms around her and stood, hoisting her into the air.
Her mouth returned to mine and I groaned into her. “I love your mouth,” she whispered, wrapping her legs around my hips.
I nipped her bottom lip and her breath caught. “You don’t even know what I can do yet.”
We kissed as I carried her up the stairs. My blood rushed with anticipation. Was this happening?
At the doorway to her bedroom, she put a hand of the doorframe to stop us. “Wait.”
I paused. Pink flushed her cheeks and she was breathing hard. Her other hand came to my shoulder and her gaze locked on mine, wide and uncertain.
“If we do this, we should be careful,” she whispered, eyes on me.
I pressed her against the doorframe and lowered my mouth to the soft, smooth skin of her neck. “I have a condom.”
“No,” she breathed. “I mean, yes, that’s good, but I meant in terms of our deal.”
I stilled. “What do you mean?” I asked against the dip at the bottom of her neck.
“We want different things, in the end, and I’m going back to Toronto,” she whispered into my hair. “So we should be careful.”
I hated that she was right. I lifted my head and searched her eyes. “What do you want?”
She wet her lips. “Friends with benefits.”
I frowned at her.
“It’ll be easier this way,” she insisted. “When you find someone, we end it. No attachments, just sex.”
Just sex. It already wasn’t just sex. I craved her. I’d been thinking about her for weeks. I thought about her laughing at the bar, how excited she had been over bathroom tiles, and the way her eyes lit up when she pitched the renovations to me all those weeks ago.
The way we almost kissed in the forest. The way I thought about her constantly.
I knew she was going home, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t enjoy it while she was here.
“Fine.”
She relaxed in my arms.
I tilted my chin to the bedroom. “Can we go inside now?”
She grinned and nodded, and I dropped my mouth to hers.