“You just what?” he asked, his voice dipping low. That something shimmered, just out of reach—if I only took hold of it.
But I couldn’t say it. Damn my weakness, but I couldn’t admit it. “Just… didn’t want you to have more leverage,” I finished, lifting my chin.
The dense tension between us dropped, suddenly. Spencer’s expression shifted infinitesimally, tinged with disappointment, but then he rallied with a hint of amusement. “Well, we wouldn’t want that, Dr. Mrs. ‘If-You-Can-Catch-Me’ Spencer.”
“Bit of a mouthful,” I breathed out. The knot in my throat eased, but it left a bitter tang behind.
“You’re right. ‘Spencer-Caught-Me,’ is much shorter.” Now he was challenging me, and we were back in familiar territory.
A spike of adrenaline rushed through my blood. My near confession about missing him, about wanting him to stay had made me lightheaded and woozy, but now Spencer’s warm eyes were promising forbidden things–exciting things. If I couldn’t be reckless with my heart, then I could damn well be reckless about everything else. “I don’t know—I seem to remember threats that accompanied that.” I looked down at my bulky outerwear. “Doesn’t look dripping wet to me.”
Fire flashed in his gaze. “You do look like you’re over your illness. Isn’t that what I said?” He stepped nearer, and finally, we were close enough that we shared frosty air, and I had to tilt my head back to regard him. “Put a pin in it?”
Desire replaced adrenaline, flooding my system. “Or pin me? Something like that.”
His gloved hand reached up and slid around the back of my neck, pulling my body against his. “Pin you to what?” he whispered low.
There was a God, and He wanted me to get laid again. Praise heaven. And this time, non-virginal Arabella knew what she wanted. I licked my dry lips, wondering if he would play along or tell me to knock it off. As I searched his handsome face, flitting over the stark need in his gaze and the tilt to his mouth, I had a pretty good guess what he would do. Spencer had said it himself: he loved to play.
“That depends,” I replied.
“On?” Spencer was devouring me with his eyes now, his body radiating heat into mine.
“If you can catch me.”
And then I ran. Dropping the hardware cloth I’d been clutching in my frozen hand and pivoting on my heel, I booked it through the ankle-deep snow and toward the barn. I’d already imagined this once before. What I would do—how it would make me feel. I wanted to be scared. I wanted adrenaline and desire to swirl into a heady concoction in my blood, heightening all the sensations Spencer had awakened in me since he’d shown up here at my ranch. I wanted the thrill of the chase.
The question was, did he? I spared a look over my shoulder, expecting him to immediately gain on me, but I found him still standing by the goat pen, his eyes on his watch and his mouth counting. For a sinking second, I thought maybe he was going to let me run and prove that I’d read all our interactions wrong. I thought he might let me humiliate myself completely. But then I realized he was counting. Giving me a head start.
Cocky fucker.
I ran fast, sprinting until the world became a blur in my periphery, and my legs pumped in a steady cadence that far outpaced my heartbeat. In the snow, it was harder, but my ranch wasn’t all wide, open range. I veered right, putting all I had into the sprint and using my long legs to my advantage, and my path took me past the round pen and between a shed and an outbuilding. That would obscure me from his sight, wherever he was. Then I banked another hard right away from the large, twenty-stall barn.
It felt good to run—and even better to get chased. The thrill sang through me, lighting my blood on fire and waking the nerves in my body. My lungs were shrieking already, pulling in too hard with painful gusts, but I didn’t care. I’d been convalescing for so long, I was practically embalmed. I was alive again, barely even considering the delicious prize a failure might bring me.
I wove my way through smaller structures—sheds and stacks of feeding tubs—and then I scrambled in a horseshoe shape, trying to throw him off and knowing that he could easily track me in the snow, anyway. I slid into a deteriorating, ancient outbuilding that hadn’t been used in so long, the wood groaned from a light breeze. But I knew something Spencer didn’t know—this place was a fucking antiquity. It had been here since law and order answered to revolvers and spurs, and there were secrets embedded in the property that only I was aware of.
As I scrambled to a trap door on the dusty floor, it occurred to me that I might be making this a little too hard. My competitive nature might actually be cockblocking me right now, but I didn’t have time to think it through, really. I was acting on instinct. I’d kindled a primal fear in my DNA—escape. Hide. Don’t get caught.
The trap door squealed on its hinges, barely giving me enough room to scramble down into it. A strong waft of musty earth enveloped me, and then I was down and easing the door shut. No sooner had I done that than I heard the thunder of footsteps outside the ramshackle structure, and I ducked down in the darkness, moving forward. This tunnel—which was a generous term, really—only reached up four feet high and had been walled with rotting wood and packed dirt. Roots brushed the top of my head as I scurried along the tunnel, and my breath filled the musty, strangely warm space as I made my way through it.
I half expected Spencer to join me, to wrench back the trap door, storm down the tunnel, and drag me back to the house. But the only sound in the short, connected path was my footfalls and labored breathing.
Shit, had I actually made this too hard for him? Surely, he would see my footprints in the snow and make some educated guesses? A new kind of fear buzzed through me—the fear of rejection. Maybe I’d angered him for making it too hard. It wasa stupid fear, but it wouldn’t have been the first time I’d been scorned for overachieving. My classmates in high school… The skiing trip… Swirling winds and biting snow…
My breath came in ragged gasps by the time I reached the connecting trap door. My fear had morphed, somehow. As always, my fucking brain ruined everything. As I pushed the door open to the heated, twenty-stall barn, I had myself fully convinced that Spencer had gotten turned off by my games. I had tried too hard again. Done too much. I was always too much. Too fiery, too know-it-all, too determined, too over-achieving. I couldn’t even play sexy games without being entirely too much.
My arms shook so much, I barely managed to leverage myself up the short ladder and out of the hole. Coughing, I tried to shove my fears of rejection down, down, deep into the recesses of my heart where the rest of my insecurities had been forcefully laid to rest.
And then, without warning, an iron arm encircled my waist, and I found myself bodily lifted the rest of the way up. I barely had a moment to gasp in surprise before strong hands whirled me around, and my back slammed against a wooden wall. The trap door let out at the back corner of the barn, away from the main entrance and in a walled-off area where we kept spare tack on the walls and old, unused items from previous owners.
Spencer loomed over me, a fiendish glint in his dark eyes, his pupils blown wide and his hand circling my throat lightly. As I wheezed and puffed, he stood over me, perfectly composed. And smirking. The bastard was smirking.
“That was very sneaky of you Dr. Mrs. Spencer.”
I gaped at him, my tumultuous feelings tumbling and freewheeling uncontrollably. He hadn’t given up. He’d bested me. I wasn’t too much. He hadn’t lost interest. In fact, as he bent his lips to my neck and whipped my scarf away from my dewy skin, he pressed his body flush against mine to irrefutablyprove how interested he was. His interest was very hard and very defined, pressing against my lower belly.
“Holy shit,” I gusted out.
