ME: I just stopped by the bank. What did you do?
I tried calling him again. Again, he didn’t pick up.
ME: If you don’t answer me, I’m going to hunt you down.
A dropped pin on a map appeared in my messages.
The address August sent me took me to the construction site Matt had mentioned during our run.
I shut the car door so hard it lifted the hem of my white eyelet dress. So many emotions whirred inside me as I stomped toward the site that I didn’t feel the ground beneath my feet or the sun in my hair. I felt like a livewire, jumpy and ready to electrocute anyone who came in between me and my target: August Watt.
I walked around the work site until I located him.
The man who’d looked at a traffic light instead of at me and yet who’d deposited an ungodly amount of money into my bank account.
The man who hadn’t taken any of my calls and yet had sent me his location.
The man who was wearing a hard hat even though he’d crashed in a helicopter and survived.
The man who made my heart sprint and my navel burn and yet who was no longer mine to hold.
“August Watt!” I yelled.
I must’ve called out his name really loudly because every single worker swiveled around.
August looked up from a blueprint stretched over a work table. Unhurriedly, he exchanged a few words with one of his men before strolling toward me, hands in the pockets of a pair of faded jeans.
His body ate up the sun and the land and the sky and all of the ambient noise.
Once he stood in front of me, I craned my neck.
“Yes?” His husky voice brushed over the tip of my nose.
I swallowed because my mind had gone blank, and I couldn’t remember why I’d come. And why I was mad. Was I even mad?
Oh, yes. I was livid.
I narrowed my eyes. “What the hell’s gotten into you?”
“Funny.” He crossed his arms, making all of his muscles pop. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“I didn’t deposit”-I dropped my voice to a hiss-“five hundred thousand dollars into your account.”
“No, you put your life on the line for your ex. Your fucking ex who then proceeded to tell me to fuck off. So let me turn that question on you; what the hell’s gotten into you?” His jaw clenched so hard it sapped all the curves from his face. Even his full lips looked etched in steel instead of skin.
“I hope you didn’t give me all your money, because you’re going to owe your mom a whole bunch for all the cursing.”
His mouth didn’t even twitch, which alerted me to the fact that he was well and truly mad.
I sighed. “Why?”
“Why did I give you that money? Because it was owed to you.”
“Owed to me? What are you talking about?”
“When we bought your family’s business, we got it at a bargain price. Dad never felt right for paying your mother such a pittance.”
My jaw slackened but then snapped shut. “Mom never thought you guys underpaid, August.”
“But the fact is we did.”
“No you didn’t. You paid the amount it was worth at the time.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because it’s half a million dollars,” I whisper-shouted. “You can’t just go around gifting that much money to people.”
“You’re not people,” he said, a tad more softly.
“What am I?”
“I was hoping you could help me define that.”
Even though I stood in his shadow, heat still pricked my skin. I suspected it had little to do with the sun and everything to do with the looming male.
“Why did Liam tell me to fuck off, Ness? What exactly happened back at the inn? What did you promise him?”
I pushed my hair off my face. “I promised him that I would stop . . . whatever it is we’d started . . . to prep him for his duel.”
His dark eyebrows dipped. “Why would you have to stop seeing me to prep him for his duel?”
I averted my gaze, studied a dusty clump of grass next to August’s heavy-duty work boots. “He wants a hundred percent of my attention.”
August snorted. After a stretch of silence, he muttered, “You forgot to flick me.”
I returned my gaze to his. Every time he’d grunted in the past, I’d flicked him to show him how often he resorted to making that caveman noise instead of using words. “If I touch you, your scent”-spice, wood, earth, heat, home-“it’ll rub off on me, and he’ll know I saw you.”
A muscle flexed in his forearm. “So what?”
“So he’ll fight Cassandra without my input.” I rolled the hem of my dress between my fingers.
“I’m not sure whether to be offended or fucking jealous that he wants you back so badly he’d lure you away with blackmail.” His warm breath fanned against my forehead. “Look at me, Dimples.”
I raised my gaze to his, but not because he’d asked. Because he’d called me that nickname that made me feel knee-high to a ladybug. “August, you know I can’t stand that nickname.”
“And I can’t stand that my girlfriend is breaking up with me over her ex’s bruised ego. So I’ll call you what I want to from now on, the same way you did what you wanted yesterday.”
I sucked in a breath that burst right back out of my mouth. “August, I didn’t want this. His confidence was going to get him killed!”