South Dakota Showdown by Nicole Helm

Author:Nicole Helm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2019-12-03T16:21:15+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

He was tired, and he should sleep. Or eat. Or hydrate. He should do a long list of things that did not include sitting here wishing Liza would put her hands on more than just his battered face.

Her fingertips were solace against all the throbbing and burning. She was all he wanted, and he was tired enough of all this around them to think... It wouldn’t be so wrong. It wouldn’t compromise anything. Even knowing she thought his brother could have gone back. Even though she’d gone back.

Get up. Focus on the task at hand.

But he realized here, in this shimmering heat between him and Liza, that all the ways he’d been good and upstanding and dedicated to his job and the law the past fifteen years were only because she hadn’t been there.

If she had been, everything would have come second to her. It always did. He leaned closer, keeping his arms at his sides even as her fingers slid through his hair.

“What are we doing here?” she asked, a whisper. Her eyes were shiny, and she shook her head almost imperceptibly.

But she didn’t move away. She didn’t look away.

He knew what she was asking, but he didn’t want to answer that question. “Waiting for the sun to set.”

She tried to smile. “Well, if we’re just waiting.” She slid onto his lap, an easy, fluid movement that reminded him of a past that had been easier, oddly. He’d felt more in danger, more desperate back then, but it had been...youth. He’d thought he could fight for right and always win, but the past fifteen years had taught him otherwise at every turn.

Right didn’t always win. Good didn’t always come out on top. Yet he’d never been able to give up the hope that it would, that it could.

And here she was—his good, his hope. He gave himself leave to slide his hands down her back. Fifteen years since he’d touched her like this, but there was no difference in this moment.

“Do you remember our first time?” she asked, her hands cupping his jaw gently so as to not put too much pressure on his bruises, her mouth brushing just below his ear.

It was a visceral memory. An awful lot like this—his grandmother’s barn instead of an abandoned shack, safety instead of danger, but Liza making all the moves and him accepting them, even as his rational mind told him not to. Too many things piling against him—knowing it wasn’t the right time, that it wasn’t right, and giving in anyway.

Because Liza was always right.

“Yeah, I remember.”

“You wanted to wait. You always wanted to wait.” She looked at him, so close they were nose to nose and he could count every faint freckle that dusted across her nose. He could catalog the way her face had changed and hadn’t. But he only drowned in the dark brown of her eyes.

“What were you waiting for, Jamison?”

“I’m not sure I remember,” he lied easily. Because lying to her about how he

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