Instant Temptation (Wilder #3)(79)

“What?” he asked. “What is it you’d have me offer you, Harley?”

When she just closed her eyes, caught between a rock and a hard spot, between her hopes and dreams, he shook his head. “You let me make love to you one night in my truck a million years ago, and it was apparently so bad that you spent the next decade avoiding me. Then I coerce you into spending time with me by following you to Desolation, where if I’m not mistaken, we had a much better than

‘fine’ time. Yet you back off again. So the message I’m getting is that you’re going to back off no matter what, and hide behind the ‘I’m leaving’ thing. Do I have that right, Harley?”

“You are leaving!”

His eyes narrowed, dark and turbulent. “You like to throw my lack of commitment out there, but you need to be honest, at least with yourself.”

She opened her mouth but he put a finger over her lips. “It’s not all me,” he told her. “You’re holding back, too. But the difference is that I know we could at least try to make this work.” He stepped away from her, and just like that, she felt cold and more alone than she had in a long time.

“You just don’t want to,” he said, and then was gone.





CHAPTER 26


TJ took his bike for a long, mind-numbing ride. On the way back through town, he refueled, and though it was past midnight, as he drove by Nolan’s Garage, he saw that the lights were on.

Nolan looked up from his desk when TJ knocked on his office door. “TJ,” he said, his expression carefully blank.

“You’re working late,” TJ said.

“Yeah.”

They looked at each other a long beat.

“What can I do for you?” Nolan finally asked.

A legitimate question. They both knew that Nick handled all of Wilder Adventures’ mechanical issues. And it wasn’t as if TJ and Nolan were friends. Nolan was relatively new to town, and TJ was gone too much for their paths to have crossed more than a few times.

Still, there’d never been any animosity or tension between them.

Until now.

“Let me take a guess.” Nolan leaned back in his chair. “This is about Harley. You should know that she dumped me.”

TJ acknowledged that with a nod. “Sucks.”

“I suppose you scored a date tonight.”

“No. I didn’t.”

Nolan absorbed that, then blew out a breath. “You know, I really wanted you to be a dick so I could hate you. Or at least so she could hate you. Especially since then I might have had a shot.”

TJ took that in a moment. Decided it wasn’t entirely out of character for him to be a dick when it came to a woman. But not this woman. “Did you fire her?”

“You mean after she dumped me for you?” Nolan pushed away his laptop and rose to his feet. He came around the front of his desk, then leaned back on it, arms and ankles crossed. A casual pose. “No. She’s a friend. I wouldn’t do that to her.”

TJ let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “She didn’t dump you for me.”

Nolan raised a brow.

“She dumped me, too.”

Nolan’s arms dropped to his sides and his brow practically disappeared into his hairline. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

Nolan thought about that a moment, then frowned. “So why are you here?”

“I just wanted to make sure you didn’t fire her.”

“She dumped you and you’re still worried about her.”

TJ scrubbed a hand down his face. “Yeah.”

Nolan just stared at him for a long beat, then shook his head.

“Do we have a problem?” TJ asked.

Nolan shook his head, again. “No. Not that I haven’t given thought to smashing your face in several times over the past week, but there doesn’t seem to be much point in it now, other than to make me feel better.”

TJ nodded. He understood the sentiment perfectly. He moved to the door. “I’m leaving town for a while. I just wanted to know that she’ll have a job if she wants it.”

“But you’ve offered her a job at Wilder.”

“Yes, but I’m not sure she’ll take it. She’d rather choke on her pride than admit she needs anything, especially that job.”

“Yeah. She doesn’t do need well,” Nolan said with a small smile. “But she does know what she wants. And if that’s this job, here with me, then it’s hers.”

TJ nodded and turned to leave.

“That also applies to the man in her life.”

At that, TJ went still.

“If you’ve screwed something up and the man she now wants turns out to be me, you’re going to have to deal with that.”

Slowly TJ turned back to face Nolan, who was suddenly looking a whole lot more alpha than his usual quiet, mild-tempered self. “I suppose I will.”

And hopefully before that happened, he’d be 3,000 miles away on an ice climb, out of cell range, out of radio range, out of heart-hurts-like-hell range.

When TJ entered the lodge kitchen the next morning, his brothers were already there, mainlining caffeine. In the very center of the room, built to be huge and airy, stood a large butcher-block table, sturdy and capable of feeding the masses.