Mama’s Boy by Avery Flynn

Chapter Twenty-Three

Fiona

Fionawas not thinking about condoms. She was not.

She was thinking about sex. Hot, sweaty, we’ve-gotta-keep-warm-in-this-tent-somehow fucking. It was wreaking havoc on her blood pressure and her ability to string together enough words to form a sentence. Especially when Dixon was outside the tent in just a gray Henley, jeans, and work boots, chopping wood for their fire.

His sleeves were pulled up to his elbows, showing off forearms that did not look like they belonged to a CEO. And the way his long, strong fingers wrapped around the ax handle was enough to give a nun dirty thoughts—and Fiona, quite frankly, did not need any help. She had a very vivid imagination. Seriously. It was like the universe had taken a peek inside her favorite vibrator-time stories and said, Oh yeah, this one!

He set down the ax and tilted his head in question. “Are you feeling okay? You look a little flushed.”

“I’m fine. I just need some space.” Mars would probably give her enough. Maybe Jupiter.

“Don’t go too far,” he called out as he gathered the wood and carried it to the fire. “You don’t want to run into a bear.”

She jerked to a stop, her hand on the rough bark of a tree surrounding the campsite. “There are bears?”

“Gotcha,” he said with a wink.

Stifling a chuckle at how well he’d played that, Fiona dug deep for her inner Fallon and rolled her eyes instead. Sticking to the path that led up the rocky hill, she let out a deep breath and exhaled some of the tension pulling her shoulders tight. Of course, the other kind of tension would have to wait until she was back home with her vibrator and candlelight. Yeah, that was her idea of date night for the foreseeable future.

It sure wasn’t laughing at Dixon’s corny jokes or falling into the trap of feeling sorry for him because of the whole boner incident. Really? Who hadn’t spent their entire puberty eyebrows deep in one humiliation or another? He was a rich jerk who only wanted to win a stupid bet. She was simply exploiting that weakness so she could get a foot in the door for Nana. This was transactional. There would be no bonding, no connection, no giving in to that electric attraction that had her as wired to his touch as one of those old-timey transistor radios.

She was so caught up in her stay-the-fuck-away-from-him pep talk to herself that she was at the top of the hill before she realized it. Holding on to a thick pine tree trunk, she looked out and took in the view. It was like a bucolic landscape painting come to life. The lake, the house, the leaves coming down like they were on a Hollywood movie set, it was all like a dream right up until she heard the branch crack behind her.

“Grrrrrrrr!”

Fiona let out a scream of surprise as she jumped and whirled around. Her fight-or-flight response had gone into overdrive. She didn’t think, just reacted, and landed a hard right jab to Dixon’s nose before she’d even sucked air into her lungs. He stumbled back a step, holding his hand to his face. If she was super smart like her sister Felicia, she’d be using all that brainpower right about now to go back in time three whole minutes.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Way to go, badass.

Yeah, she couldn’t even do that right.

“Oh shit,” she said, her entire body cringing with regret. “I thought you were a bear.”

Did that sound as ridiculous to him as it did to her now? Grrr? Really? Judging by the way both his eyebrows went up, oh yeah it did.

Oh God. Could this get any worse?

He took his hand away from his nose, and there was blood—not a lot but enough to remind her that yes, it absolutely, for sure, without a doubt could get worse. When it came to her luck with men, that was the one thing she could always depend on.