Mama’s Boy by Avery Flynn

Chapter Twenty-Six

Dixon

Hourslater, the fire was almost down to embers, and the air was going from cool to cold as he and Fiona sat under the stars. It wasn’t right to be this relaxed around her.

“So there’s Frankie, holding the pie above his head while Felicia’s cat is literally climbing him like a tree, and there is total chaos everywhere else in the kitchen as my mom is trying to catch the neighbor’s dog that had snuck into the house and tore through the Christmas cookies laid out on the counter. I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t even save the no-bake cookies, and they are my favorite.”

“Your family sounds like the kind of people my grandma would have loved.” Loud. Fun-loving. At ease with themselves. That was pretty much Grandma Betty.

Fiona rubbed her hands over her arms, her words coming out in little puffs of air. “Judging by how it seems your grandma lived her life, they would have loved her right back.”

“She was something else,” he said, scooting closer to Fiona on the log so they were hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder in order to share his body heat. It was just the right thing to do. She was obviously cold, and he was a selfish bastard who wasn’t ready to call it a night yet. “She started Beckett Cosmetics after my grandfather died in Vietnam. She went door to door at first, then got in with a woman doing Tupperware parties, and now we’re in every state in the country and are growing our share of the international market.”

She inched over just enough that their bodies lined up perfectly. “That’s pretty impressive.”

“When she retired, she handed off the business to her kids.” He kept his gaze on the ever-shrinking orange flames, but he was ultra-aware of Fiona, and when she shivered from the cold, he put his arm around her, holding her close. His fingertips barely brushed the outside of her denim-covered thigh, but the awareness of her still hit him like a frozen snowball to the back of the head. “That’s when we ended up spending every summer here with her. It was the only time of the year when any of us got to just run free. At my house, it was one tutor or extracurricular after the other so I’d have whatever edge was needed to get into the exclusive old-money schools when our money was so new, you could still smell the ink.”

She laid her head against his shoulder. “Is that how it was for Griff and Nash?”

“Not exactly, but it wasn’t any less stressful.” He looked up at the sky. He couldn’t hold her out here like this much longer. He was an asshole, but he wasn’t the give-a-woman-frostbite kind of asshole. “But out here, especially on this island, we were just kids. No expectations. No running to catch up. No pressure to get it perfect the first time.”

“No having to always win,” she said, her soft words barely louder than the snap, crackle, pop of the dying fire neither of them was looking away from.

“Nah, there was always that,” he said. “Some things are just ingrained in the Beckett DNA.”

She tilted up her chin, her face so very, very near his, her full lips curled into a small grin. “You’re a mess, Dixon Beckett.”

He laughed and glanced down at Fiona. “But a winning mess.”

And that’s what mattered. Primum est rem.

Eye on the prize, Beckett.

That little voice in his head was screaming into the void, though, because at that moment, he couldn’t stop looking at her. He was so fucked.

“Well,” she said, standing up fast and quickly stepping away. “We’d better go in before it gets much colder.”

Take a hint, Beckett. She is not into you.

“Good plan.” That he absolutely hated.

Together, they made quick work of picking up everything and putting out the fire’s last embers. He held the tent flap open for her, and she walked inside. He followed behind.

“You can have it,” he said, tipping his chin toward the single sleeping bag.

Fiona shook her head. “You take it.”

Yeah, that wasn’t gonna happen.

“As a man, I have a higher body temperature than a woman, so I’ll do better without it than you will.”

She planted her hands on her round hips, one of which was jutted out, and glared at him. “Are you trying to piss me off?”

“No.” He was trying to do the right thing. “Are we having our first fight?”

“Yes, and you’re not winning this one.” She pointed to the sleeping bag. “Either get in or no one is going to use it.”

What, she thought she could just upend his life by making it so he’d just accept losing? So they stood there. And stood there. And then they stood there some more because she obviously was the most stubborn and completely wrong person to ever have been born. There was no way he was giving in.

She shivered.

He ignored it.

Then she shivered again.

Dammit.

“Fine,” he said, stripping off his jacket and folding it up for a pillow. “Let’s both get in.”

Five minutes later, Dixon was calling himself sixty different kinds of fool for giving her the W. At six feet even, fitting into the sleeping bag on his own would have been a somewhat tight fit. Add in Fiona, who easily looked him in the eye when they were facing off, and it was beyond snug. Spooning in the sleeping bag, he inhaled the vanilla scent of her shampoo with every breath, and her perfect ass was tucked up against him. And even though he was up to the twenty-sixth times table, there was no way to stop his dick from getting hard and pressing against her softness. Christ, he had to get out of this damn sleeping bag before he forgot that all of this was just to win a bet. That was all. Nothing else.

Fiona shifted, rolling over in the close confines so they were face-to-face. She wet her lips and tugged the bottom one between her teeth as she looked up at him from underneath her eyelashes. There was no moving. No escape. Dixon was held in place by the nearly overwhelming need to kiss her until they both forgot why they were here in the first place.

“Do you have a headache?” she asked, her words soft.

“No.” His cock ached. Fuck, when had he ever been this hard before? Never. But with Fiona? Yeah, it was all he could do to remember to breathe when they were this close.

She brought one hand up, pressed her palm to his chest above where his heart was beating like crazy. “I don’t hate dogs.”

“I know.”

It was all he could say, because every fiber in his being was working overtime to keep from reaching out, from dragging her on top of him and fucking her until she screamed out and came, riding him hard. Then Fiona leaned her head closer, brushed her lips across his, her tongue teasing his apart. The moment he let her in, it was all over, and he’d never been more glad to lose in his life.