Seducing Sawyer (Wishing Well, Texas Book 7)

by Melanie Shawn

  “Yeah, honest,” I repeated as a nervous laugh tumbled from me.

  I wasn’t sure if it was an anxious chuckle because I sort of felt like this entire plan of mine was a little dishonest, or if it was a giddy giggle because we’d said the same word so, obviously, we belonged together.

  He took the design from my hand. The roughened pads of his fingertips grazed along my knuckles as he did. By now, I should be used to the contact. We had spent the entire day brushing against each other. Our shoulders, our arms, my front to his back, his front to my back. But instead of growing immune to his touch, with each innocent skim I became more sexually charged.

  His head lifted from the papers, and he looked around the screened-in space.

  Setting the scene for him, I explained, “I picture myself having my coffee here in the morning and dinners out here at night.”

  He nodded as he looked down at the paper and began folding it again.

  I could feel the clock ticking on him leaving. My window of opportunity was shutting, and I knew I needed to squeeze one more question in. It was a doozy so I did my five-second countdown, opened my mouth, and blurted out, “If you could change anything about your childhood, what would it be?”

  Slowly, he lifted his eyes to mine. For a brief moment, I thought he was going to just turn around and leave or tell me to mind my own business. Sawyer was fiercely protective of his family, and I wasn’t sure if he’d take the question as an insult.

  “What about you?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “If you could change anything about how you were raised, what would it be?”

  “Oh, um…well…”

  It took me off guard since it was the first time he’d turned the tables on me. I knew the answer, but I was scared that it would reveal too much. I worried that if I let him behind the curtain, he would run screaming, or more likely walk silently, out of my life, never to be heard from again.

  I thought about coming up with a different answer. Something less revealing. Something safer, like I wish we would’ve had more family game nights. But I quickly dismissed going that route. If I wanted him to trust me, to let me in, then I needed to trust him and let him in.

  Before I could talk myself out of it, I walked to the edge of the confession cliff and jumped off. “I wish that my parents would’ve seen me. I know they loved me, but I wish that they had seen me. I always felt invisible. Everything we did, everything in our lives revolved around the shop and the triplets. I was just kind of along for the ride.”

  He didn’t respond and my mind filled in the blanks of what he was thinking.

  He thinks I’m a spoiled brat. That I am a self-centered, attention-starved girl with serious emotional issues.

  I tried to fix the damage I’d done and show him that wasn’t who I was. I wanted to show him that I was a woman that took responsibility for her own life. “It was my fault. I never spoke up. I never asked for what I wanted. I just went along with everything because I wanted to be the good daughter. I thought that if I did, they…”

  My words trailed off because before I finished my sentence. I’d inadvertently come full circle from taking responsibility back to being the attention-starved girl. At least I knew the man of few words standing in front of me wouldn’t point it out.

  “They would notice you.” He finished.

  Whelp, I guess I was wrong. Now that we’d established that I was self-centered, I figured that he would take it as his cue to exit. But again, I was wrong.

  His expression turned pensive. “My mom stopped by the other day and apologized for the amount of responsibility that I’d had with my brothers and sister. She thought that it was her fault that I’m still single. But, I didn’t mind helping out. I guess the only thing I would’ve changed was I wish I could have had my own room and didn’t have to share a bathroom with Wyatt, Jackson, Beau, and JJ.”

  Gravity was pulling my jaw down from the shock and disbelief that what had just happened had actually happened. Sawyer had answered all of my questions today, but never with more than one word or sentence. For Sawyer that’d practically been an essay.

  As excited as I was about that development, I couldn’t help but want to ask why he was single, but I knew that I should consider his answer a win and move on. I should stick to the plan. The intimacy experiment was apparently working, and there was nothing in the study about follow-up questions. Though I wasn’t sure when I’d get another opening like this.

  I was still battling with whether or not to satisfy my curiosity when he grinned, handed me back my paper, and said, “Better get going.”

  “Oh, right.”

  After grabbing his tools, I walked him to the door and said goodbye. As he walked past me, his arm slid against mine, and something wonderfully unexpected happened. It was no surprise that my body responded as it always did, with tingly fireworks exploding like it was the Fourth of July, but, it appeared that I wasn’t alone in my reaction.

  When Sawyer’s forearm connected with mine, he paused halfway out of my door. He remained in place, not moving his arm forward or pulling it back, we were skin to skin. There was a seismic shift in energy. An intimacy that hadn’t been there a moment before now settled between us. When I felt it, my brain told me that it was just in my head, that I imagined it. Facing that possibility, I tilted my head up to see if that was the case.

  What I saw stole my breath away. Sawyer was staring down where our bodies touched. His eyes were locked on our innocent contact. I watched raw emotions play across his face as I felt the back of his hand, his knuckles brush back and forth and up and down slowly in a whisper-soft caress along my arm. The delicate motion was such a stark contrast to his dominating presence that it increased the erotic magnitude of the moment to almost unbearable levels.

  I couldn’t breathe as a hurricane of arousal lashed through me. My knees weakened from the tornado force of need that whipped around me. Dizziness assaulted me as tsunami waves of lust crashed over me.

  Then, as fast as the storm rolled in, it cleared. One second Sawyer was beside me, the next he was gone. I blinked, and he was climbing in his truck and driving away.

  For a moment I entertained the possibility that the entire thing had been in my head. I wondered if I’d imagined it. Was it just a visualization that I’d inadvertently had?

  The one thing that I knew for certain was that I could still feel the trail of embers that the heat of his touch had left on my arm. The sensation was proof that something had happened, I just had no idea what. But I was hoping to find out…

  Chapter 13

  Sawyer

  “Doin’ the right thing doesn’t make you a saint, it makes you a man.”

  ~ Grant Turner

  Just do it.

  Those three words played over and over in my mind, but the Nike slogan wasn’t quite getting the job done. I’d been sitting in my truck parked in my driveway for the past ten minutes staring at the text that I’d written, deleted, written, deleted, and written again. I knew that I needed to press send but I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to pull the trigger.

  I was sure that my inability to do what needed to be done had something to do with the fact that I hadn’t slept. All night my mind wouldn’t shut off. I was kicking myself for not leaving after the last cabinet had been hung. If I hadn’t gone out to see the plans she had for the screened-in porch, I never would’ve told her about the conversation with my mom. I wouldn’t be thinking about her childhood and how she must’ve felt living in the shadow of the Turner Triplets and The Flower Pot. I would never have given into the impulse to touch her soft skin, to let myself indulge, just for a moment, in the fantasy of more with her.

  All night, I’d lain in bed blaming myself for giving into the need to touch Delilah. I tried to pat myself on the back for being able to walk away even after I felt and saw how her body reacted to my touch. How my body reacted to touching her.

  The deep connection that I’d felt for her at that moment was more than jus
t physical, although that was a huge part of it. What I’d felt for her was soul-deep. It was powerful, pure, and sensual as hell. Walking away from it, from her, had been one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I still didn’t know how I’d managed to pull off such a feat, but I was confident that if faced with it again, I wouldn’t be so strong.

  All three of my previous romantic relationships hadn’t just ended in heartbreak, they’d ended in tragedy. I was not about to risk anything happening to Delilah. Which is why I needed to send this message.

  My thumb pushed against the screen and I immediately turned off my phone, so I couldn’t change my mind and undo what I’d just done. I glanced up in the rearview mirror to make sure it was clear. I pulled the gearshift down into reverse and noticed my reflection. I had dark circles under my eyes and hadn’t bothered to shave after my shower. Before heading out of the house, I’d thrown on a baseball cap. I looked rough.

  As I backed out onto the main road and drove to Delilah’s I was filled with relief, disappointment, and frustration at the message that I’d felt forced to send. Today was not going to be a repeat of yesterday. I’d just made sure of that, and I was having a lot of mixed emotions about it.

  The short drive did nothing to soothe my foul mood. I wished that we had more demo to do because it would be nice to take out my agitation by breaking shit. As bad as I was feeling now, I knew that after what I’d just done, I’d be feeling a hundred times worse by the time this day was over.

  Running. That’s what I would be doing tonight. It was the only way that I’d found to exhaust myself, at least legally that is. In my late teens, I’d taken my aggression out in destructive ways, on people, on property. Now, when I had excess energy to burn I ran and had a job where I broke things.

  I pulled up in front of Delilah’s house and I saw her in her front yard watering the grass. Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail, and there were earphones in her ears as she spun in a circle spraying the hose.

  Lifting my hand, I wiped the sheen of sweat that had broken out on my forehead. My body’s sudden increase in temperature had nothing to do with the heat outside and everything to do with the hot sight in front of me.

  Delilah was wearing a thin white cotton T-shirt that was practically sheer in the sun, and I could see the outline of the lace bra she wore beneath it. Her cutoff jean shorts were frayed at the bottom and molded to her ass. They barely covered the tops of her thick, shapely thighs.

  My sweat glands weren’t the only part of my body affected, either. My mouth watered and my dick grew hard. I hadn’t popped a boner like this since I was in sixth grade and got hard if the wind blew in my direction. And this was the second time it had happened in the same amount of days.

  “Shit.” Taking a moment, I closed my eyes, tightened my grip on the steering wheel and inhaled slowly through my nose, trying to get myself under control.

  Knowing that I didn’t have the luxury of letting things deflate of their own accord I tried to think of anything I could to help it along. I thought about baseball stats, taxes, safety reports…nothing was working. So I pulled out the big guns and pictured the time my friends and I accidentally ended up at a nude beach populated by a geriatric crowd.

  That did the trick.

  When I could be in public and not be arrested for indecency, I opened my eyes and saw that Delilah was walking towards me. As I got out of the truck, I reminded myself to try and keep my eyes above her neck. Otherwise, I’d be spending the day recalling very old, very wrinkly balls.

  Look at her face. At her face.

  “Hey!” Her lips parted in a huge grin as I shut the door behind me.

  There it was. The smile I knew I could never get enough of. Keeping my attention focused above the neck might help one part of my body not swell with desire, but another part expanded to the point of pain. My heart filled with emotion, causing my chest to ache.

  When I stopped in front of her, she took in a sharp breath, and her full, genuine smile fell. It was only for a brief moment, but I saw it. Then, she immediately replaced it with one that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  “Okay!” she clapped her hands together before putting up two awkward thumbs up. “Who has two thumbs and is ready to build a kitchen?” She pointed her thumbs to her chest. “This girl.”

  As cute as I found her behavior, I sensed that she was as nervous as I was apprehensive about the day ahead. It made me wonder if her sudden discomfort had anything to do with my behavior last night at the door, if I’d made her uncomfortable.

  She started to head into the house, but I stayed where I was and asked. “Are you okay?”

  When she looked over her shoulder, the gold specks in her caramel gaze shimmered, reflecting the morning sunlight. “Yeah. I’m great.” She answered with false enthusiasm.

  No. She wasn’t. She was on edge.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she answered with a forced cheeriness, her smile plastered across her face.

  I didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Didn’t smile back at her.

  My stoic silence was twofold. First, I’d found when I didn’t fill in awkward pauses with words that didn’t need to be spoken, people usually cracked and fessed up. And second, I was trying to find the right way to clear the air. I wasn’t sure if I should just say sorry for being creepy at the door. If I should tell her that I normally kept my distance to avoid situations like that happening.

  But before I could figure out the right way to apologize, she did.

  “I’m sorry, I’m just…” She waved her hand up and down in front of me. “You’re just…it’s a lot.”

  “What’s a lot?” Was she talking about last night? At the door?

  She squared her shoulders, and her lips moved, but no sound came out. I hadn’t tried to read lips since I was a kid and my brothers and I needed to communicate without my parents hearing us, so I was out of practice. But it looked like she was counting down. When she got to one, she said, “You. You are a lot. And sometimes I just…I don’t know…it makes me nervous.”

  Shit. It was about last night.

  Regret didn’t even scratch the surface of what I felt for making her uncomfortable. I was furious at myself. I’d kicked a dozen guy’s asses for crossing those lines and making women feel uncomfortable, in my late teens and early twenties before I found other ways to handle my frustration. Hell, I’d been ready to put Brady’s head through a wall for doing the same thing just a couple of weeks ago.

  “I’m so sorry.” I apologized and was turning to leave when her fingers wrapped around my wrist.

  “For what?” Her brow scrunched. “Where are you going?

  “For last night. For making you feel nervous around me. I’m leaving.”

  “What? Why? Last night…?” She shook her head and dropped her hand from its hold on me. “Are you talking about at the door?”

  “Yes,” I said through clenched teeth.

  A blush crept up her cheeks. “That didn’t make me nervous. I mean…it did but in a good way…in the best way ever. I was talking about you making me nervous because…I…because you’re…” she stammered as she waved her hands up and down in front of me.

  I waited for her to finish her thought and when she didn’t I prompted, “I’m what?”

  “You sure you want to hear the answer to that?” Coop walked up the driveway and slapped his hand on my shoulder.

  “Hey, Coop!” Delilah’s eyes bounced between my brother and me, probably seeing if I was as surprised to see him here as she was.

  I wasn’t. I’d texted him because he was my insurance policy. And for once, my brother’s timing was perfect.

  Chapter 14

  Delilah

  “Just because somethin’ gets ya down, don’t mean it’s holdin’ ya there.”

  ~ Grant Turner

  “No, Dad. It’s fine.” I stood in my backyard, staring through the window at Coop and Sawyer as they put the final subway tile on the backsplash, which we�
��d got up in record time thanks to Sawyer’s tips and expertise. “We’re good.”

  “Are you sure? It’s almost four now, and I don’t mind coming over when I close the shop.”

  “Thanks, but we’ll be finished by then.” I hoped that my dad didn’t hear the disappointment in my voice.

  Neither of my parents knew about my feelings for Sawyer, and I wanted to keep it that way. I’d thought that I was going to have to come up with some reason for why my donation had been so high, but when they’d assumed it was because I was still trying to pay him back for saving my life at the river, I’d left it at that. My sisters guessed that my intentions weren’t so pure, but I knew they wouldn’t say anything to them. They were too wrapped up in their own lives.

  “Okay, baby girl. But if you change your mind, I’m only a phone call away. Love you.”

  “Thanks, love you too.”

  I hung up, and when I did, I saw that I had a text from Madison. There was a picture attached. She was in her kitchen, which looked like a disaster zone, surrounded by a mess of bowls, cooking utensils, and ingredients. Her arms were outstretched, and she was holding a pan of cookies and wearing a proud smile. The message below it said that she’d come home early from her getaway and spent the day baking. She was showing me the result of her hard work and thanking me.

  Wait.

  I reread the last line of the text. Yep, I hadn’t misread. She said that she had no idea how much work it would be, and she thanked me for all the times I’d made the baked goods she’d promised to provide.

  As I read it one more time, I got a little misty-eyed. A year ago, I probably wouldn’t have gotten emotional. Then again, a year ago, I probably would’ve figured out a way to get the baking done while remodeling my kitchen.

  Until I’d started my mission of self-improvement, I hadn’t even realized how taken for granted I’d felt. But now that I had decided to put up boundaries, it was incredible to see that they weren’t only respected but also that I was appreciated. I knew that it could’ve just as easily gone the other way and my sister could’ve been mad at me for not doing what I’d always done.