Free Ahead in the Heat by Lorelie Brown Page B

McMillan’s second heat at the Hurley Pro and the overall standings of the last Billabong event. Leaning in was so damn stupid that he tried to stop himself, but he couldn’t. She didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Kept staring at him with those eyes that he wanted to drown in and that mouth that he wanted to taste.
    He tested the tight limitations of his right arm to let the ends of her hair skim like feathers over his fingertips. She was worth the pinch of pain. “Growing up is bullshit. That’s why everyone wants to be done with it as soon as possible.”
    Her head tilted. “I don’t think that’s true. There are lots of people who hold on to their high school years with an iron grip.”
    “The star football players. The homecoming queens. The ones for whom everything worked.” The words spilled out with a hefty dose of bitter ashes.
    “You weren’t one of those, were you, Sean?”
    When his shoulder pulled with fatigue, he put his hand on her waist, framing her in. She shied away from his touch as if she wasn’t the one in charge. He’d seen that when he tried to take her hand at the party. Even in the middle of a crisis, she’d held safe within herself. But crowding her meant that maybe she’d stop asking stupid questions about his background. He wasn’t ready to answer, because the answers blew. There was nothing lovely about beingtrapped in a house with a crazy woman. “No. I wasn’t.”
    “You’re certainly making up for lost time lately then, aren’t you?” She lifted her face toward him, defiantly raising her chin. She wasn’t completely unaffected, though. Her hands flattened against the wall at her hips. The pulse at the side of her throat fluttered like a butterfly’s wings. “Putting on the playboy act. I don’t think that’s real. I don’t think that’s who you really are. Maybe a hard-drinking, bar-fighting surfer would take drugs to try to catch up. But you’re this Sean Westin, the one who devotes hours to research. Who knows your competitors inside and out. Who’s made himself an industry. You wouldn’t risk any of it by doping. Steroids would defeat the purpose.”
    “You don’t know anything about me,” he growled. Fuck, he needed to shut his own mouth up, because what was he arguing for? She was saying good things about him. But at the same time, it felt like she was going too far beneath his surface. Crawling under his skin. He didn’t know what to do with that. How to respond. She assumed his biggest concern was doping rumors. How cute.
    She smiled serenely. “Sure I don’t, Sean,” she agreed, except she laced her words with doubt, teasing him. “But I also know you’re about two seconds away from kissing me.”
    The hand he had braced against the wall clenched into a fist. He dropped to his elbow, crowding her even more. He had to pull back his bad arm, which made the nerves across the back of his skull crawl with frustration. She smelled like pure skin and soapand the faintest hint of flowers. No perfume for her. She didn’t put that type of work into herself. “Shouldn’t you run, then?”
    Her head fell back against the wall. Her breasts pushed out with the move, her hips bending away. “Do I seem like the running type?”
    He hated when other people were right about him. He’d made it his mission to defy expectations in so many ways. Otherwise he’d have a house piled to the rafters with trash, if he’d even had a house at all. He might have been homeless. It came close to being a viable option more than once when he was young. He broke stereotypes about surfers being laid back and lazy. He was neither of those.
    But Annie was right about him. He was transparent as glass, because he couldn’t think about anything but kissing her, not anymore. Part of him wanted to blame it on her because she’d planted the idea in his head, but he knew it wasn’t true.
    He’d been fixated on her mouth for hours, ever since she’d shown up at his front door in her