Free Feel the Rush: A Hard Feelings Novel (InterMix) by Kelsie Leverich Page A

he watched Meagan’s face slowly return to its original color.
    She sighed again and smiled. “She is a spitfire. You might need to watch out for her. She may be tiny but she is tough as nails and if you piss her off I have no doubt in my mind that she would, in fact, attempt to twist off your testicles.”
    “Well, fuck. What did I do to piss off the fire-breathing dragon?”
    She pressed her lips together, suppressing another laugh as the corners of her mouth twitched. “She’s not pissed, she wouldn’t have let you in if she was. She’s plotting.”
    “Plotting?”
    Meagan rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Yes, just ignore her.” She pushed the nearly demolished burrito aside and stretched her perfectly tanned legs out in front of her. Yes, self-control was something of his she seemed to push, knowingly or not.
    “If you say so, sugar.”
    “There you go with the ‘sugar’ again.”
    “What? You don’t like it when I call you ‘sugar’?” He lowered his voice and made sure to let his thick Alabama accent stroke his words before they left his mouth. Why? Because he could tell she liked it—he could tell by the way her face heated up and her legs brushed together, and anything he could do to get that kind of reaction from her, he would do it.
    A soft flush spread across her cheeks, only making her look that much more beautiful. She didn’t come across to him as someone who got embarrassed easily, but he was definitely doing the job nicely.
    “It doesn’t bother me either way,” she said, meeting his eyes directly. There was that confidence he liked. Her face may say she was affected, but her eyes—they weren’t going to tell him so easily, and that was okay, he liked a challenge. “I do like your accent though, where are you from?”
    Yep, that Southern drawl hadn’t let him down yet. “I’m from Birmingham. What about you,
sugar
?” He intentionally let the sound of the
r
fall short.
    Meagan cocked her head, her mouth parting in a slight smile. “I’m from everywhere.” She lifted her finger and pointed to herself. “Army brat.”
    “Oh yeah? You been stationed here with your family before?”
    She shook her head and picked up her drink. She pressed it to her mouth, brushing her bottom lip across the rim of the cup, and then she pulled her bottom lip into her mouth, sucking off the salt before she took a drink. Reed needed that bottom lip in his mouth. He wanted to lean in and pull it between his teeth, then suck on it until it was swollen, and if she kept doing little things like that he might just do it.
    She lowered the cup from her mouth and paused. Her head tilted a little to the side, her eyebrows furrowing before she blinked and continued to set her cup down. Reed was pretty sure he had the hand-caught-in-the-cookie-jar expression on his face and she more than likely knew why. “Nope, this is the first time I’ve ever been to Georgia,” she said, letting him off the hook from his involuntary staring that he couldn’t seem to control.
    “And what do you think so far?”
    “Well, in the week I’ve been here I haven’t really seen much to gather an opinion. I mean, I like it just fine. It’s beautiful here.”
    “Have you ever been white-water rafting? They just opened up an urban course here not too long ago.”
    “No, I’ve never been.”
    “Oh, I will take you sometime. It’s a blast.”
    “Okay, that could possibly be fun.”
    Reed flinched. “Possibly? Oh, sugar, you just broke my heart a little.”
    Meagan rolled her big blue eyes at him then pushed her bottom lip out in a pout, mocking him. “Do you need a Band-Aid?”
    “Ouch, woman,” he said, clutching his chest.
    Her lips tightened into a line, and she scrunched her nose, causing her eyes to disappear behind her long lashes. “You just strike me as the type of guy who would take the boat over a waterfall or something equally as insane, just for kicks, and I don’t know how much fun that would