Kira was not the one for him.
And he needed to remember that, even as she leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his cheek.
‘Thanks for rescuing me,’ she said, her voice light and teasing in his ear. ‘I hope it was good for you.’
He bit down on a groan. This woman was going to kill him. She was so close; her delicious lips were right there. A slight turn of his head and his mouth would be on hers. It took all his strength to pull away.
Kira raised an eyebrow, a playful smirk on her face and damn, did he want to play with her. But it just wasn’t meant to be.
‘Real good,’ he said, and Kira’s smile grew. ‘But I have to get going.’
Her face fell. ‘Oh.’
‘See you around, Kira.’
‘Right. See you around, Bennett.’
Chapter Thirteen
The sky was white this morning. According to her weather app, they were under a winter storm warning which to Kira sounded quite ominous. What did one do to prepare for a winter storm warning? Did she need to stock up on toilet paper and canned soup? She already had plenty of those.
She probably just needed working heat.
But that was still a pipe dream, so instead of preparing she just stared forlornly out the window at the eerily white sky. She didn’t love the idea of being trapped here alone for whatever this storm might bring, but she didn’t have much of a choice now, did she? What was she going to do? Trap Bennett here when he, hopefully, came for a walk? Bat her eyelashes until he agreed to stay and keep her company?
Ha, ha. Nope, of course she wouldn’t. That would be crazy.
And Kira was done manipulating people like that. Or she was trying to be. She’d replayed the whole scene from last Sunday over and over in her mind, searching for evidence that she’d somehow conned Bennett and his friends into helping her when her employees didn’t show up. But she hadn’t found any. She was pretty sure they’d all just stayed out of the kindness of their hearts. Which was … odd. And made an uncomfortable, but decidedly warm feeling settle in her chest. Uh-oh, maybe her Grinchy heart was growing.
She shook her head and reread her sister’s text message from this morning.
Morning, Kiki!
Love you! Hope you have a great day and sell so many trees!
Xoxo
The whole thing was followed by several tree emojis and far too many hearts. Chloe was overcompensating. She only used emojis when she was feeling bad about something. Somehow her twin knew that she was struggling here, despite all her protests.
And if she didn’t get her shit together soon, Chloe might do something crazy like come back, and as much as the thought made Kira’s heart surge in her chest, she absolutely could not allow that. Just as much as this was her chance to do something on her own, it was Chloe’s, too.
It had taken some distance for her to see it, but Kira realized how much she had pulled Chloe down over the years. How many times had she nearly gotten them both into trouble? If that cop that showed up to pull a half-naked and very drunk Kira out of the neighbor’s pool hadn’t had a huge crush on Chloe all through high school, they’d probably both have been arrested.
And Chloe could have been a functioning member of society so much sooner if Kira hadn’t kept them both behaving like spoiled brats for so long. Chloe had a real job, like with numbers and money, and she’d gotten it all on her own.
God, Chloe had been so damn proud of herself when she’d come home after that interview. An interview that had nothing to do with their father’s company, the one he hadn’t had to make up for her. And Kira had panicked. Her twin was moving on. Her twin was growing up. And when Chloe had casually mentioned getting an apartment of her own in the city, Kira had freaked out. Well, freaked out in a way that no one but her twin would notice, but Chloe knew. Chloe knew she didn’t want her to go. She’d quietly dropped the whole thing, putting her life on hold for Kira.
It wasn’t until Chloe had met Erik on that dating app that she finally had the courage to leave. And Kira had tried so damn hard since then to make sure she didn’t get in her sister’s way again.
She took a deep breath and pressed her forehead to the cold window. She didn’t like to think about it, her past behavior. How entitled she’d acted for so long. How often she’d put herself above others, even her sister.
Sure, she’d donated more of her trust fund than she’d spent, but karmically, it didn’t seem to be helping. As it turned out, being a good person was kinda hard.
Sighing dramatically for no one’s benefit but her own, she put her coffee cup in the sink and decided to head outside just to … check on things. Not to maybe accidentally bump into a certain perfectly symmetrically-faced man. Definitely not that.
Actually, screw it. She absolutely was going to look for Bennett because he was pretty to look at and he was nice to her and she was lonely, damn it. And if she wanted a little Christmas flirtation, a little holiday hookup, she was perfectly within her rights as a grown woman.
She tugged on her boots and took her coat off the hook. She strode out the back door with a new determination in her step. Bennett had been looking at her with all that steam in his eyes for days. He’d practically been drooling over her at the skating rink until he had to leave. And who was she to deter him when she could really use a friendly roll in the hay?
Besides, this was the perfect solution. Bennett was leaving after Christmas. It was the perfect out. She’d let him fill her stocking and then he’d be out of her life. No need to worry about seeing her mother’s smug face when she met him, because she never would.
Bennett could just be a Christmas fling.
She smiled as she pulled on her coat. Why hadn’t she thought of this sooner? She’d been too bogged down with this whole running-a-business thing, and fighting off Bennett’s attempt to fix her life. She didn’t need him to fix anything but she sure as hell would let him give her a hand with a few things in the bedroom.
She nearly laughed to herself, but she already felt a little bit like she was hunting the nice man, so she probably shouldn’t add villainous laughter into the mix. Not that she was about to force him into anything. He’d been making those sexy eyes at her for days and she’d been stubbornly and rather stupidly ignoring it. Well, she was done with that.
It wasn’t manipulation if he wanted it, too, right?
It was just finally giving in to what they both wanted.
Now she just had to find him.
Kira’s confidence faded a bit when she found Bennett on the edge of the farm, out by the old barn. It was possible that she had been grossly underestimating his attractiveness. He looked good this morning. Like, really good. Like Henry Cavill good. And suddenly she felt less sure of her seduction plan. Maybe she had hallucinated the tension between them? Maybe it wasn’t sexual at all, maybe it was just regular old hostile tension. And he did kinda run away after carrying her off the skating rink. Maybe he wasn’t into her, after all.
And besides, how was it that a man this good looking and this kind and handy, and who filled out his jeans like that, was single? Maybe he wasn’t? Oh, God, what was she even doing out here? It was that text from Chloe that had her all mixed up. And this storm warning. Something in the atmosphere had made her briefly think that this man might want her. Never in her entire life had Kira been attracted to a well-adjusted man—or attracted one, for that matter. Instead, she picked up delinquents, deviants, and general trouble wherever she went. Men that looked and acted like Bennett Ellis had never factored into the equation. Despite her mother’s best efforts to set her up with plenty of upstanding citizens (or at least men that appeared that way from the outside; plenty of them had pinched her ass and called her sweetheart when her mother wasn’t looking), Kira had resisted at all costs.
