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“Five? Five! I get five for that?” When she studied the target, she saw why. Her axe had buried itself into the outer ring.

“How about I give you a hand?” I asked. Offering to help Jamie was always a bit of a fraught thing, so I watched her warily now. “I can show you?—”

“Fine.”

Not quite the teaching experience I’d hoped for, but I accepted her resigned expression and moved in behind her. My axe was pressed into her hand and she turned to look at me.

“But this is your go.”

“I’ll give you a free shot for being a newbie,” I replied, right as my body slotted in against hers. Fuck. It was a fight to keep my mind on the job at hand at the feel of her.

“You’re throwing it a bit too hard. Lemme show you.” I grabbed her wrist, moving it back and forth until her joints started to loosen. “It’s tricky because you can’t force it. You just have to keep your body loose and let it go, rather than smash it at the target.”

“OK, Master Yoda.”

But as soon as she went to throw, I felt the tension in her body. My hand clamped down, stopping her from throwing, something she fought for a second before I spoke.

“Take a breath.”

“Is this where you get me visualising dolphins swimming through the sea or something?” she snarked, but that had me smiling.

“In a way. Surfing and axe throwing, they have some similarities. You can’t force the sea to give you the kind of waves you want. Instead, you have to sit out there on your board and wait for them to come, then be ready when they do. There’s no fighting the ocean. It’s a whole lot bigger and completely disinterested in you. Instead…”

I was telling her to relax, but I felt anything but as my hands went from her wrist to her shoulders, making tiny corrections to her stance, then resting my hands at her waist.

“Let your breath out.”

She didn’t want to, I could feel that tension there, but biology determined that she would. The tension went out of her body, her shoulders dropping down, and that’s when I gave the order.

“Now.”

She wanted to ask questions, interrogate that further, but something inside her responded to me and she took a step forward and let the axe fly. I followed its path while being keenly aware of the warmth of her body underneath the thin silk of her dress, my fingers squeezing until I saw the axe bury itself in the bulls’ eye.

“Yes!” She spun around, eyes flashing before her hands locked around my neck. “I did it!”

“You did.”

I was hugging her the same way I had countless times before, that’s what I told myself. It was to congratulate her, build her confidence, but my body had whole other ideas. The smell of her perfume, the usual floral now spicy and sultry, the fabric of her dress so thin I could feel her body move beneath it, and her, pressed against me, in my arms. Mine tightened without thought, trying to hold on forever. This, this was what I needed, and that selfish thought throbbed through me as I pulled back.

Her smile faded, and for a second I thought I’d done something wrong. The little frown that followed confirmed it, but then her eyes dropped down, her lips parting as she traced the shape of mine. She stared and stared for far too long and that’s when I moved forward. I wanted to claim her mouth, make it mine, over and over until she was gasping.

Which she seemed to sense.

She jerked back and then smiled hastily, her eyes everywhere but on me.

“OK, so, if that was your turn, then it’s my turn now?”

The cheeky little shit, she was trying to win this bet via nefarious means, but she didn’t know that by the end of this, we’d both win. I’d promise to attend whatever family events she had planned, and I’d… I’d kiss my girl before we left this place.

Chapter 22

Jamie

I was being stitched up.

I’d thought we were going on this casual ‘date’ where we both flailed around, trying to throw axes at the wall, but apparently Hayden was like some kind of Viking king, pegging the axe at the target with a negligent flip of his wrist and hitting the bullseye every damn time.

I hated it.