Page 103 of Ly to Me

“Close your eyes.”

“Car, where are you takin’ me, now?”

“Just close ’em, please.” I shut my eyes and stumbled. He steadied me with his hands on my hips, then continued moving me forward. “Almost there,” he whispered in my ear.

“This feels familiar.”

“In what ways?”

“You used to surprise me a lot. Not that you don’t now, but your surprises now are more…”

“Carnal?” he finished, chuckling a little on the word. “Stop here, but don’t open yet.”

I tapped my foot, leaves crunching beneath my boot. “I’m not good with waiting. You know that.”

He shifted my hips, angling my body to the left. His breath was warm and as sultry as his voice as he said, “Open.”

I blinked at the tree in front of me, then narrowed my eyes. I flattened my hand above my forehead, covering the rays of sunlight piercing through the treetops while looking around as that familiar pit formed in my chest. That pit intensified as I snapped my attention to Carver, who was leaning against the same tree.

“Say something,” he begged, lips turned down while his eyes softened.

“I…I’m…”

“Speechless?”

I looked around the woods again, like it’d have evidence of that night from ten years ago. “This…you bought the land?”

“Couldn’t let them cut down this tree.” He tapped on the bark with his knuckle, right where the initials ‘C’ and ‘L’ were carved into it. Surrounding the letters was a heart, my contribution from that night—the night we first slept together in the very truck that was behind me.

“They were going to clear it for some new-build homes. I protested with signs, got half the town in on it, saying it would ruin Alliston Springs, but really, I just didn’t want this tree to go. A few months in, the builders gave up, and when I turned twenty and got my inheritance, I used a chunk of it to buy the land from them.”

I glanced down at my shirt, the name of his facility now making a whole lot more sense. The smile he gave when I met his eyes again was as sincere as ever. I wrapped my arms around myself. “All over a tree?” I whispered.

He stepped up to me and brushed his knuckles over the curve of my jaw. “It’s more than a tree, Ly.” He angled my head up, and our eyes locked. “It’s us. This tree was the only thing I had left of you besides your collection, and I wasn’t about to let anything you’d left behind slip through my fingers.”

“I tried to take your hoodie with me. Before I left, I mean.”

His jaw flexed, and I grew painfully aware of his silence. Of the words I knew he wanted to say, but had forced himself not to. He ended up threading his fingers through mine and pulling me back to the truck without a single word.

But the silence was killing me as we drove up to the facility, eating away so slowly that each second that passed felt like hours.

“Sophia wanted me to steal some bud from you before I…well, she wanted some.” My fingers twisted in my lap, unsure why I was blurting this out, but continued anyway. “I’m glad I didn’t try. Not sure how I would’ve gotten past”—I waved a hand at the barbed wire that spanned the top of each gate—two, in total, that required a pin and a thumbprint to open—“all this.”

“You don’t need to steal a thing from me. All you have to do is ask. Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you.” I made to open my mouth, but snapped it shut as he added, “And no, it has nothin’ to do with the Agreement.”

He reached his hand through the open car window and pressed his thumb to a pad, then repeated the process at the next one before driving closer to the first large building right at the front.

“You need some of this kind of security for those coyotes,” I muttered, looking around at what I imagined could pass for a penitentiary from a plane’s view as he parked.

“I got a donkey coming.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Hayes was giving me shit about it and said I was a dumbass for not knowing they’d help with that issue.”

I snorted a laugh. “I mean, I don’t know anything about farming or owning an animal that isn’t dead already. Just ’cause we’re from the South doesn’t mean we have to know all that.”

He grinned as he pulled the key from the ignition. “That’s what I said. But Hayes is an uptight asshole and thinks he knows best.”

I shrugged. “I dunno. I didn’t think he was all that bad. Kind of interesting in a mysterious guy kind of way.”

Carver glared. “Now I really don’t like him.”