Page 23 of Trick or Tease

SAbrINA

I cranked the wrench, tightening the bolt on the trebuchet’s arm until my knuckles were white.

The physical exertion felt good, giving me something to focus on besides the memory of Garrett’s hands on my body and the way he’d looked at me afterward like I was some kind of mistake he needed to correct.

“Friends,” I muttered under my breath, giving the bolt another vicious turn. “We’re friends, Sabrina. I want to keep it that way.”

What a load of bullshit. Friends didn’t kiss each other like they were drowning and the other person was oxygen.

Friends didn’t touch each other the way he’d touched me in that hayloft, like he couldn’t get enough.

And friends definitely didn’t make the kinds of sounds Garrett had made when I’d wrapped my hand around him.

I sat back on my heels and wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand.

It wasn’t hot out, but I’d worked up a sweat wrestling with the chunker’s mechanics.

Billy had built three of these contraptions over the years, each one more elaborate than the last, and this particular one had a tendency to jam if you didn’t keep all the moving parts properly lubricated.

“How’s it looking over there?” Billy called out from where he was adjusting the sights on another launcher about twenty feet away.

“Good,” I called back, not trusting my voice to say more. I could see Lucy working on the third trebuchet, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail as she tested the release mechanism over and over again.

Yesterday had been exhausting in the best way. We wanted to make sure we were ready for the next round of eager visitors. Yesterday there had been some hiccups, including two broken trebuchets.

“You okay?” Lucy asked.

“Yep.”

I wished I could tell them what had happened.

Lucy especially. She’d been my best friend since we were kids, and I’d never kept anything this big from her before.

But how could I even begin to explain it?

Hey guys, so your brother/future brother-in-law had me half-naked in the barn loft yesterday and then told me we should just be friends. Pass the screwdriver?

The whole thing felt surreal in the morning light. Had it really happened? Had Garrett Hogan actually kissed me like his life depended on it, touched me like he’d been fantasizing about it for years? Or had I imagined the whole thing in some kind of hormone-induced hallucination?

But no, I could still feel the ghost of his hands on my skin. Could still taste him on my lips if I thought about it too hard. It had definitely happened.

The question was whether it had been the most incredible mistake of my life or just the most incredible thing, period.

I picked up my wrench again and moved to the next bolt, trying to lose myself in the repetitive motion. Thank God he wasn’t out here trying to help us. Billy said he was working on some paperwork or something.

Good. Because I didn’t want to see him.

I didn’t know what I would say and I didn’t want to blush. It was like the awkward morning after without the benefit of actually getting the good stuff. It was all the awkwardness with none of the reward.

“Sabrina, can you test this release for me?” Lucy’s voice broke through my brooding.

I walked over to where she was standing beside the smallest of our three trebuchets. It was designed for the younger kids, with a shorter throwing arm and less tension in the springs.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“It’s not releasing cleanly. The pumpkin sort of dribbles out instead of launching.” She demonstrated with a small gourd, and sure enough, it rolled pathetically off the end of the arm instead of flying through the air.

I examined the release mechanism, a simple hook-and-eye system that Billy had designed. “Looks like the timing is off. The hook isn’t letting go at the right point in the swing.”

We spent the next twenty minutes adjusting the mechanism, testing it with practice pumpkins until we got a satisfying arc. It was exactly the kind of problem-solving I usually loved, but I found my attention wandering.

“You’re distracted today,” Lucy observed as we watched our latest test pumpkin sail across the field.

My heart jumped. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you’ve been muttering under your breath for the past hour.” She gave me a knowing look. “Want to talk about it?”

I opened my mouth to deny everything, then closed it again. Lucy knew me too well for lies.

“It’s complicated,” I said finally.

“Most things worth talking about are.”

“I’m good,” I said.

I already knew what Lucy would say. She had already said it. Don’t do it. Garrett was a walking, talking heartbreak. I did not need that drama in my life.

“Yesterday was wild, right?” Lucy said.

“It was good.”

Billy laughed. “We might just get rich if it keeps up like that. I was thinking we could also do something for Christmas. Like a big holiday themed thing.”

“Slow your roll,” Lucy teased.

“Hey, I’ve got dollar signs in my eyes now.”

“We need to add more stuff on the trail up to the house,” I said. “It was good, but it needs to be better.”

“I still have a few boxes of decorations we didn’t have time to put out,” Billy said.

“Cool. We need them. I’ll grab them.”

Garrett appeared out of nowhere. My stomach did an immediate flip.

“How can I help?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral as his eyes swept over our work area. He was wearing another perfectly pressed button-down, this one a light gray that made his blue eyes look even more intense.

I couldn’t look at him. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to kick his ass or kiss him. Both. I wanted to do both.

“Actually, yeah,” Billy said, straightening up from where he’d been crouched beside the largest launcher. “We need those boxes of decorations from the barn. The ones we didn’t get to yesterday.”

“I’ll grab them,” Garrett said.

“Sabrina can help you,” Lucy piped up with fake innocence. “There are a lot of boxes thanks to Billy’s trigger finger clicking on everything he thought was cool.”

I shot her a death glare that could have melted steel. Did she know? There was no way she could know what had happened in that barn yesterday, but the timing of her suggestion felt awfully suspicious. Lucy had always been too observant for her own good.

“I’m fine here,” I said quickly.

“Come on, Sabrina,” Lucy pressed, and I swear I could hear amusement in her voice. “You were just saying you wanted to dress up that trail.”

I wanted to strangle my best friend. Instead, I brushed the dirt off my jeans and mustered up my dignity. “Fine.”

Garrett said nothing as we walked toward the barn, maintaining a careful distance between us. The silence stretched uncomfortably, filled with everything we weren’t saying. I could smell his cologne, that expensive scent that had no business smelling so good mixed with hay and pumpkin.

Inside the barn, I made a beeline for the stack of boxes in the far corner, desperate to keep busy and avoid looking at the ladder that led to the loft. The ladder where everything had changed yesterday.

“These ones?” Garrett asked.

“Yeah, and those three over there.” I hefted a smaller box, very aware of how close he was standing. Close enough that I could see the way his sleeves strained slightly across his forearms as he lifted the heavier containers.

We worked in efficient silence, loading boxes onto an old wheelbarrow Billy kept in the barn. Garrett didn’t complain about the dust or worry about his clothes getting dirty. He just got to work, the same way he had yesterday.

“This should be the last of it,” he said, settling a final box into the wheelbarrow.

“Good.” The word came out sharper than I’d intended.

We wheeled the boxes out to the trail that led up to the old Hogan house. I tried to focus on the task at hand instead of the way Garrett kept positioning himself close enough that our arms brushed when we both reached for the same decoration.

“Where do you think this should go?” he asked, holding up a plastic skeleton that was supposed to look like it was clawing its way out of the ground.

I pointed to a spot about ten feet up the trail. “There, by that old stump. It’ll look like it’s emerging from the roots.”

He nodded and walked over to set it up, but instead of moving on to the next decoration, he lingered, adjusting the skeleton’s position with more attention than it really required.

When I moved to hang some fake spider webs from a low-hanging branch, he reached up, his body brushing against mine as he hung the web.

“Thanks,” I muttered.

He seemed to be there every time I turned around. In my personal space.

“You don’t have to help with every single thing,” I said, finally turning to face him as I tried to stake a foam tombstone into the ground. “I’m sure you have important lawyer stuff to do.”

“This is more important right now.”

I looked up from where I was kneeling beside the fake grave marker and found him watching me with that same intense focus he’d had yesterday before everything went sideways.

“Is it?” I asked, hating how breathless I sounded.

He crouched down beside me, ostensibly to help position the tombstone, but his hand covered mine on the plastic stake. “You know it is.”

The contact sent electricity shooting up my arm, and I jerked my hand away like I’d been burned. “Don’t.”

“Sabrina—”

I grabbed another decoration from the box and stalked toward the next marker, but of course he followed me. Because apparently telling me he wanted to keep things platonic didn’t actually mean he was going to act platonic.

“When are you going back?” I asked.

I felt like I needed to remind him of what he said. He wasn’t going to be around for long, so no point in starting something.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’m going to stick around for a bit longer and help get things off the ground.”

I took a deep breath. That was not what I wanted to hear. It didn’t help anything. Didn’t he know that?

“If you’re sticking around a bit, we need to talk,” I said.

I was not going to keep doing the awkward dance. Life was too short for bullshit. Granny had said something along those lines. And I was going to take her advice.