Chapter 4

4

COLTON

O wen Rossdale found us. Fucking Owen Rossdale.

If it’d been anyone else on the volunteer ranger team, I probably would’ve gotten a “way to go, man.” Maybe not immediately—the guys were gentlemen, after all, and wouldn’t do something like that in front of a woman. But behind the scenes, I’d be hearing about it for months, maybe years.

Owen was my boss, though. He headed up the top construction company building log cabins up and down these mountains. He was clearly not happy to see that one of the guys he’d referred to help with rescues like this was taking advantage of a damsel in distress.

But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.

“It’s not how it looks,” I told Owen under my breath as I approached him.

I was wearing only my underwear. Not my choice. My clothes were on the other side of him, so I’d have to go through him to get there.

He was still staring at me, now holding that damn bottle of water in one hand and his phone in the other. He’d pulled it out of his back pocket like he was ready to call someone to report what he’d just seen.

But Owen’s expression remained completely unreadable as he glanced toward the water. “That the missing woman?”

When he looked back at me, I nodded. “Olivia.”

I didn’t know her last name. Did she even know my first? We’d had sex. She’d given me her virginity. And I hadn’t even introduced myself. That was ten thousand kinds of wrong.

Owen was fiddling with his walkie, the bottled water tucked under his right arm. Cell phone reception up here was nonexistent, so the rescue team relied on walkie-talkies to communicate.

“I need to let the team know we found her,” Owen said.

Was it too soon to ask if I could grab a couple of waters for me and my new girlfriend? Probably. First, I needed to put on some clothes. Standing out here with my boss wearing only my underwear was the worst.

I went around him and shoved on my T-shirt and jeans, looking out at the water as I did. Olivia was in the center of the pond, most of her body underwater. She didn’t want to come out until she had clothes on.

That sprung me into action. I was still fastening my jeans as I rushed back around Owen, toward the area where I’d spotted Olivia’s clothes. I glanced over at my boss as I scooped them up.

“Could you turn your back for a second?” I asked him. He looked up like he’d forgotten I was even here. I gestured toward the water. “She needs to get dressed.”

Owen seemed to get it then. In fact, he didn’t just turn his back to us. He headed down the hiking trail, talking to someone on his walkie along the way.

“We found Olivia,” he said. “Colton has her.”

I liked the sound of that. In fact, I’d be beaming with pride right now if not for the fact that my boss had just discovered me naked with a woman. That was embarrassing no matter the context.

“Could you turn your back too?” she asked as I held out the clothes to her.

Any happiness I felt flew out the window with that request. I’d seen her naked. More than that, I’d been inside her. I’d given her two orgasms. This was the woman I planned to spend the rest of my life with.

But she didn’t want me to see her naked right now. Had she changed her mind? Had sex with me been just a fleeting thing? A way to lose her virginity?

That didn’t seem right, but I couldn’t ask her right now. At this point in time, the best thing I could do was get her dressed before a bunch of guys came creeping up the trail toward us, looking for the woman they’d been sweating their balls off to find all morning.

I closed my eyes and turned around, holding the pajama bottoms and T-shirt behind me. There were panties around here somewhere too, but she’d work all that out.

The clothes left my hand a few seconds later, and I heard rustling behind me as she got dressed. Meanwhile, my mind was racing as I tried to figure out how to get things back on course.

I could just ask her outright if something was wrong. We could work all this out, clothed or not. To hell with anybody who came walking up here to find us.

I turned around, but I honored her request to not peek. Eyes closed, mouth open, ready to say something…

“Colton, you up here?”

That was the voice of my buddy, Zachary. My eyes popped open automatically. Luckily, Olivia was fully dressed by then. It was my first time seeing her in clothes, and she looked just as beautiful dressed as she did naked.

“It’s okay,” I said. “My buddy’s coming.”

What I was reassuring her against, I wasn’t sure. She’d turned ice cold on me, and I was scrambling for a way to get things back on track.

She opened her mouth as if to say something, but before she could, the crunch of a tree branch alerted both of us that Zachary was exiting the trail. We were no longer alone.

I wanted to grab her hand as we turned to face Zachary. But if she was mad at me, that was the worst thing I could do. If she’d changed her mind about me, it was equally a bad idea.

“They’re rounding up some water for you,” Zachary said as he approached. “Are you okay? I’m sure Colton here took good care of you.”

There was nothing even the slightest bit suggestive about the way he said that. No surprise. He was a gentleman like the rest of us.

But I knew my buddy. He had no clue that something happened here. That shouldn’t have been a surprise. My boss might not have approved of what he found, but he wasn’t the type to gossip.

Would I tell Zachary, my closest friend in Rosewood Ridge, what’d happened up here? Probably not. Especially if Olivia had changed her mind about me. If she’d decided she didn’t want to be with me after today, I’d never breathe a word about what happened. If I couldn’t manage to get her to spend the rest of her life with me, I’d probably look like a jackass for taking advantage of her under the waterfall when it had been anything but that.

“Thanks,” Olivia said. “I’m ready to go.”

She started walking, leaving Zachary and me to exchange a look. It was then that I realized one very unavoidable fact. I still hadn’t put my shoes and socks on. I’d been in such a rush to get her clothes to her, I’d stopped dressing before I got to that part.

“I’ll make sure she gets to the campground safely,” Zachary said. “You come on whenever you’re ready.”

The look he flashed me told me I’d been wrong about one thing. He knew exactly what had happened out here. Call it guy intuition, or maybe it was because we’d been buddies for a while, whatever the case, he was on to me.

But he’d help me out wherever he could. That’s what buddies did.