Noah’s Reckoning: Alaska Dating Games Book 3 Read online

  I lifted an eyebrow. “You’ll remember them?”

  She tapped her temple. “If you say it, and I concentrate on remembering it, it will stick.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit,” she said bluntly. “I have a freakish memory.”

  That was a trick I needed to see. I threw some numbers at her, enough that I thought there was no way she would remember any of it. The good news was rattling through all those numbers was another way to keep my mind off sex.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t last as long as I needed. With another couple hours to kill, I was looking for a distraction. I remembered the pack of cards. It was better than sitting here and not looking at her.

  “You want to play?” I asked. “Cards,” I quickly clarified.

  “Oh. Sure. Let me get the deck.”

  * * *

  A few hours later

  Ark

  “And that’s gin,” she said, setting her last three cards aside. “Let me see them.”

  I laid down the four cards I was still holding in my hand. She counted the points then added that to the number she was holding in her head from our last seven rounds.

  “That’s one forty-two to seven. I’m winning,” she said with a cheeky smile.

  “You’re not winning, you’re kicking my ass,” I growled at her.

  We had moved to make it easier to deal the cards. Now, we were both sitting on the sleeping bag, using the chairs to lean against. I let her have the blanket as the fire was keeping me plenty warm. The fire also provided us with enough light to see the cards.

  “I think we fight a lot because I also like to be on top and I can feel you gaining ground on me,” I said, referencing her earlier statement from this afternoon. “I don’t like it.”

  She looked at me. “Are you being honest right now?”

  I was. Extremely honest. “Growing up, I didn’t do a lot of things well. Not sports, not girls. But I was smart. That was my thing. When someone challenges that…maybe I get my back up. Sometimes.”

  Her lips quirked. “Maybe. Sometimes. I guess that’s why we have such a hard time working together.”

  “I guess that’s why.”

  That wasn’t totally honest but at least we’d managed to survive the whole day without going for each other’s throats. And I’d managed to go the whole day without pinning her to the sleeping bag and ravaging her.

  “Another round?” she asked.

  “Nah, I’m beat.” It was true.

  “We need to do the thing with the sleeping bag and the blanket again, huh?”

  She was chewing the pad of her thumb, and I hated the fact I had made her nervous about something that should have been as easy as falling asleep.

  “’Olivia, about this morning…”

  “No, it’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. I know that wasn’t about me. But maybe we should put our coats between us or something?”

  “A coat’s not going to stop me from getting hard,” I told her bluntly. “I just need you to know I would never do anything about it.”

  “Yep. I get it. There are no two people less likely to have sex than us. I don’t know why I even said that. Forget I said that.”

  “Olivia, we’re cool. Okay?”

  I stretched out on the sleeping bag and waited for her to lay next to me. I covered us both with the blanket then pulled her up against my chest. Damn, I liked this. The wind was still howling outside, the fire was crackling and Olivia was in my arms.

  She shuffled a little at first, but I felt her relax eventually. She trusted me. Despite what happened this morning, despite our contentious relationship, she trusted me not to hurt her or take advantage of the situation.

  That was something at least.

  “I find it hard to believe you weren’t good at sports,” she said quietly. “You’re so big. Physically, I mean. Not…okay, forget I said that.”

  I laughed into her hair. “My mother called me a late bloomer. The reality was I don’t think I hit actual puberty until I was seventeen. I was this tall, skinny beanpole with a squeaky voice and I didn’t have any coordination. So no, sports were not my thing. And you can imagine an uncoordinated, skinny beanpole with a squeaky voice was not a hit with the girls either. I didn’t learn how to fuck until I was in my twenties.”

  “What do you mean you learned how?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about that,” I muttered.

  “Right. Sorry. It’s just an unusual thing to hear a guy say he had to learn. I think most believe they know what they are doing right out of the gate.”

  “Guys know how to get off right out of the gate. That’s not the same thing as fucking a woman. Sex is like anything else in life. If you want to be good at it, you have to study, and you have to practice.”

  She waited a beat. “Isn’t this the part where you tell me you’ve done a lot of practicing?”

  I chuckled. “My fair share. Not as much as you probably think. And I’ve never--” This was getting oddly intimate again. Like that moment we shared when she wrapped her body around my feet to take away the cold. I wasn’t used to that kind of closeness.

  “Never what?” she pressed.

  “I’ve never been in a relationship. Not a serious one. I think, like sex, that’s something else that has to be learned and I’ve never been with anyone who made me want to try.”

  “Me, neither,” she admitted. Which immediately made me feel better. “My focus has always been on what’s important. First that was school, then work. Because it’s more than a job for me. It’s a mission.”

  “To save the planet,” I said, knowing all about her mission.

  “Yes! Someone has to. Anyway, I never felt like I could let my guard down at school or on the job. I always thought that if I started dating any of the guys I was working with, they would have a certain perception of me.”

  Instinctively, I squeezed her a little tighter. “I hate that’s your reality. I hate that you have to do your job wondering if today is the day some asshole is going to step out of line.”

  “It’s worth the risk.”

  “Is it? You can work anywhere, Olivia. I know you’re a crusader for the planet and your goal is to change things from the inside, but why Dyson? Why up here where you work with a bunch of hard ass men, where shit like getting stranded in a storm can happen?”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment and I wondered if she had fallen asleep.

  “At the risk of stroking what is clearly a healthy ego…I came up here to have a chance to work with you. You’re the best in the industry. I wanted to see you in action.”

  It hit me like one of her slaps across my face. Startling. Emotional. And it made me hot.

  Then I smiled. “You respect me.”

  “Of course, I respect you. You infuriate me, you push every last button I have, but I never said I didn’t respect you.”

  “I respect you, too,” I offered.

  “You do?”

  It was truth. “You infuriate me, you push every last button I have…but yeah. I told you, I wouldn’t have left you in charge of my rigs, if I didn’t.”

  She stiffened again. “Well, you had a pretty strong motivation for that. Jenny was coming.”

  I could feel her body get tight again in my arms and I thought about how she kept going back to Jenny over and over again.

  She wasn’t actually jealous, was she?

  Sure, that’s exactly the move I wanted to make when I signed up for the stupid contest. But the minute I told her about it, she acted as if it didn’t faze her at all. Except, she’d mentioned Jenny no less than five times in the past two days.

  I told her I wasn’t fucking Jenny. Surely that was enough to realize we were nothing more than friends.

  I thought about correcting her assumptions, but maybe this was for the best.

  I wasn’t going to sit here with a semi and convince myself I didn’t want Olivia like crazy. But even if the attraction did go both ways, what then?<
br />
  She’d said it and she wasn’t wrong. If the guys knew we were banging, it would change how they saw her. It would remove that layer of professionalism she always worked so hard to maintain.

  They would stop seeing her as engineer and start seeing her as a woman.

  Which was probably ridiculously unfair, but the men who came up here had certain views of world. Role definitions were clear because, sometimes, they had to be to survive.

  Hell, the first day Olivia had shown up at camp had shaken all of us. Until she made it clear what she was about.

  And Olivia was not about fucking around.

  So let her think I was with Jenny. Let me remind myself she was completely off limits. Let’s get through this next day or two without issues and everything would be all right.

  While I couldn’t control my dick, I damn sure could control what I did with it.

  Two days. Three, tops. I could already hear the wind calming down. The storm would probably pass by tomorrow and Cal would come looking for us shortly after that.

  I didn’t say anything about Jenny. Instead, I just mumbled goodnight and hoped she thought I was drifting off to sleep.

  But I didn’t sleep right away. Instead, I listened to her breathe, felt her relax in my arms and was content in the moment.

  This time with her was limited.

  I was going to make the best of it.

  6

  Ark

  I was going to kill her.

  This morning I woke up and she was draped all over me. Her face pressed against my chest. Her leg over my thighs.

  Her hand firmly on my crotch.

  I was hard, aching and irritated. It was like she was doing this on purpose. Tempting me. Baiting me. The frustrating part was I knew she wasn’t. She was just being her.

  Yes, I wanted to enjoy being with her. I didn’t necessarily want to suffer while doing it.

  “Olivia, you need to get up. Now.”

  She popped her head up and I could see she was still mostly out of it. Then she killed me even more by running her hand over the bulge in my jeans clearly not realizing who she was with and what she was doing.

  I groaned and something about the sound must have alerted her to my state of mind when she started scrambling away from me.

  “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know…I didn’t mean…”

  “Yeah. I know.” I jackknifed up. “I need to take a piss. Stay here.”

  I shoved my feet into my boots, grabbed my coat on the way out of the cabin and slammed the door behind me. The snow had stopped, and the wind had died down significantly. The storm was passing. This was good news. For the second time in two days I stomped around outside waiting for my ardor to cool until I could finally take a piss.

  Then I walked around some more, checking the snares I had set yesterday. Anything to keep me from going back into that cabin. From looking at her when I could still feel her stroking me, even if it was over my jeans.

  “Get it together, Ark,” I said aloud to the quiet of the woods around me.

  Now, one more day. Two more days, tops. We could do this.

  “Noah!”

  I turned when I heard the scream. I wasn’t that far from the cabin.

  “Help! Noah!”

  I raced back, plunging through the snow, my heart in my freaking throat when I saw the cabin door open with smoke pouring out.

  Olivia was standing just outside. “I just wanted to start a fire.”

  I didn’t listen to her. Instead, I ran inside to see what she’d done.

  Immediately I realized the problem. She’d stuffed too many large logs in the fire place. All they were doing was smoldering, which was causing all the smoke. I took two out, carefully trying not to burn myself as I did it. I made sure neither log was on fire before I put them back on the woodpile. Once there was more oxygen, the fire picked up and the smoke started to clear.

  “You can shut the door now,” I snapped, happy to have a reason to bite off her head, which was less about her and more about my unhappy dick.

  “You were gone, and it was cold. I just thought—”

  “Yeah, well, you thought wrong. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you ask first.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. Something I didn’t think Olivia had.

  Great. Now I felt like an asshole. “It’s fine. No damage.”

  I took my coat off and sat in the chair running through my mantra of the amount of time I had to get through before this ordeal would be over. Before she would be gone and on her way to Anchorage and corporate headquarters.

  She sat in the chair opposite me, and we both were silent as we stared at the fire.

  “About this morning—” she began.

  “Forget about it.” There was no point in discussing it. She was only going to say she hadn’t realized what she was doing, and I already knew that. Just like I would have said yesterday that I didn’t know what I was doing until she beat me to it.

  “Should we eat something?”

  I thought about the rations. “Not until tonight. Storm’s over. They should find us soon, but I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “Does Cal know about this cabin?”

  “I don’t know, but Zeke does. And Zeke knows I know about it. He’ll make sure Cal knows that.”

  “You’re mad at me.”

  I sighed. “I’m not mad, Olivia.”

  “You’re something. You won’t even look at me.”

  Because it hurt. It hurt to look at her and know she wasn’t going to be mine. It hurt knowing she was hungry, and I hadn’t caught anything to feed her. That she’d been cold, and I’d stormed out without leaving her with a proper fire to keep her warm.

  Everything about her made me ache to my teeth.

  I turned to her and tried to think of something I could say that might make it evident to her but, in the end, I just shrugged. “You want to play rummy?”

  That made her perk up. “I’ll get the cards.”

  We planted ourselves on the sleeping bag and Olivia dealt out the cards leaving the rest of the deck between us. Sure enough, not ten minutes later, she was laying down her last pair.

  I had three cards left.

  “Eighteen,” I said, counting my points.

  “That’s one-sixty to seven,” she said.

  “Oh no. We’re not counting yesterday’s points. This is a new game,” I said. One I might have a chance to win.

  “But that’s how rummy is played. You keep a running total. My parents have had a running total for thirty-seven years.”

  “Well, we’re starting over so I have a chance at catching up.”

  She looked like she wanted to object further but stopped herself. “Fine. Eighteen to nothing.”

  Another hand, another victory for her.

  “Eleven,” I grumbled, counting the remaining points in my hand. I glanced at her then. “Oh no, stop doing that.”

  “Stop doing what?” she asked, pretending to be innocent.

  “You’re counting a running total in your head, not just today’s real total.”

  “You can’t know that,” she insisted.

  I raised my eyebrow at her.

  “Fine,” she huffed. “But that’s not how rummy is played.”

  “Twenty-nine to nothing. Now deal.”

  “It’s one-seventy-one, but whatever,” she grumbled.

  “So your parents have been married that long?” I said as a way to change the subject. There was nothing either sexy or competitive related to families. It was a safe topic for us.

  “Yep. Still as in love with each other as they day they got married. It’s really sweet… and maybe a little intimidating.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, they set the bar pretty high for me. I know what a successful marriage, relationship, love affair looks like. Up close. There would be no way I could settle for anything less and the idea of finding that…scares me a little. Like it’s super rare an
d the odds of it happening within the same family feel like they would be pretty low.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I told her. “The only reason you haven’t found someone, Olivia, is because you’re not looking. Once you start, I imagine you’ll find that person pretty quickly.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Your parents,” she said. “What are they like?”

  “Strong. Resilient. Tough. You have to be to make a life up here. I always thought they were a team. A solid unit. One my sister and I could always count on. They weren’t emotional or anything like that, but they relied on each other. I didn’t realize how much until my mom passed.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, reaching out to grab my hand. “I didn’t know.”

  “Almost ten years now. Cancer. My dad still walks around like a man who is missing his right arm and not even sure of how he lost it.”

  “And your sister? Where is she?”

  “Anchorage. Married to a fisherman so he’s around only part of the year, but they seem to make it work. I have two nephews I get to spoil so it’s all good.”

  “I was an only child. My parents were straight-up hippies and while they wanted the experience of parenting, they didn’t want to burden the world’s resources with another human being. At least that’s what they told me when I asked them for a sister.”

  I laughed. “They sound pretty radical.”

  “Green Peace all the way. When I told my dad I was leaving the EPA to go work for an energy company, I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I explained I wanted to try to change the culture from within. I think he thought I was going to start sabotaging oil wells because he started talking a lot about explosives and ways to use them.”

  “You keep your father away from my wells,” I grumbled.

  Then I looked down and realized she was still holding on to my hand. Or I was holding on to hers.

  I pulled my hand back and I knew she’d realized then what we had been doing. Sitting here, talking, holding hands.

  “Another game?” she asked her face turning red.”