Love is a Battlefield: Games of Love, Book 1 (18 page)

It was later in the day than when she’d been there before, the sun an orange ball starting to glow as it made its descent, and she could already tell how spectacular the park would be when lit only by the paper lanterns and the light of the full moon that was expected the weekend of the event. The entire place practically pulsed with romance, the sound of her car door breaking into the evergreen-scented air and causing a nearby flock of birds to take to the sky in a mad dash of wings.

And then she saw the three other vehicles parked a few spots away, one of which was a huge black truck she recognized with an uncanny thump of her heart.

She should have known Julian would be here. If something existed in opposition to her, he’d already claimed it, mastered it and stood around waiting for a chance to flaunt it.

Kate’s hair happened to be held in place by a silver-beaded hair stick that would make very satisfactory holes in each of the oversized tires of that damn truck. But the hair stick was vintage, and it was fragile.

Next time, she’d remember to pack an icepick.

Stealth had not been in her plans, but she adopted it all the same, peering at the vehicles without making a sound. The back of Julian’s truck was filled with assorted paraphernalia, including what looked like a giant box of beef jerky and two twenty-four packs of beer. Some tools and a tarp were back there too.

She shook her head. The things men carried around in their trucks. Her own car had nothing more stored in it than an emergency blanket, a first-aid kit, some jumper cables and a fully loaded flare gun. Jada constantly made fun of her safety collection, but Kate had started driving before every teenager in the world had a cell phone. Her father had worked very hard to instill a healthy respect of dark, deserted highways.

Kate crept around the vehicles to the main clearing of the park. Voices, male and inordinately pleased with themselves, rose up through the air.

Four tents in muted shades of blue and green were set up in a crude semicircle around a single light source. Camping. They were camping in the middle of the park. Kate straightened. The situation didn’t seem quite right. There were still a good two weeks to go before the events.

The men didn’t have a campfire lit, but two of them had found a way to jam a couple of hot dogs on a stick inside the glass of an old lantern. Kate recognized one of the men as the bouncer from Vixen’s Gin and Juke Joint. The other man was a little bit smaller than the others but bore a strong resemblance to the bouncer. A behemoth in training, most likely.

“Hey, Jules—you want a beer?” she heard Michael call. Michael stepped out of one of the green tents, liberally scratching his balls. So that was what men did when they went camping. Drank and played with themselves.

Kate wasn’t sure what to do next. Instinct urged her to crouch next to one of the large rocks marking the periphery of the parking lot and watch to see what sort of plot they had lined up, but the risk of being caught was too great. What possible explanation existed that wouldn’t make her sound like a complete idiot?

She decided it was best to leave—the mature thing to do, surely.

But then Julian emerged from his tent, wearing nothing but a pair of athletic pants. Her vision tunneled like she was in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and she found her legs didn’t work quite as well as they used to. She already knew he was strong, that his chest was a hard-packed surface of muscles that radiated heat. But seeing, in this case, was more than believing. It was swooning, drooling, falling to the ground in a pool of hormonal bliss.

He moved as though he were completely unaware of the effect he had on the atmosphere around him, as though he didn’t feel the way men, nature and the very air parted to make way for him. He displaced so much energy, it was as though he caused some sort of cosmic shift in the way the world was supposed to be functioning.

His actions were simple as he bent to arrange a few supplies, but the way his body rippled was anything but. He was like a predatory animal, so attuned to its own form that it forgot how majestic and frightening it might appear to a bystander—to its prey.

“Well, well, well. What have we here?” a low, masculine voice cooed directly into her ear. A hand grasped her waist.

She whirled around with a start, the prey metaphor coming to an untimely truth. But before she could register the man behind her, she smacked her forehead against something hard and unyielding, pain splintering out like cracked fissures along her skull. Stars didn’t quite come dancing into her line of vision, but twinkling bits of floating light did. She sank to the ground with a groan.

“Oh shit,” the same voice said, the hand pulling sharply away. Her attacker turned to the group of campers and called out, “Dude—I think I killed some chick hiding in the parking lot.”

“I’m not dead,” Kate muttered, letting out a noise halfway between a groan and mortification. She pressed her hand against her head, right on the hairline. Her fingers were slick with blood, and she could feel a huge welt growing already. “What did you hit me with?”

“What happened?” Julian came jogging up. Kate couldn’t see much through the haze of pain and blood, but she heard his voice, felt the way the air suddenly shifted. “Kate? What the—?”

She struggled to get to her feet, but Julian’s hand pressed down on her shoulder, forcing her back to the ground. His hand stayed there, warm and insistent. He was telling her what to do, as usual, but it was comforting to know he was there.
Why did he have to be so comforting? Why did his simply being there have to make her feel so good?

“McClellan? What happened?”

“He hit me.”

“He did what?” Julian roared, an honest-to-goodness feral sound that started somewhere deep underground and rumbled up through the entire earth. His hand lifted from Kate’s shoulder only to be planted firmly into McClellan’s nose, which looked a little as though it had been punched once or twice over the past few years. The impact made a sickening thud and sent the large man reeling backward.

McClellan, to his credit, didn’t return the swing.

“I didn’t hit her, man. She ran right into my hammer.”

Julian leaped forward with another growl, but McClellan was ready for him this time and easily dodged the attack.

“That’s ridiculous. No one runs into a hammer so hard it makes her bleed.”

“I do,” Kate said with a sigh. She got most of the way to a standing position, but her head throbbed, and she was hit with a wave of nausea that threatened to upend the contents of her stomach—wine and scone.

Julian grabbed her and put an arm—strong, solid and warm—around her waist. “Are you sure you should get up?”

“The alternative is to sit here and bleed. So, yes.”

“Do you want me to hit him again?”

Kate laughed. And winced. “No. I did run into his hammer. But it wasn’t my fault. He scared me.” She looked over at McClellan, seeing him now without the element of surprise weighing her down. He
still
scared her. He was big in ways the other athletes weren’t, muscles and flesh all stacked up on top of one another to the point where he couldn’t put his arms firmly down at his sides or even stand up straight. He even wore a pair of those muscle-builder pants, all elastic and loose, colorful fabric.

McClellan scowled. “She was skulking.”

Kate opened her mouth. And then shut it. She
had
been skulking, and she didn’t particularly wish to dwell on it.

“Oh, I think I need to sit down.” She moaned instead, turning her head so a few dramatic drops of blood splattered into the dirt.

Julian promptly whisked her up into his arms and began carrying her to his truck. He was doing it again—taking over. But the way he lifted her and carried her like she was nothing more than a deliciously feminine slip of a human being reminded her very much of their first meeting. Before she’d realized he was her enemy, when he seemed like a sweet, caring man who might genuinely be interested in her.

She let herself enjoy the brief journey, her head pressed against the smooth plane of his bare chest, warm even in the cooling night air. She was so close she could easily kiss him, a quick press of the lips along the upper curve of his pectoral muscle. And she was perilously close to doing it, like a woman on a diet placed in the arms of a piece of decadent chocolate cake.

But she didn’t. Blood, dirt and the crunch of McClellan’s nose as he snapped it back into place set an entirely different tone to the proceedings.

Julian set her gently on the tailgate of the truck, amidst the beef jerky and tarps, her legs dangling over the edge. But he wasn’t the least bit interested in her legs. His face level with hers, he started poking at the wound on her head, exploring the cut as a chimp might search for nits.

She bore it patiently, closing her eyes and trying not to imagine those hands moving in a less clinical manner across her brow.

“I don’t think you need stitches,” he said in a voice of authority. Something rough wiped across her face, wafting a slight gasoline smell into the air. It was a rag—like the kind her mechanic used to check the amount of oil in her car.

Kate wrinkled her nose and backed away. “What are you doing? Is that sanitary?”

His easy chuckle shook the truck. “It’s clean. Relax. I’m not an idiot.”

“You’re also not a doctor.”

“I work with builders five months out of the year. I’ve seen my share of gaping head wounds. This cut isn’t going to kill you.” He waved the rag in front of her face. She had to admit it looked relatively clean, other than the blood now covering it. “And neither is this.”

He dabbed at her head with it again, a smirk lurking at the corner of his mouth. “What are you doing here, anyway? Spying on me?”

“Very funny. As far as I’m aware, this is a public park, not a private residence—especially not a private residence where two people are having a date.” She cast a pointed look over at the group of men, all of whom were none too discreetly watching their conversation unfold.

Kate snatched the rag out of Julian’s hand and jumped off the edge of the truck, using the side-view mirror to inspect her wound. He was right—it wasn’t going to kill her. But it was unsightly just the same, a giant blue goose egg crowned with a jagged line of drying blood.

“You could have outed me at any moment,” Julian pointed out. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the truck as though he hadn’t a care in the world. “But you chose not to. I think that says a lot more about you than it does me.”

“At least I don’t skulk behind potted plants!”

“Right. You were skulking behind a rock. That’s better. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“To Duke?” Kate forced herself to laugh and mirror Julian’s stance, even though her highly unattractive head wound put her at a slight disadvantage.

That was a question she’d been asking herself for days. If there was one weapon that would help her put Julian in his place, it was Duke. Golden, gilded Duke, with his rolling lawn and fat wallet. But it had seemed wrong, somehow, to drag him into the fight. Duke wasn’t a man who resorted to spying and juvenile pranks. He was above it, floating like an effervescent god.

“I didn’t want my evening to descend into a fistfight, that’s all,” she lied. “It’s too bad you didn’t stick around. We had such a lovely time after you left.” That was a lie too. After dinner, Kate cut the evening short. It had been growing too difficult to keep a serene, interested expression on her face after the altercation with Julian. Duke had been incredibly gracious about it, of course. And he’d sent flowers the next day, a huge, gorgeous display of roses that still made her blush to look at.

“How do you know I wasn’t there? Maybe I found a better hiding place.”

It was possible. Unlikely, but possible. She’d thought of it at the time and had even granted Duke a kiss after he walked her to her car in case Julian might be on hand, watching. It had been performed as an act of pure rebellion, but she’d had to admit there was an undeniable allure to Duke’s kiss. He was a man who knew what to do with a soft pair of lips.

She decided play the same cards now. “Shame on you, then. I had no idea you were such a Peeping Tom. Did you at least enjoy the show?”

A scowl, dark and shadowy, crossed Julian’s face, but he didn’t speak.

“I came here to take measurements of the park,” she said, pointing to the papers she’d dropped over by the rocks. “What are
you
doing here?”

As if suddenly realizing the impropriety of standing there with the breadth of his chest flashing right in her face, he rummaged through his gym bag until he found a T-shirt to pull on.

“Funny thing, that.” His words were muffled until the gray material came down over his abs. Kate was finally able to bring her full attention up to his face.

“I was thinking over our past conversations, and something you said inspired me to action.”

“This doesn’t look like action. It looks like…barbarism,” Kate said. It did too. She didn’t condone sleeping outside, in a bunk bed or in any hotel that boasted a number in its name.

“We’re camping,” McClellan said helpfully, coming forward to grab a case of beer from the back of Julian’s truck. “She’s all right, eh?”

“She’ll live,” Julian muttered. “Sorry about the nose, McClellan. I got carried away.”