Mom gives me a quick peck on the cheek. “That goes for you too,sweetheart.” She points a key at Rowan, mouth tipped up in a tease. “Rowan, I expect her home by midnight.”
He chuckles, tips his ball cap. “Yes, ma’am.”
Together, we watch Mom’s brake lights as she turns onto the main road.
“You heard the woman,” he announces. I turn to find him grinning down at me. “Fun. So what’ll it be?”
I purse my lips in thought and cast a glance around the parking lot until I spot something in the distance. A Ferris wheel.
The annual Boulder County Carnival. I forgot it was running this weekend. A cheshire grin spreads across my face.
Rowan tracks my eyes. “I don’t do dunk tanks,” he warns.
“I don’t do haunted houses.”
He takes one slow, sauntering step and then another, gaze fixed on me as he closes the distance between us. I fight to hide the way my breath catches when he dips his head. His lips are a millimeter from mine when he pauses, hovers so close I can feel the scratch of his beard on my chin. A hand grazes my hip, coils around my waist to my back and then…
Creak.
The passenger door to his truck swings open behind me and he steps back, leaving me breathless, flushed, and annoyed as hell.
I scoff and glare at the same time. He pops a dimple I want to scrape right off that smug face of his. Correction: I want toeatthat dimple right off his face.
“The night is young, Hannah James. Get in.”
The air smellslike hot asphalt, buttered corn, and cotton candy. Carnival music rings through the crowd, split amongst the shrieks of happy children and the sound of spinning gears and clanging metal.
“What first?” Rowan asks.
“Funnel cakes, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
I order my wagon-wheel-sized plate of billowy, sugary goodness while my soldier orders a turkey leg the size of his head.
We wander the wide paths sliced between rows of food vendors and carnival games, stuffing our faces as we hatch a plan for the rides we want to tackle.
A sudden tug on my waist jerks me from the path of a group of rowdy teenage boys. “Eyes up,” Rowan commands, the crook of his smile matching the crook of his finger still wedged in the belt loop of my shorts.
I chuckle and return to my funnel cake, licking the powdered sugar off my fingers before going in for another bite.
Another belt loop tug a moment later as a mother pushing a double stroller squeezes past us. In my defense, it’s hard to walk and consume funnel cake at the same time.
“Would you marry that funnel cake if it had a pulse?”
“Funnel cake is only available to me this one weekend a year, Rowan. Let me live, dammit.”
He trashes his turkey bone and uses a napkin to wipe away the grease around his mouth. Rowan stares down at the funnel cake carnage on my plate, watching in amusement until I’m finished. I suck my thumb clean one final time with a loudslurpand toss the plate into the bin.
I scan the nearest attractions. “Should we do the bumper cars first?”
“Nope, come here.” He pulls me across the busy path to a vintage photo booth tucked between two food trailers.
Slipping inside, Rowan slides the curtain shut behind us. He lowers to the tiny bench seat and plops me into his lap. I tap through the setup screen until the countdown begins.
5…4…
I scrunch his face between my palms.