Burning Wild

Chapter Seven

The ride home was just as quiet as the drive to the mountains, but this time it was a quiet that weighed heavily on me. I was embarrassed to find myself in this situation, yet again. When I was around Jake, I lost my ability to think clearly. It was as though my mind was clouded with smoke, the vapor just as thick as the kind that nearly suffocated during the fire.

Jake was engrossed to me, too, that much I knew. Otherwise, he wouldn't have initiated the kiss in the back of his truck. But what Jake's body implied, and what his mouth said were two different things, and I wasn't sure which one to believe. He was a torn man who was sending me mixed messages. I tried to be understanding of whatever internal struggle he was enduring, but all he was doing was confusing my feelings even further. 

When Jake and I were together, all I could think about was touching him, feeling his lips on my body, or as appalled as I was to admit it, the idea of having him inside of me. Deep down, I knew that Jake wouldn't want anything more than whatever this was. He only wanted to be friends. But my ability to ascertain this seemed to go out the window when he was sitting next to me.

I fought back to the tears in his eyes and how he'd pulled at his hair in frustration after our kiss. I could see the remorse in his deep, brown eyes the moment he pulled away from me, like he felt an immense amount of guilt for what had happened between us. The fact that he regretted kissing me felt like a punch in the gut.

Jake dropped me off at the hotel with a muffled goodbye before driving away. Once I got to my room, I collapsed on the bed with a heavy sigh, my mind replaying the night's events over and over. After several hours of restlessness, I finally dozed off. Despite my uneasy stomach and wounded pride, I slept better than I had in several days.

I was still lost in unconscious bliss, when I heard a loud banging resonating through the hotel room, causing me to jerk awake in a panic. Harley growled, and the hair on the scruff of his neck was raised. My first instinct was to grab the pepper spray on my keyring.

The pounding on the door continued, getting progressively louder with each bang. My heart raced as I tiptoed to the door and peered through the peephole. A gruff, middle-aged woman with graying hair stood on the other side, tapping her foot impatiently.

"Who is it?" I called, holding my pepper spray at the ready. I meant to sound assertive, but my voice was heavy with sleep and cracked midway through the sentence.

"Hotel management. This is a courtesy reminder that check out is in thirty minutes," she said.

This had my attention. I dropped the arm holding the pepper spray and opened the door a crack so I could talk with the woman unhindered.

"I'm sorry, but there's been some sort of mix-up. I wasn't planning on leaving today," I said. 

"There's no mix-up. You've been booking the room from week to week. Your most recent week is up, and you haven't renewed your reservation," she said. The exasperation was evident on her face.

"Oh, I'm sorry about that," I apologized. It must have slipped my mind with everything I had going on with Jake. "I would like to go ahead and renew the room for another week, then."

"No can do," the woman said. "There's a rodeo convention in town, and all of the rooms are booked up for the next three weeks."

"What?" I asked, my eyes widening in alarm. "What am I supposed to do? My house burned down in the fires a couple of weeks ago, and this is the closest hotel for miles. I have nowhere else to go."

I felt the heaviness of that statement pressing on my chest.

"Not my problem," the woman said brusquely. "We need you to be out of here by eleven, or I'll have no choice but to call the sheriff's department to escort you off the premises."