Teagan couldn’t cook a decent meal for shit. She was too health conscious, too focused on calories and levels of proteins and all that shit a professional athlete was require to eat during training. Even though Noah was in retirement, he still ate like he was conditioning for a fight. We weren't all fitness fanatics, and thankfully, Teagan had a BFF that more than made up for what she lacked in the cooking stakes.

I watched from my perch at the island as Hope busied herself with frying chicken in a skillet at the stove. Fuck, I missed her cooking since she moved out. Hell, I missed more than her cooking. I missed everything about the woman, especially that round, sexy ass of hers as she pottered around the house looking like a lost puppy.

She had a pair of baggy sweatpants on today and an over-sized shirt. Her curls were pinned to the top of her head, held up with a pencil, and I'd never seen anything so fucking beautiful. I had no clue why she continued to hide that amazing body of hers beneath clothes that were about four sizes too big for her, but she did.

She couldn’t hide that fine ass though, I thought to myself as I studied her curves shamelessly. Hope Carter was built like a dream. Honest to god. And I should know. I'd had the pleasure of having that beautiful body beneath me once. And even though it had ended sooner than I hoped, I'd had a hard time forgetting the feel of her.

"Hey, Hunter? How many pieces of chicken do you want?" Hope called out with her back to me, her attention focused on the food she was cooking. She crouched down to look through the glass oven door at the tray of roasted potatoes she had peeled, giving me a wonderful glimpse of the black thong riding up.

"Whatever's going is fine with me," I replied distractedly, tilting my head sideways to thoroughly enjoy the view.

"There's plenty to go around," she called over her shoulder. "Breast or thigh? What's your preference?"

Goddamn.

I had been with more than my fair share of women over the years and I could safely say that not a single one of them had ever evoked in me the feelings Hope Carter did. For Christ's sake, she was a married woman. She had turned me down more than once. And now, she was standing in ugly ass sweats and asking me whether I preferred breast or thigh, and I was burning the hell up inside.

"I'll take whatever you give me," I told her, and I didn’t just mean the chicken or her ass. I was certain this was the longest Hope had spent alone with me since going back to her husband. Teagan and Noah had left for a walk twenty minutes ago, and I had half expected Hope to tag along with them.

That's the way it was between us now.

I smiled and she ran, I chased and she hid, and it drove me batshit crazy.

Hope was careful around me now. Reserved. A shadow of her former self, and I found myself itching to break her free from the chains and restraints holding the real her inside.

I missed that girl and everything about her. The way she slurped on her first cup of coffee of the day, and the way she stored pencils in her hair. I missed that adorable expression she wore every time she had to put down her laptop when she was only half way through writing down a new idea. I missed seeing the excitement in her eyes when she thought up a plot twist, and the way she cried when one of her characters was in pain.

I missed my friend.

Noticing all her little quirks and habits probably made me a fucking stalker but I didn’t care. I wanted to be around this woman.

I always had.

From the moment she crashed into Noah's hotel room last year, Hope Carter had taken me by surprise. The very first time I saw her in the doorway, something switched on inside of me. It wasn’t because she was gorgeous and I wanted to fuck her brains out – I did, but that wasn’t it – no, it was the look in those big blue eyes of hers when she looked up at me. In that moment, I could see how lost she was. I could see the turmoil inside her heart. It was like something inside of her called out to something inside of me, almost like a kindred spirit sort of connection. This beautiful, intelligent, independent and headstrong woman so full of secrets and hidden pain. Hope had burst into my world and intrigued me to the point that I found myself opening up a part of myself to her that had been closed off to the rest of the world.

Losing Hayley the way I had was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

Accepting that she wasn’t coming back was the hardest thing I ever had to do.

But I did it.

Hard as it was, I fucking did it.

The way I saw it, loving someone wasn’t a sign of weakness or something to be ashamed of. Not in the least. Loving someone and telling that someone was one of the bravest things a human being could do. Putting yourself out there, knowing there's a ninety-nine percent chance it will all end in pain and tears and fucking misery, but risking it all anyway because of that one percent chance it might work out – that it might be the jackpot bet you've been trying to win your entire life?

That was fucking bravery.

Love was insanity. It was choosing to bare you soul and ugliness with another human being and being okay with what you saw in the mirror because that person loved the parts of you that were unlovable. The parts you were most ashamed of.

I believed in that.

It didn’t make me a romantic person. I was far from it. I just believed that there had to be some sort of a recess from the bullshit life humans were thrown into, and that recess was the love of a human heart.

Some people might say that made me a traitor to her memory, but I'd never given much thought to what others thought of me. In fact, I didn’t give a damn. I was who I was. I had loved and lost, cried and mourned, and I wasn’t about to shy away from the chance to heal and love and breathe again.

And the woman standing in front of me?

She made me breathe again.

She made me want to.

Hope gave me something I didn’t realize I had been missing and now that I'd had a taste of it, I wasn’t giving it up.

I wasn’t giving her up.

Fuck her husband and the whole damn world. If he loved her as much as she said he did, he wouldn’t have left her. In my humble opinion, the man was fucking crazy. He had walked away from a woman like her and had been touched by fucking god himself that she had waited for him.

If he had only stayed away a couple more months, hell, even another week, I had a feeling the outcome wouldn’t have been so positive for him.

"Hunter," Hope warned, stirring me from my reverie. She spun around to face me and held up a shaky hand. "Please don’t."

Jesus, the way she said my name, the way the word rolled off her tongue, did something to me. I hadn't been called Hunter since pre-k, not even by my folks, but I liked hearing the name come out of her mouth.

"Don't what, sweetheart?" I cocked a brow and waited for her to enlighten me. I wasn’t about to open my mouth and give her an out. I was baiting the girl and I wanted her to bite.

She looked head on, blue eyes wide and cheeks flushed bright red, before whispering, "Don’t flirt with me."

"I wasn’t aware that I was flirting," I shot back with a smirk. Of course I was flirting with her. It was impossible not to. "You asked me a question and I answered you honestly." Now, that part was the truth.

My response seemed to throw Hope and her brows furrowed in confusion. "Oh," she finally mumbled, redder in the cheeks than earlier. "Okay."

"Why?" I teased. "Did you want me to flirt with you?"

"No," she spluttered, almost choking on her words. I cocked a brow in response and it earned me a death glare. "Absolutely not," she reiterated. "No flirting."

"You sure?" I asked, unable to wipe the smirk from my face. The woman was ridiculously hot when she was angry.

"One hundred percent. Now stop being so...infuriatingly frustrating!" Her chest was heaving as she glared up at me, clearly pissed off.

I laughed at her response.

She was such a little liar.

We didn’t speak much after that, and ended up eating our meal in silence. The woman was still very nervous around me and I didn’t want to push her too far. I was enjoying being in her company far too much to fuck it all up and send her running back to him. She had a backbone worthy of a soldier and an uncompromising loyalty. Unfortunately, that loyalty seemed to be directed at Jordan. I had plans on fixing that.

Later that evening when she was about to leave – to go back to him – the heaven's opened up and blessed me with a fucking miracle.

"Dammit," Hope hissed, stalking back through the front door. "I left the lights on in my truck. The battery's as dead as a doorknob now."

"I'll drive you home," I was only more than happy to offer.

"Oh." Hope's cheeks turned bright red. "No. That's okay. I don’t want to trouble you. I'll just call a cab."

"You're not troubling me." Grabbing my keys off the counter, I walked towards her. "I offered. Come on."

"But it's over an hour's drive to get to Denver," she spluttered, trying to find a way out of getting in my truck with me.

"I'm not doing anything," I shot back, not giving her an out. "Now, let's go."