His expression didn’t shift. No surprise. No retreat. No recalibration. His hand stayed on mine, warm and steady.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said.
“Does it change anything?”
“It doesn’t change how I feel.”
“And how do you feel?”
He took a breath. The kind that comes before a confession or a surrender.
“Like I’ve been sitting in the dark for seven months, and you walked in and turned on a light I didn’t know was there.” His thumb traced the back of my hand. “Like I was supposed to find you on that ridge. Like the mountain put you there because it was tired of watching me hide.”
My heart was hammering. Not from fear. Not from the fall. Not from the pain in my ankle. From the way this man—this quiet, broken, impossibly solid man—was looking at me like I was the answer to a question he’d stopped asking.
“I want this,” I said. “I want you. But I need you to know I don’t have a frame of reference. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You don’t need a frame of reference.” He lifted my hand from his chest and pressed his lips to my knuckles, soft and slow. “You just need to tell me what feels good and what doesn’t. That’s all.”
He kissed me then, and it was nothing like what I’d imagined a first kiss would be. I’d thought it would be tentative. Exploratory. Two people testing the edges of something new.
This was a man who’d made a decision. And the decision was me.
His mouth was warm and firm, and when his hands slid to my waist, the gentleness in his grip contradicted everything about the size of him. He kissed me like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it. Slow. Deep. Thorough.
I made a sound against his mouth—a soft, involuntary thing I’d never heard myself make—and felt his hands tighten at my waist in response. Not harder. Just more certain.
He pulled back just far enough to speak. “Your ankle.”
“My ankle is fine.”
“Your ankle is sprained.”
“My ankle is not invited to this conversation.”
The ghost smile became a real one. I watched it transform his face—the hard angles softening, the tension around his eyes easing—and I realized I was seeing something he hadn’t shown anyone in a long time.
He lifted me the same way he had on the ridge, effortlessly, and carried me through the cabin to the bedroom. It was spare, like the rest of the house. A bed with a quilt his mother probably made. A nightstand with a book and a reading lamp. A window that looked out on nothing but dark trees and stars.
He set me on the bed and stood over me, and in the lamplight his eyes were the color of the creek outside, gray-green and clear and deep.
“Tell me if you want to stop,” he said. “Anytime. For any reason.”
“I don’t want to stop.”
He knelt in front of me, unlaced Paisley’s borrowed boot from my good foot, then carefully—so carefully—eased my wrapped ankle onto a pillow. Then his hands moved to my waist, his fingers hooking into the waistband of my hiking pants, and he looked up at me with a question in his eyes that made my breath catch.
“Yes,” I said.
And that was all he needed to hear.
4
RIDGE
Iyanked her pants and panties down in one rough pull, cotton sliding over her hips.
She was already soaked, the scent of her hitting me hard—musky, sweet, ready. Blue cotton hit the floor. Bare pussy, pink and glistening, thighs parted just enough to show me everything.