“Yeah,” I said to the dark, to nobody, to the woman already asleep beside me. “Me too.”
CHAPTER FIVE
AMY
I woke up alone in a strange bed and lay still as memories of yesterday and last night came flooding back.
I might have been in a strange bed, but I knew exactly who it belonged to.
Garrick.
I ran my hand over the other side of the bed. Empty. But his pillow still held the dent of his head, and as if to confirm the whole thing was real, I pressed my face into it. “This is how women end up kidnapped willingly,” I whispered into the pillowcase.
I sighed. Waking alone was exactly what I’d expected. It would have been too much to hope I’d wake up in his arms — although my imagination, unsupervised since the riverbank, had no trouble filling in what that would have been like. All that heat at my back. One of those forearms banded under my breasts. A hand the size of a dinner plate trailing down my body, those rough fingertips slipping under the hem of my shirt, and finding nothing under that flannel but me, and…
And he wasn’t even in the building and I was already flushed. Wonderful. Great start.
Sitting up on the edge of the bed, I took stock of how I was feeling after my adventure yesterday. My head was clear. Nodizziness, no nausea. Only morning light coming through a crack in the curtains, the sound of a creek somewhere in the distance, and the flat, undeniable fact that I had asked a mountain man if I could sleep with him and he had carried me to his bed and I had slept. Beside him. All night. Without so much as rolling over into his space, which, in hindsight, felt like a criminal waste of proximity.
From outside came a sound I couldn’t place. Rhythmic. A dense thud followed by a small silence. Then another thud.
I got up, finger-combed my hair to some semblance of normal and followed the sound through the cabin and out onto the porch, and then I stood there in my socks and forgot what I’d come out for.
Garrick was splitting wood. With no shirt.
I was a grown woman. I’d seen shirtless men before. But there was shirtless, and then there was whatever was happening in that yard — acres of tanned back, a spine like a plumb line, muscle moving under skin with every swing of the axe. There was a scar low on his left side, another along the ribs, a knee brace strapped over his jeans. Sweat ran a dark line down his spine into the waistband of those jeans, and I followed it all the way down before I caught myself, and then I didn’t catch myself. He set up a round of wood, swung, split it clean, kicked the halves aside, and set another.
I kept watching. Why? Because I was a grown woman. And my grown woman brain had thoughts. Thoughts about the flex of his thighs when he swung. Thoughts about those hands choked up on the axe handle, and what else he could do with them. Thoughts about whether he’d handle me with that same unhurried precision — set, swing, split — and whether I’d survive it, and whether surviving it was even a priority.
The man split logs like he had all day. I had a strong suspicion — and an even greater desire to know — if he dideverything like he had all day. My thighs pressed together on their own initiative.
I must have made a noise. Or he’d heard the door. Either way, he turned around. “There’s coffee.”
“You said no caffeine.”
“That was yesterday. Your eyes are tracking and you did four rounds of questions overnight without missing.” He turned back around and set another round on the block. “Half a cup.”
“You’re rationing my coffee?”
“Yep.”
“You can’t.” I took a deep breath not wanting to start this day looking like I was arguing with him. Because I would argue my case for more caffeine. “Why do you even need this much firewood?”
“Winter.”
“It’s July,” I stated.
“Winter doesn’t care.”
“That’s the most Montana sentence I’ve ever heard.” I went back inside, poured my half cup, and came out to sit on the porch edge with it, and I watched him work. It was hardly my fault the work he was doing required being shirtless, or that he worked up a sweat doing it. Which, in turn, made his chest glisten. I was simply a witness. An extremely thorough witness.
“What’s the plan today?” I asked his back. “What does a Bigfoot do all day? Walk me through it. I want the full itinerary.”
“More wood. Then repair the garden fence. Something’s been getting in.”
“Something like what?”
“Deer. Maybe elk.”
