“I’m not going back to the lodge, am I.”
Mine. The word whispered through me one more time, settling in for good.
“No,” I said, into her hair. “You’re not.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
AMY
I woke up the way a woman should always wake up. Naked, well-used, and buried against a mountain man. Or in my case, a Bigfoot.
I still wasn’t used to the sheer real estate of him — all that heat at my back, one forearm banded under my bare breasts, his hand splayed across my stomach. He was awake. I could tell because his thumb was tracing slow arcs low on my belly, each one drifting lower than the last, and because his cock was pressed hard and heavy against my ass, and had been, I suspected, for some time. Patient. Like everything else about him. The man could outwait weather.
I could not.
I arched back against him, slow, with follow-through, and got a low sound against the nape of my neck for my trouble.
“Don’t start what you can’t finish,” he rumbled.
“I finished three times last night. My record is spotless.”
“Mm.” His hand slid up and cupped my breast, kneading the soft weight of it, catching my nipple between two fingers and rolling it until my whole body arched into his hand. “Then let’s talk about mine.”
He turned me under him — a move that had stopped surprising me and would never stop working — and settled hismouth where his hand had been. Not gentle about it. He drew my nipple in deep, sucked hard enough that my back bowed off the mattress, then eased off to a slow drag of tongue, then the soft scrape of his beard across the now wet crest of it, and by the time he switched to the other breast I had a fist in his hair and had already lost the thread of every clever thing I’d been about to say.
“Garrick.”
“Busy.”
“I can see that. I’m endorsing it. I just —” His hand slid down between my thighs, and they fell open for him with zero hesitation. One thick finger drew a long, slow line up the slit of my pussy — barely inside, teasing, discovering how wet I already was and dragging it up over my clit — and whatever I’d been about to say… it hadn’t been that important anyway.
“Look at you,” he said against my other breast, giving it the same treatment. A long deep suck, a drag of his tongue, the scrape of his beard. “Soaked before I even touch you.”
“That’s — you did touch me, technically the thumb thing counts as — oh.” His finger slid inside me, unhurried, curled exactly where he’d learned I needed it, and his thumb settled on my clit in a lazy circle. I heard myself make a sound the neighbors would have complained about, if he had neighbors, which he did not, which was becoming one of my favorite things about him.
“There’s the talker.” He kissed his way up my throat, working me open on a second finger, his cock a brand against my hip, and put his mouth at my ear. “Loud already. Haven’t even given you my —”
A truck horn went off in the yard.
Twice. Cheerful. The unmistakable rhythm of a man announcing himself who knew exactly what he might be interrupting.
Garrick went still. His forehead dropped to my collarbone, his fingers still deep in me, and he said a word into my sternum I’d never heard him use, and I noted it, to tease him about it later.
“Expecting someone?” I asked, my breathing not entirely steady.
“No.” He withdrew his hand — slowly, one last drag of his thumb that made my hips chase him and his mouth curve against my skin, the sadist — and rolled out of bed and into jeans with military efficiency. I admired the entire process from the pillows like the shameless woman I’d become. “Stay here.”
“Absolutely not,” I said, and pulled on one of his shirts and another pair of his shorts and followed on legs that had recently been promised better things.
Jared was standing in the yard beside the lodge truck, aviators on, grin already at full wattage, and at his feet sat my luggage and my missing shoe.
“Morning!” he called, entirely too loud. “Thought I’d run your luggage up the mountain, seeing as it didn’t seem like you were coming down anytime soon.”
Jared looked at me. At the shirt I’d clearly just thrown on. At my bare legs. He looked at Garrick who was wearing nothing but a pair of jeans, unbuttoned at the waist.
We looked like we’d just climbed out of bed.
He grinned. “Amy. You look… recovered.”
