He didn’t rush. But then, I’d never seen him rush. Not even when he’d rescued me from the river. One minute I believed I was drowning. The next, he was there.
He loved me with long, hard strokes of his tongue. Hard, deep thrusts of his thick fingers before moving them to grind against my clit, pressing hard, working me in rough circles until I tightened, and tightened, heels digging into that broad back, everything reduced to just the feel of his mouth and fingers, and the sounds I was making.
When I broke, I broke loud — my cry ringing off the log walls of the home I’d fallen into, one lost shoe, one wrong raft, one perfect river rescue ago — and he stayed exactly where he was through every wave of it, hands clamped on my hips, holding me to his mouth like I might try to leave. As if. As if.
He stood, finally. Wiped his beard on the back of his hand with a satisfaction I felt all over. Then he pulled me off the counter and into his arms, heading toward the bedroom. I grinned into his chest while my one remaining coherent thought floated up and presented itself.
I was, once again, drenched for my mountain man.
EPILOGUE
AMY
“No.”
“Amy.”
“I want to be clear that I love you, I love this campsite, I love this tent, and I love all the things you are planning on doing to me in the tent. But the answer is no.”
Six weeks. Six weeks of living on his mountain — of learning the cabin, the garden, the man, of working remote from his kitchen table while he pretended he wasn’t rearranging his entire workday to stay within earshot of my chatter — and this was the first thing he’d asked me for. Not asked. Garrick didn’t ask. He’d loaded the truck with camping gear, driven us down the mountain, and set up camp on a wide gravel bar beside the river.
The river. My river. He’d taken us to another place along the river. Above the rafting office. Above Devil’s Bend. At a spot where it spread out lazily in the warm August afternoon, moving slow over stones, barely hip-deep. It didn’t fool me for a second. I knew what it was capable of. We had history.
History I had finally memorialized that week, in fact, in the five-star review I’d owed the rafting company all summer. It was simple. And cryptic. Lost a shoe, gained a mountain man. Wouldabsolutely drown again. Jared had it framed behind the front desk within the hour.
Garrick stood at the water’s edge, shirtless, barefoot, patient as bedrock. “It’s August. The water’s low. You have to know how to handle it.”
“Just like I learned how to handle you, Bigfoot?” I walked closer to him, grabbing his cock through his shorts. He responded instantly, growing hard and long beneath my touch. It had taken a little while to let my bad girl side out, not knowing if he would want that or not. He’d encouraged her shamelessly.
He placed his hand over mine but didn’t move it away.
“I handle the river just fine. I admire it from shore. It’s a whole system we’ve worked out. Boundaries. Very healthy.”
“You had a nightmare.”
I let go of him and took a step back.
“You told me once,” he said, “that you spent your whole life saying maybe next time.”
“That’s — using my own confessions against me is a war crime.”
“The water is warm here, I promise, and I’ll be touching you the entire time.” His voice dropped into that register I had never once survived. “Every minute, Minnow.”
I sighed as I looked up at his face. I knew the words were a promise. To keep me safe. No matter the cost.
Which is how I ended up walking into the water holding hands with my very own Bigfoot.
The first ten feet were awful, and I narrated every one of them. The shock of the water as I entered, the gravel shifting beneath my feet, the way the current wrapped my calves like it remembered me. I talked through all of it, high and fast, and Garrick didn’t tell me to calm down or breathe or relax, because he’d figured out long before I told him that the talking was the breathing.
He kept backing deeper, my hands locked in his, his eyes never leaving mine, huge and steady and planted in that riverbed so deep and so steady, the river could never wash it away.
“That’s it. Come to me.”
“If this goes badly, I want a headstone that says she was right about the river.”
“Deeper.”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be saying to you? In fact, if we turn around right now, I’ll let you—”
