“Slade.” I hear the smile in her voice now. “While it’s very,um, sweet that you’re prepared to defend me against rogue bears, you do need to sleep too.”
I turn around.
She’s lying on her side, head on the pillow, watching me with those warm brown eyes. She’s wearing a silky little nightdress. Her pink hair is loose around her shoulders, still damp at the ends from the shower. The wood stove throws a low warm glow across the bed and across her.
I stand there in the tent flap, mesmerized.
She pats the duvet. “Come to bed.”
I know she doesn’t mean it to sound sultry. But it does. Her soft voice. Her incredible curves laid out for me like a feast.
Every caveman instinct in me takes it as an invitation.
Moving slowly, controlled, fighting against that instinct with every breath, I close up the tent flap.
I get under the covers and make a series of careful decisions.
The first: where to put my hands. Those go flat on my chest, not reaching.
Then, where to direct my eyes: the tent ceiling, not her.
Most importantly, where to keep my dick: in my pants.
Not, as much as I may want to, inside my wife.
I breathe deeply. It only gets me a lungful of her delectable feminine scent and I close my eyes briefly, praying for the strength to get through this night without pulling her body to mine.
She turns on her side to face me. I can still make out her features in the moonlight. “How’s your shoulder now?” she asks.
“Better. Thanks to you.” I pause. “I’m sorry about the ‘tent’ of it all. I wanted to give you an authentic Montana experience. Could’ve just stayed at Wild Rose and had four walls and roof too.”
She laughs. “This is lovely.”
“You don’t have to pretend,” I tell her. “I know how you grew up. This is roughing it for your kind.”
“It’s rustic and beautiful. I’m having the time of my life. Truly.”
We lie there in the warm dark. The wood stove ticks. Outside the wind moves through the spruces and the pines, ruffling the flaps of the tent.
She’s close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off her. Close enough that if I reached out my hand I’d find her immediately. I could tug her into my side with no effort at all.
I say, “I’m sorry your family didn’t come to our wedding.”
She snorts. “I’m not.”
After hearing the kinds of things they say to her, the truth is I’m not really sorry either. What I’m really sorry for is that she doesn’t have a better family.
“They would have been terrible guests,” she continues. “Would have drank every drop of alcohol and left the food untouched. Made some snide comment or another about us. Trust me, the less we see of the Sherwoods, the better.”
“How’d someone…”—as perfect as you— “Like you come from someone like them?”
“We’ve all been asking ourselves that question for twenty five years,” she sighs. “I’m the black sheep of the family.”
Reaching across the bed, I gently tug on a strand of her hair. “Pink sheep.”
She smiles and looks at me with those gorgeous deep eyes and I feel it everywhere: the pull of her. The warmth of her body just inches from mine. The softness of her hair still curled around my finger.
I could cross this distance between us. If I could, I would kiss her until she was breathless. Peel every scrap of silk off her body and bury my face between her legs andfeast. And after I made her come that way, I would fuck my wife and make her come for me again, on my cock.
