She goes still.Her eyes drop to our hands.My fingers are rough and scarred and twice the size of hers, and something about the contrast makes my chest tight.
"You're doing the right thing," I say.
"I know I am."She turns her hand over beneath mine.Palm to palm.Her fingers thread through mine and grip."Doesn't make it hurt less."
"No.It doesn't."
We sit there.Holding hands across a table littered with bread crumbs and stew bowls and the remnants of a meal shared between two people who've been holding themselves together alone for too long.The rain comes down.The fire burns.Duke snores by the hearth and Scout's tail thumps once against the floorboards.
"I should go," Lydia says.She doesn't move.Her thumb traces a circle on the back of my hand.
"You should stay."
The words come out low and certain and completely irreversible.I don't take them back.I don't qualify them.I look at this woman who walked onto my property three days ago and systematically dismantled every wall I built, and I tell her the truth.
"I'm not asking you to stay because of the rain or because the roads are bad.I'm asking you to stay because I want you here.In my cabin.Tonight."
Her breath catches.The amber in her eyes goes dark and liquid.Her grip on my hand tightens.
"Stephen."
"Tell me no and I'll drive you back to town myself.Tell me yes and I'll spend the rest of this night making sure you don't regret it."
She stands up.My hand drops.For one terrible second, I think she's leaving.
She walks around the table, stops in front of my chair, and looks down at me with an expression that burns through every defense I have left.
"Yes."
I'm on my feet before the word finishes leaving her mouth.My hands find her waist and I pull her against me, and the heat of her body through the thin flannel sears into my palms.She gasps, a sharp intake that I swallow with my mouth, kissing her hard, open, tasting rosemary and bread and the sweetness underneath that is just her.
Her hands fist in my shirt.She pulls, and I go willingly, walking her backward out of the kitchen and down the short hallway toward my bedroom.Her back finds the wall and I press into her, pinning her there with my hips, and the sound she makes against my mouth is the most devastating thing I've ever heard.
"I've been thinking about this since you got out of your car," I say against her lips."Since you walked across my gravel in those boots and looked at my property like you already knew every secret it had."
"Since you held my hand too long."She's pulling at my shirt, dragging it up.Her palms flatten against my stomach and slide up my chest, and the feeling of her hands on my bare skin makes every muscle in my body contract."I knew right then."
I grip the hem of the flannel she's wearing.My flannel.On her body.The possessiveness of that thought goes through me like wildfire.
"I want this off."I pull it over her head in one motion.She lifts her arms to help and the movement pushes her breasts toward me, and Christ, she's not wearing a bra.Full, round breasts with dusky pink nipples already hard from the cold or from wanting me, and the sight of her half-naked in my hallway with her hair falling out of its braid stops my breath.
"You're staring," she whispers.
"I'm memorizing."I cup her breasts, one in each hand, feeling the weight of them, running my thumbs over her nipples and watching her eyelids flutter."Because I want to remember exactly what you look like right now the next time I can't sleep at three a.m."
She grabs my belt and pulls me into the bedroom.
We hit the mattress together.I land over her, catching my weight on my forearms, her thighs opening to cradle my hips.The press of her body under mine is electric.Hot skin against hot skin, her chest bare against my bare chest, and when she rolls her hips up against my cock, already hard and straining behind my jeans, I drop my head to her neck and groan.
"Off."She's working my belt buckle with urgent fingers."Everything off.Now."
I rear back and strip.Belt, jeans, boxer briefs.She watches me from the bed, propped on her elbows, eyes tracking every scar and line and contour of my body.I watch her looking.I let her see.The reef cuts on my arms.The rope burn across my ribs.The body I built pulling people from the ocean.
Her leggings are next.I hook my fingers in the waistband and drag them down her legs, taking the underwear with them.Plain black cotton.Nothing fancy.And still the sexiest thing I've ever peeled off a woman because it's her.
She's naked on my bed.Long limbs, sun-kissed skin, the athletic lines of her body softened by curves that make my hands ache.The silver chain catches the firelight from the other room, the pendant resting between her breasts.
I bend down and kiss that pendant.Then the skin beneath it.Then lower, my mouth tracing a line down her sternum, between her breasts, over her ribs.She arches into me.Her fingers slide into my hair and grip.
