Page 12 of The Mountain Man Lumberjack’s Claimed Bride

"Tell me to stop." His voice is wrecked. Low and scraped raw.

"No."

His eyes find mine. This close, the hazel is almost entirely gold. Firelit. Burning.

"Nora. If I don't stop now, I'm not going to."

My hand slides from his chest to his jaw. The beard is softer than it looks. Underneath, his pulse hammers against my palm.

"Good."

He kisses me again. Harder. Deeper. His arm wraps around my lower back, hauling me fully into his lap so my knees bracket his hips. My back arches as his mouth leaves mine, trailing down the line of my jaw, my throat, the hollow below my ear where his breath comes hot and rough and his teeth graze the skin just hard enough to make my hips roll forward against him.

A groan. Deep. From his chest. His hands flex on my waist, thumbs pressing into the soft skin above my jeans, and his hipspush up to meet me. The evidence of what this is doing to him presses against me through denim. Thick. Hard. Unmistakable.

"Six days." His mouth moves against my throat. "Six days of you in my kitchen. In my flannel. Walking my land like you were born on it." His teeth catch my earlobe. "Do you have any idea what that does to a man who told himself he didn't want this?"

"Show me."

He pulls back. Looks at me. One long, searching look that takes in my flushed face and my swollen mouth and my hips pressed down against his and whatever he's been carrying since a rental car pulled up his driveway and changed the shape of his silence.

"Not here." He lifts me off his lap. Sets me on my feet like I weigh nothing, which, given the size of him, I probably don't. "Not on the couch."

My hand catches in his. "Then where?"

He stands. Six foot four of decision made, battle lost, wall down. His hand is enormous around mine, warm and rough and certain.

"My room."

Two words. No question in them.

He leads me upstairs instead of the guest room where I've been sleeping for six nights in clean sheets in a bed that isn't his, past the bathroom, to the closed door at the end of the hall that I haven't opened because it felt like a line I wasn't supposed to cross.

He opens it. Pulls me through.

The door closes behind us, and the storm rages outside, and tomorrow is day seven, and the answer was never going to be no.

CHAPTER FIVE

HUNTER

Moonlight cuts through the bedroom window in a pale stripe across the floor. The storm has shifted east, rain tapering to a steady drum against the roof, thunder rolling distant now over the far ridges. Enough light to see her. Enough dark to feel like the rest of the world has been erased.

Nora stands at the foot of my bed, looking at me with those brown eyes that haven't flinched once since she stepped out of a rental car six days ago. Her hair is half down from the braid, loose strands falling across her shoulder. My flannel hangs open at her collar, and underneath it her chest rises and falls with breathing that's gone fast and shallow.

My hands are shaking.

Not from nerves. From restraint. From six days of maintaining distance that got smaller every morning, every dinner, every moment she walked through my house making it smell like bread and feel like something it hasn't felt in eightyears. Home. She made it feel like home, and now she's standing in my bedroom with swollen lips and flushed cheeks, waiting for me to do what I've been imagining since I wiped flour off her face on a mountain ridge.

The flannel goes first. My hands find the collar, pulling it off her shoulders slow enough to feel the fabric drag across her skin. It drops to the floor behind her, pooling in a heap of worn cotton that smells like sawdust and her shampoo mixed together. Underneath, a thin tank top. No bra. The cold or the arousal or both have her nipples pressing hard against the fabric, and the sight of them sends a bolt of heat straight down my spine.

"You've been wearing my shirt for two days." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Rougher. Lower. "Every time the collar slipped down your shoulder, I wanted to put my mouth right here." Two fingers trace the curve where her neck meets her shoulder. She shivers. "And here." Down to her collarbone. "And here." The hollow of her throat, where her pulse is hammering so hard I can feel it against my fingertip.

"So do it."

My mouth replaces my fingers. Slow. Tasting the salt on her skin, the warmth underneath. Her head tips back, giving me access, and a sound comes out of her that turns my blood molten. Not a moan. Quieter than that. A caught breath. An exhale that carries my name in the shape of it without actually saying the word.

The tank top peels over her head. Her breasts are full, heavy, perfect. Soft skin and dark pink nipples that tighten under my gaze before I've even touched them. My hands span her ribcage, thumbs brushing the underside of each breast, and her back arches into the contact.