Page 110 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“I cannot believe you proposed,” she said.

“I told you I was pursuing you.”

“I thought you meant flowers and dinner. Not a ring.”

“I am an overachiever.”

She laughed. Soft and warm, the kind of laugh that vibrates through the body of the person holding you, and I felt it in my chest and my arms and the place behind my ribs where she had lived since the first day I met her.

“You are shaking,” she said.

“I am not.”

“You are. Your hands are shaking.”

“That is the adrenaline. Proposing is stressful.”

She turned in my arms. Faced me. Put both hands on my chest and looked up at me with those eyes, and the candlelight made them darker, deeper, the color of the sky just before night falls when everything is suspended between light and dark.

“You were scared,” she said.

“I was not scared.”

“Sawyer Cole. You were scared I would say no.”

“The thought crossed my mind.”

“The answer was always yes. It has been yes since the first day I showed up at your sawmill. It was yes when I kissed your cheek in front of your crew. It was yes when I left and it was yes every single day I was gone and it was yes the moment I came back.” She pressed her palm flat against my chest, over my heart. “It has always been yes.”

I kissed her.

Not hard. Not hungry. Not the way I usually kissed her when the need was driving and the patience was gone. This was different. This was the kiss of a man who had just been given something he did not deserve and was treating it with the reverence it warranted. Slow. Deep. My mouth moving against hers with a tenderness that I did not know I was capable of, one hand cradling her jaw, the other at the small of her back, holding her close.

She melted into me. Her hands sliding up my chest to my neck, her fingers threading into my hair, her body pressing against mine with a warmth that seeped through every layer of clothing between us. The kiss deepened. My tongue found hers and the taste of her, wine and salt and something that was purely Chloe, flooded my senses.

I pulled back. Pressed my forehead to hers.

“I want to take my time tonight,” I said.

“Then take your time.”

I lifted her. She wrapped her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck and I carried her to the bedroom, through the hallway still lined with streamers from the celebration, past the candles that were burning low but still casting their warm glow on the walls.

The bedroom was dark except for the moonlight and two candles I had placed on the nightstand earlier, their flames small and steady, and I laid her on the bed and stood over her and looked at her the way I had been looking at her all night. Like she was the answer to every question I had ever been afraid to ask.

I undressed her. Slowly. One piece at a time. Her blouse, unbuttoned from the top, each button released with the careful patience of a man who was not going to rush this even if his body was screaming at him to. Her skirt, unzipped and eased down her hips, my hands following the path of the fabric, tracing the curve of her waist, the swell of her hips, the smooth skin of her thighs. Her bra, unclasped and removed with a gentleness that made her breath catch.

She lay beneath me in the candlelight and the moonlight, bare and beautiful, the ring on her finger glinting, and the sight of her made something inside me expand until it hurt. Not pain. The opposite. The kind of fullness that comes from feeling too much all at once.

I stripped my clothes off. Settled beside her on the bed. And for a long moment I just held her. Skin to skin. Her back against my chest. My arm draped over her waist. Our breathing syncing the way it always did when we were close, a rhythm that was ours, a frequency that only the two of us could hear.

My hand began to move. Slowly. Tracing the line of her collarbone. The curve of her breast. The flat of her stomach. Slow, lazy circles that were not going anywhere and were going everywhere, and I felt her breathing change under my touch, felt it quicken and deepen and catch.

I turned her onto her back. Kissed her throat. The hollow where her pulse was racing. The curve of her breast, where I took her nipple into my mouth and sucked gently, and the sound she made, a soft moan that she tried to stifle and could not, sent heat flooding through me.

I kissed lower. Down her stomach. Across her hip. I settled between her thighs and looked up at her and she was looking down at me with those dark blue eyes and her lips parted and her chest rising and falling with breaths that came too fast.

“Sawyer,” she whispered.