Page 19 of Consumed By The Forbidden Mountain Man

"He's coming Saturday."

Her face goes still. The sleepy warmth drains out of it. "Saturday."

"Marco's move finished early. He wants to be here for the last weekend of the festival."

She wraps her arms around herself. My henley, her bare legs, the cold turning her cheeks pink. "Okay. So we tell him."

"Tell him what."

"About us."

Us. The word sits between us on the porch. It's too big for what we've had. Too small for what it feels like.

"Ivy. He's my best friend. He asked me to look out for you. I slept with you."

"You didn't just sleep with me." Her voice is quiet. Careful. "Don't reduce this to that."

"I'm not reducing anything. I'm being realistic."

"Realistic." She takes a step back. "What does realistic look like to you?"

And here it is. The thing I've been swallowing for five days. The thing that kept me awake last night while she slept against my chest.

"You're here for two weeks. You don't have a job. You don't have a plan. You told me yourself you don't know what you're doing next." My voice comes out flat. Controlled. The voice I use on subcontractors who've screwed up a measurement. "What happens when the festival ends?"

"I don't know."

"That's what I mean."

"So because I don't have a five-year plan stapled to my forehead, this doesn't count?"

"That's not what I said."

"It's what you meant." She's looking at me with those brown eyes and they're hurt. Clear, direct hurt. She wears everything on her face. No walls, no armor. "You're doing what your ex did."

The words land in my chest. Direct hit.

"Don't."

"She decided you weren't enough before you could prove her wrong. Now you're deciding I'm temporary before I've had a chance to show you I'm not."

"You've been here ten days, Ivy."

"And in ten days you've shown me more honesty, more kindness, more of yourself than any man I've ever known. So don't tell me time is the problem. You're scared."

Scared. She's right. She's absolutely right, and I hate her a little for seeing it so clearly.

Claire left because she outgrew me. Outgrew this life. She married a contractor in a small town and woke up one morning realizing she wanted something bigger. Something I couldn't build for her no matter how many houses I framed.

Ivy is twenty-six. No roots. No plan. She's brilliant, ambitious, and currently in the middle of rebuilding her entire life from scratch. She could go anywhere. Do anything.

And I'm a thirty-eight-year-old general contractor in a town of two thousand people who sleeps in the guest room of the house he built for someone else.

What the hell do I have to offer her?

"I think we need to take a step back before Tony gets here," I say.

Wrong words. Wrong tone. I hear it the second they leave my mouth.