Page 26 of Consumed By The Forbidden Mountain Man

"I love you." My nails in his shoulders. "Don't stop."

He doesn't stop. Picks up the pace, his other hand dropping between us to circle my clit with his thumb. The counter rocks. Something falls in the cabinet behind me. Neither of us cares.

"Come with me," he says. Low, strained. Close.

His thumb presses hard against my clit. I shatter, and he follows, burying himself deep, groaning against my neck.

We stay like that. Connected. His forehead on my shoulder, my hands in his hair. Both breathing hard.

"Your porch light," he says.

"What about it."

"Turn it back on tonight."

"Already planning on it."

Later, in his bed, his arm around me, my head on his chest, I listen to his heartbeat slow.

"Reid."

"Hmm."

"I'm going to build something here. For real. Not because I'm running from Sacramento. Because I'm choosing this."

His arm tightens. Pulls me closer. His mouth presses against my hair.

"I'll build you whatever you need," he says. "It's what I do."

Through the window, both porch lights glow through the pines. His and mine. The whole clearing lit up.

I close my eyes. For the first time in months, I'm not lost. I'm not spiraling. I'm not the girl who quit without a plan.

I'm the woman who found one.

EPILOGUE

REID

EIGHT MONTHS LATER

Ifinally sell the house. The house I framed, drywalled, plumbed, and wired for a marriage that stopped being a home three years before it ended. The house I slept in but never really lived in after Claire left. Guest room. Cold kitchen. Empty closets.

The Hendersons buy it. Young couple, first baby on the way. The wife walks through the master bedroom and tears up, her hand on her stomach, telling her husband about where the crib could go.

I sign the paperwork in my truck in the driveway and don't look back.

The closing check goes into savings. Tony helps me run the numbers on an expansion for the cabin. A proper kitchen. A second bedroom. An office for Ivy, because the woman runs a business now and she needs more than a kitchenette counter and a prayer.

Because Ivy stayed.

Not for two weeks. Not for the festival. She stayed.

By November, she had Patty Cole's muffin business on Instagram. By December, Patty had orders coming in from Reno. By January, Ivy had picked up Holly Pearce at Sweet Peaks, a custom furniture maker named Caleb Morrow who needed a website, and Wade Sutton's orchard operation. She built logos, wrote copy, ran social media accounts, and designed marketing plans from a laptop on our kitchen table at two in the morning with a glass of wine and bare feet on my thigh.

Our kitchen table. Our cabin. She stopped going back to hers in November. Just gradually migrated, one sweater at a time, until the closet had more of her clothes than mine.

When I asked about the other cabin, she said Tony was fine with it. When I asked Tony, he said, "She's already there, man. You want me to drag her out?"