Chapter 20 Forrest
20 FORREST
It’s incredible how quickly you can tell someone’s pissed at you. Thanks to this evolutionary superpower, it takes me less than a second after returning from Anchorage to understand that the only welcome home I’m likely to receive from Margot is a detailed instructional pamphlet on how to fuck off.
It’s problematic, because ever since the sauna, the attachment hormones I’ve been desperately trying to repress have decided they’re moving in and putting up fucking wallpaper. Naively, I actually believed going to Anchorage would help me get some control over them. But this feeling in my chest has only gotten more settled in the last week. Margot has a home inside me now, even if it’s just for the next two weeks, and the idea that she might not want it chafes so deep I can barely breathe.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had a second to talk to her about it. From the moment I got back, I’ve been inundated with settling my dad back into his rooms, preparing for tonight’s snowstorm, and making dinner for eight hungry people so that Jo can have a break, all while feeling like there’s a freshly sharpened ax dangling above me. But thankfully, dinner’s over, and I no longer have a table full of people watching as I try to break the icy wall of polite formality Margot has put between us.
“Hey,” I say to her profile as she loads her plate on top of the others.
“Yes?” she says without looking at me. Her tone is curt—the same as when she asked me to pass the goddamn rolls, and nothing like the warmth she used while planning her cozy fucking Scrabble rematch with Ollie.
“We need to talk,” I say more brusquely than I intended. “Please,” I add.
She takes a breath and lowers her shoulders like she’s been preparing for this moment. I’m bewildered, mind clawing for what I did, when she finally looks at me. “Let’s go to your place.”
I nod, wanting to feel relieved, but she turns from me without another word. She’s silent on the cold, dark walk from the lodge. Silent when we reach my place and take off our outerwear. Silent as she perches on my couch like she doesn’t plan to stay long. I hurry to light the fire, my anxiety building with every sharp pop and crackle of burning wood. Until finally, I turn to her.
“Well?” I blurt. “You want to tell me what I did? Why you won’t even look at me?”
It comes out like I’m the one who’s pissed, and I want to staple my tongue down. I’m not pissed. I’m scared and jealous as hell, but I can barely tell the difference right now. Her light-brown eyes narrow at me, and I know I should sit down next to her, but I’m too nervous. I cross my arms instead.
“I think the real question,” she counters, crossing her arms right back, “is whether you were ever going to tell me about Charlotte.”
My tapping fingers freeze against my ribs as her words deliver the relief of understanding what’s wrong, and horror because— shit . My shirt begins suffocating me as I mentally scan words I wish I didn’t have memorized, this time from Margot’s perspective.
“Charlotte,” I repeat hoarsely. “You read her review.” And I bet I know who showed it to her.
Margot’s eyes drop to her hands, which have twisted in her lap so tightly, her knuckles are white. “Yeah, Forrest. I read it.”
Goddamn it, Ollie . Half-panicked, I take a step forward, needing her to look at me. When she doesn’t, I automatically kneel down to be at her level, and her eyes widen in surprise.
“You’re right. I should have told you about Charlotte sooner, and I’m sorry I didn’t. But you need to know there’s more to this story than what was in that blog post,” I say, summoning all the loyal earnestness of a golden retriever. “I’ll tell you everything if you’ll let me.”
“I think her review said it all,” Margot shoots back, but her bottom lip is trembling. “Honestly, I don’t know why I’m upset. You’ve read my Happily Never Afters. You know I got canceled for not believing in fairy tales. You’d think—” She stops and closes her eyes for a moment. When she looks at me again, all the hurt she’s tried locking away is still there. “You would think I’d have learned this lesson too many times to be surprised by another asshole in good-guy clothing. But I guess you really had me fooled, Forrest. Bravo.”
Her voice hitches on my name, and everything in me wants to reach out and pull her close. Knowing I gained her fiercely guarded trust only to have it broken over this is intolerable, but I try to hold my focus.
“You’ve only heard her side of it,” I say firmly. My whole body is tense, practically vibrating with the need to explain myself.
Margot pulls back from me. “So you’re saying she was lying?”
“No. Not about everything, but she made some pretty big assumptions and omitted quite a fucking lot,” I say, unable to fully muscle down my bitterness. I run a hand through my hair and take a breath. Apparently, I’m not above begging on my knees for this woman. “Please, Margot.”
I wait, completely at her mercy until she gives me the smallest nod to go on. I exhale.
“I did have a very short-lived relationship with Charlotte Bard,” I confirm. “Like you read in her review, I made the inexcusable mistake of agreeing to sleep with her. But unlike what she wrote, I’d never crossed that line with a guest before, and haven’t since, until—” I stop, meeting her gaze, and I know we’re both remembering the sauna. My eyelashes do the equivalent of a stutter, and I take a breath. “It was completely unprofessional, she ended up hurt, and I take full responsibility for the consequences.”
“I’m not following,” Margot says, her arms tightening across her light pink sweater. “How is this you not using her and leaving her? Why would she say you did the same thing with other guests, too, Forrest? Who am I supposed to believe?”
It’s an indicator of how fucking bad I’ve got it for Margot that even in the depths of the doghouse, I can’t help admiring her fierce protectiveness for a woman she’s never met. Charlotte, no less—a woman who, for a time, made my life feel like a porta-potty she’d used, knocked over sideways, and then kicked down a hill. Suddenly, I feel like I need to be sitting for this conversation.
“Do you mind if I—?” I ask, glancing at the seat next to Margot. After a moment, she nods again. “I know right now it seems like her word against mine. I don’t blame you for taking her side, and I’m not denying the role I played.” I carefully fold myself onto the love seat without touching her. “But I swear she’s the only guest I’ve ever been with up until now, and I regretted getting involved with her almost immediately.”
Margot rolls her eyes. “Is that the gentlemanly way to say she was a bad lay?”
“It wasn’t about that,” I say neutrally, refusing to skip into that particular minefield. “After that first night, she became… demanding. Petty. Unforgivably rude to my dad and Jo.” I pause, interlacing my sweaty hands between my knees and corralling bitter memories. “Whatever initial attraction I’d felt disappeared, but when I tried pulling away, Charlotte made it clear that keeping her happy was the only way the lodge was going to get a good review.”
“That’s not what she said.” Margot shakes her head and looks at me. “She said that you used her .”
I pull in a breath and look down at my hands as my stomach crunches into a denser knot. “And I have no doubt she felt that way. After the night we—” I glance at Margot apologetically, and her lips compress. “She felt attached. I think she hoped I’d feel the same way, and when I didn’t, she was hurt. Angry. Told me I owed her a chance, at the very least, and if I didn’t give it to her, she’d have something to say about the lack of decency she was treated to.”
Margot looks stiff enough to snap, but her eyes are reassessing me. “So you gave her a chance?”
I shrug uncomfortably. “I felt guilty and trapped. I thought maybe she was right, and I didn’t want the lodge to get hurt, so I kept trying to rekindle our initial connection, hoping I’d misjudged her.” I shake my head. “Obviously, it was a shit plan. I couldn’t make myself feel something that wasn’t there. So she wrote that blog post about me, falsely criticized North Star while she was at it, and copied it onto every major review site. It took a solid year of damage control for the lodge to regain its footing.”
I’m silent after this, unsure what else I could say to help her understand what I went through—what I made Dad and Jo go through—when Margot finally says, “Forrest… that’s unbelievable.”
Her voice is shocked, and I’m so ashamed that I can’t bring myself to look at her. I want to say, I know. I’m the one it happened to, and four years later, I can still barely believe it.
“I have emails saved if you want proof,” I tell her. “After she posted that review everywhere, she sent me some pretty uncivil messages. I asked her why she lied about the lodge and all those other guests I supposedly slept with, and she admitted she’d just been angry. But she wasn’t apologetic, and nothing I said persuaded her to take the review down. Apparently, it was her ‘top-performing post.’?”
I sigh, pulling a hand over my exhausted face. “I decided to tell my superiors at work what happened, and it was a whole goddamn mess. They interviewed all my coworkers, half of whom are women, to make sure they felt safe working with me. My character has never been more scrutinized, but none of them spoke against me. They were all incredibly supportive.”
Margot is quiet at this, and the cozy fire and thickly falling snow outside seem to exist only to contradict the wire-tight tension stretching between us.
“I don’t know what’s more ludicrous,” she says at last, “what Charlotte did, or the fact that you actually have an explanation for all of this.”
At her words, hope is a guttering flame in my chest. “You believe me?”
Her honey-colored eyes sweep reluctantly to mine. “I don’t want to,” she answers softly. “Ever since getting to Alaska, I’ve been looking high and low for a reason not to trust you, and this…” She shakes her head with a ghost of a laugh. “I thought this was it. In a way, it was almost a relief to have the rose-colored lenses ripped off. Now, though…”
Her eyes are glassy in the firelight, and my heart feels like it’s in a car compactor.
“Now what?” I ask.
She rubs her forehead. “Now I have to believe you. How could I not? You feeling morally obligated to make things work with an entitled manipulator, just because she slept with you, is the most Forrest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s the same reason you didn’t try sweeping it under the rug at work, and why everyone still trusted you. The same reason you gave up your whole life to take care of your dad.” She shakes her head faintly. “You probably drove Charlotte back to the airport, didn’t you? I bet you carried all her luggage too.” When I don’t contradict her, she takes an unsteady breath and looks down. “I can’t believe you found a way to make me trust you even more.”
After a moment, her hand slides tentatively onto my knee, and I force myself to focus on her words as all my awareness narrows to our point of contact.
“I don’t do trust, Forrest,” she admits. “It’s never been a good fit for me. You understand that, right?”
I’m beginning to. From the little I’ve gleaned about her absent father and all the fearful, angry mistrust woven throughout her Happily Never After file, I’m beginning to understand why she might be hypervigilant around men. It only makes me feel worse that she had to worry about me too.
Slowly, I lift my hand to her face, and it’s like a paint can of relief spills through me when, instead of pulling away, she leans her cheek into my palm. Suddenly, the made-for-Margot room inside my heart has throw blankets and fucking fairy lights.
“I’m never going to be someone you can’t trust,” I say, making sure she sees me when I say it.
“And by ‘never,’ do you mean just for now? Until I have to go back to the real world?” she asks, smiling sadly.
“I mean fucking never,” I say, as every part of me rebels against the catastrophic idea of losing her, ever. Her eyes widen slightly, and I’m choked with regret for keeping anything from her. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything sooner. It’s why I was such a dick about anything happening between us. I’ve always had a rule to keep my hands off guests, and Charlotte gave me a pretty solid reason to never cross that line again.”
“Well, I hate to break this to you,” she says softly, the corners of her lips lifting as I stroke the barest hint of her dimple, “but you suck at following your own rules.”
My fingertips and thumb slip down either side of her neck, and I feel her pulse jump.
“You’re not a guest. You stopped being a guest the second you ran away from Bullwinkle and jumped into my arms,” I argue stupidly. Anything to keep playing this game of slow-motion touching.
Her hand slides almost imperceptibly from my knee to my thigh, and every moment of wishing I hadn’t left her this week throbs through me.
“Not a guest?” she asks, leaning into my touch until my hand is lightly wrapped around her beautiful throat. “Then what am I, Forrest?”
Mine . The word is white-hot in the darkness of my mind, and my hand tightens for one reflexive moment. Her mouth parts as her eyes turn hungry, and I struggle to form other thoughts. With effort, I force myself to let go and explain what I see in her so that she can see it too.
“You’re selfless,” I say, sliding my palm lower, fingers stroking into the dip behind her collarbone. “Fiercely protective, loyal, and kind. So fucking brave.” She shudders at my touch, and her breathing gets quicker. Shallower. “You try to hide it, but you’re so giving underneath it all. You care about my dad, Jo, and even Scout. You’d never do something to hurt them or this lodge.”
“So you’re saying I’m a family friend?” she asks breathlessly, pressing her knees to the side of my thigh. “Hot.”
“It is hot,” I agree. “How many people do you trust with Savannah?”
Her eyelids get heavy as she searches my face, her gaze catching on my mouth. “I’d trust you.”
There wasn’t much space on the couch between us to start, and now it’s practically gone.
“I’m sorry I left you. I’m sorry you had to go through that. For being one more man you thought you couldn’t trust,” I say, my hand drifting to the softest sweater I’ve ever touched. “How long has it been since you read that bullshit?”
“Three days,” she almost whimpers, like it’s been three centuries. Her hand finds mine, pressing it to her cashmere-covered heart like I’m the only one who might soothe it, and yeah, three centuries feels about accurate.
“Who told you?” I ask, like I don’t already know the Shit-stirrer in Chief.
“Ollie,” she confirms, and I feel like a bear yanked on a chain. I’m not thinking when I lift her onto my lap so that she’s facing me. I pull her hips close, and her pretty mouth opens in a quiet gasp. “He was looking out for me,” she says, her fingers curling into my chest.
“Yeah, I know exactly what he was looking for,” I grumble. At the thought, a sudden, alarming possibility burns acid up my esophagus, and my fingers dig into her tight yoga pants. “You take him up on anything while you were pissed at me, sweetheart?” I ask, my rocky voice betraying me.
Her white teeth snag on her bottom lip, and she shakes her head quickly. “No.”
But her pulse is racing in her neck, and she won’t look anywhere above my chest, despite how close we are.
“And why not?” I ask, trying to maintain some semblance of rational thought as guilt and jealousy tornado through me. The only thing grounding me are her hips, which have started making rocking movements so tiny I doubt she even realizes what she’s doing.
“Because he’s not—” She stops talking, her flush only getting deeper, and Christ, this woman. She feels so fucking good spread wide across my lap, giving in to these feelings neither of us has any business having. Soon enough, I can’t stop my hands from helping her hips along, tugging and pushing until I know she can feel what she’s doing to me.
“He’s not what, sweetheart?”
Her eyes are dark and sweet as maple syrup when she looks up at me. “He’s not you.”
Three short syllables, and I’m flush with victory. Greedy with triumph. I want her to say it again, but she falls forward and presses her forehead to mine like she’s been defeated. Like she knows all about the secret room in my heart with the flowers on the table and the candles going, and she wants in. My eyelids drop like cinder blocks, and despite all good sense, I’m ready to roll out a goddamn welcome mat for her.
It’s slow, the way it starts. A slide of my hand up the back of her sweater, a needy tilt of her hips against me. There’s no ambiguity about what we’re doing now, and I’m on my way to breathless when I ask, “Missed me?”
The side of her nose glides against mine in an imitation of a nod. “Too much,” she whispers, like it’s okay to tell secrets if we’re this close together. And fuck, I missed her too. Missed how soft she is beneath all her armor and the way I feel when she takes it off for me. But I only have two more weeks left with her. I missed six precious days of this, of her , and my urgency to make up for lost time feels spring-loaded.
She must feel it too because her hips start rolling harder against me, seeking friction, and I slide forward on the seat to give her better access. She huffs a breath as she centers herself on what feels like the business end of a baseball bat in my pants, and I can’t stop the rusty sound she pulls from me when our lips catch for the first time. It’s just a graze, but the tease of her mint ChapStick may as well be a narcotic.
My head falls back onto the couch, unable to support itself when she starts rubbing herself off on me in earnest, her little whimpers warm against my parted lips. My tongue slips into her mouth for one life-stopping moment, and I’m moaning. She’s teasing me, her lips brushing mine, teeth nipping, and I want to be a gentleman, but my hand finds the nape of her neck and holds her in place so I can taste her properly.
We’re panting, hands seeking and grasping, when she leans back, out of reach. I want to protest, but it dies on my lips when she grabs the hem of her sweater and pulls it off, her long hair cascading down one shoulder.
“Oh, Christ,” I groan. It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m only having a cardiac event as my eyes fall to her chest, propped up in the same baby blue bra I’ve been jerking off to ever since I saw it on the floor of her cabin almost a month ago. Yeah, she was never just a guest. She’s every one of my dreams come to life. Her vulnerability, her trust, her beauty, her thoughtfulness, and yes, her tits, and if I thought I couldn’t get any harder, I’m proven wrong when sitting in pants suddenly becomes impossible.
“Hold on to me,” I order her, taking two generous handfuls of her ass as I stand up. She makes a cute little yelp, clinging to my shoulders as her legs wrap around my waist, and I pause because I’ve been here before. I think of the first time I met her. How she leaped before thinking and how I held her just like this. Stared, dumbstruck, at her just like this. We’ve come full circle, except this time I’m going to give her exactly what I now know we both secretly wanted that first time.
“Bedroom,” I say thickly, and start walking.