Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Jonah
I stared at my dark bedroom ceiling. The wind had picked up, howling outside. There was little ambient light, but I could picture the snow swirling and gusting, clouding the view in every direction.
The weather wasn’t keeping me awake.
The inhuman restraint I’d had to use to keep from sporting an erection around Summer was obscene.
I was a pervert. Smelling her while she had leaned over me, enveloping me in her strawberry-sugar scent while she rubbed me down with the same stuff I’d used to stroke myself off with the night after she’d left . . .
I’d almost let her work on my hip only to keep her in my room longer.
To have her hands on me for another twenty minutes.
But each time I looked at her, blood rerouted to my dick.
Each time my brain dwelled on the fact that she was the one touching me and not Hannah, my fifty-five-year-old surrogate grandmother of a massage therapist, my cock swelled. Inconveniently and rampantly.
Each glimpse I’d stolen of her, she’d been bathed in weak lamplight, and now I knew what she looked like in my bedroom. I knew what she looked like in comfy clothes, like this was her home. Like we did this on our Saturday nights.
A creak sounded and I frowned. The house was sturdy, but the noise wasn’t one of the normal sounds that happened during a storm. Another squeak. This one I recognized. The bottom step. The damn thing had made noise for years, and while I didn’t traverse the stairs often, I knew the sound.
Summer was awake.
Was she having trouble sleeping because of the weather? Because of me? When she’d stayed with her mom, she hadn’t gotten hung up on her ex, had she?
No. She hadn’t brought that cocksucker groceries.
I rolled out of bed. I should let her roam and do whatever she needed to do, but after she’d told me about her parents’ accident, I couldn’t let her be alone.
I got up and shrugged into a shirt. I had on pajama bottoms and she’d seen almost everything, but I couldn’t risk another flashing. My dick was a delinquent around her.
Before I left my bedroom, I grabbed a cane. My shoulder wasn’t complaining and my knee was stronger. Summer wasn’t a professional massage therapist, but she’d helped. Imagine the wonders if I’d let her work on my hip.
I found her in the dark living room, highlighted by residual light from the kitchen appliances and the flickers from the modem by the TV. She wore the same clothing she’d had on when she’d arrived—shit. She didn’t have anything else.
“Do you want to borrow a shirt?”
She gasped and jumped, spinning around and then losing her balance. She caught herself on the window.
“Don’t fall,” I said wryly.
She flashed a quick smile. “Then it’d be my turn for a massage.”
“Anytime, sunshine.” My goddamn mouth.
Her eyes widened, and she let out a nervous laugh. “Right. Fair play.” She folded her arms around herself and turned to stare back outside.
“Is it the storm?”
“The wind.” She sighed, her shoulders falling. “The damn wind. When I hear it, I can’t stand to be closed in anywhere. Sometimes my condo is too small.”
Slowly, I made my way across the living room. My eyes were adjusted, but I wasn’t falling down again around her. At least I was dressed this time. “Is that why you don’t like to fly?”
A shiver ran across her slim shoulders. “The entire flight makes it sound like the wind is right in your ears. And you have nowhere to go.”
I stopped next to her. “Is the bedroom too closed in?”
“It’s not that.” She glanced at me, the reflection of the blue modem light in the window in her eyes. “At Mama’s house, my room’s in the basement. Up there, I can hear the wind rush over the house, pulling and pushing and demanding.” She shook her head. “It’s silly.”
“Never say that.” I stared at the darkness on the other side of the window. Nature’s chaos. Inside, man-made calm. “I couldn’t drive for two years after I left the hospital.”
She pivoted toward me and her hand landed on my arm. She didn’t say anything, like she knew I needed silence to continue.
“At first, it was why I didn’t go to town for so long.
I have to go past that—” Words tangled in my throat, cutting off air.
I couldn’t go back to that isolated space, so I continued to tell my story.
“Now, I’ve gotten used to driving past the accident site.
The guilt still gets to me. I was the idiot who left his liquor unlocked.
I was the idiot who never thought my underage brother would sneak into the house.
” I scoffed. “Afterward, I used to lock my doors up tight. All day, every day, the doors were locked.” I had secured the house when Summer was staying here too.
But otherwise, keeping my place unlocked was a small action I took to keep from retreating into a shell I almost hadn’t broken out of.
“I’m so sorry.” Her sympathy bordered on pity.
“I’m not like that anymore.”
Her lips quirked. “If you were, you wouldn’t have an unwanted guest in your house waking you up in the middle of the night.”
“I never said you were unwanted.”
The silence fell between us, expectant and heavy.
I couldn’t look away. We were close. I just had to reach out.
I could take her in my arms and press my mouth against hers and find out if she was as sweet as I thought.
Then I’d press her against the window and lift her.
She’d wrap her legs around my waist, and if she worried whether I’d be able to bear her weight, I’d growl about proving I could—
Christ. I was getting hard.
“What’ll help you sleep?” I owed her. I owed her as a man to not be a creep.
I owed her for the rubdown. Usually when I tweaked one of the joints on my left side, I slept fitfully for a few nights until I broke down and took a muscle relaxer and slept for two days straight or made an appointment with Hannah.
I was able to rest tonight. My mind was the one keeping me awake. And my dick.
“I’ll get too tired to stay awake.” She waved a hand and shifted her gaze to the window.
“But there’s something.”
She took a moment to answer. “When I was a kid, I’d crawl into bed with Autumn and we’d .
. .” She grimaced but her lips twitched like she was struggling not to smile.
“We’d talk shit about our brothers. ‘They think they know everything,’ ” she ended in a high-pitched voice.
“ ‘They’re so bossy and treat us like wimps.’ ”
I grinned. “I know that didn’t last long. Teller used to tell me about the extra work they tricked you and Autumn into doing.”
She whipped her head toward me, her gaze righteous. “He was so bad. Tate could be worse. If it weren’t for Tenor and his soft heart, we’d have probably continued doing everything while they”—she threw up air quotes—“ ‘swept the barn.’ ”
Laughter vibrated out of me. I could picture Tate and Teller, young and broody and cocky, thinking their sisters got it easy and making sure they righted the world.
Her grin was better than the haunted look she’d had when I’d first found her.
“Good thing Montana winters are long. My sisters and I needed that therapy time complaining about them.” Her smile faded.
“As an adult, I just roam my place until I can’t stay awake.
Sometimes, I pull all-nighters, but you know the wind is never as bad in town. ”
“No Boyd?”
She shook her head. “I tried to talk to him once. He said, ‘Baby, it’s just a breeze.’ ”
“What a dickwad.”
“So many red flags marched past me.” She shuddered. “So I’m back to wandering and waiting.”
I’d made it through her massage. I could be a gentleman. “I have a big bed. You can shit-talk your brothers, and I’ll stick to my side of the bed.” She blinked at me, stunned. I could take back my offer and pretend I had said nothing, or I could forge ahead. “No funny business, I promise.”
She softened. “I know you won’t try anything,” she said with a hint of resignation, but that was probably just me thinking about things better left alone. “I can be a bed hog.”
“Do you steal blankets?”
The corner of her mouth lifted. “I’ve been told I do but I think it’s all lies.”
“Go on, sunshine. I just did laundry the other day, so all bedding is clean.”
“Mama is a laundry maniac before blizzards too.”
“Can’t be stranded with no power and racing stripes.”
A giggle burst out of her. “I don’t know if Mama would admit that, but I’m sure that was her reason with my brothers.”
“Save the shit-talking for the sheets, sunshine.”
Laughing, she walked away and straight to my bedroom. I took a few seconds to gather myself.
I’d smiled more around her in the last week than in the entire year put together. Unfortunately, I’d also gotten more erections.
“We got it stuck.” I was on my third story of the hijinks Teller and I had been up to as teens, lying on my bed like I had been when I’d heard her wandering.
She was on her side, on the edge, with an expanse between us.
The faint glow of a night-light emanated from the hallway.
My eyelids were heavy but there was no way I was falling asleep before Summer did.
There’d be no one to make sure she got some rest.
“You did not. Daddy’s new pickup?” Fatigue was entering her voice.
“Right down in that very valley. I had to sneak my dad’s tractor out of the yard to tow it.”
She yawned. “How do you sneak a tractor?”
“Bribed my brother to fake breaking an ankle.”
“No way!” She perked up, and I grinned. The few times I’d mentioned Eli, the old pain wasn’t there. I liked talking about the fun we’d had. I rarely thought of those memories without the weight of sadness.
“He did. Dad wouldn’t call him on it after the X-ray came back clear and there was no swelling or bruising. The youngest, you know. Spoiled.”
“Wynter would disagree, but totally the youngest.” Sleepiness was back in her voice. “Eli never told me that story.”
“I’m surprised.”
“I’m not. He idolized you, but he was also jealous of you.”
Acid flushed into my throat. “Why?”
“All the girls were hot for you. We were freshmen, and you were a senior. Then you became a mountain man. So many girls only talked to Eli to get close to you.”
My brother hadn’t told me. “Shit.”
“It’s not your fault how others react.” The bed shifted as she propped herself on her elbow. “You know that, right? You can’t take responsibility for his actions.”
I had shared good memories about Eli, but that was as far as I was getting into his death. “You need to get some sleep.”
Her gaze held an earnestness I couldn’t decipher. She licked her lower lip like she was readying herself to say something hard, but she ended up sucking that puffy lip between her teeth and lying back down. “You have a hard time talking about the accident.”
“I have a hard time talking about everything.”
The corner of her mouth tipped up, but there was a sadness to her smile. “Me too. There are some very difficult things to talk about.”
Did she mean with her parents who had died, or with Eli? Had she gotten to talk about losing Eli with anyone or had she powered through life and suppressed all her feelings?
Her eyelids fell shut and I let mine do the same, more content than I had been in a long time.
Other than camping with buddies, which hadn’t happened for years, I’d gone to sleep alone.
Going to sleep with a beautiful woman in my bed was something I could get dangerously used to.
I’d have been better off not knowing what I’d been missing my entire life.