5. Kinsley #3
The door swings open and cold air rushes in, carrying rain and the green smell of split pine.
Jakob fills the doorframe, arms loaded with wood, his dark hair plastered to his forehead, water streaming down the planes of his face into his beard.
He kicks the door shut behind him with one boot and crosses to the woodbox beside the stove, where he drops the logs in a controlled cascade.
They tumble and settle with dull, heavy thuds.
He straightens. Pushes his wet hair back from his face with one hand, and his eyes find me across the small room.
I'm standing by the table. Broom in one hand.
His flannel rolled to my elbows, which are white to the elbow with flour I missed.
My hair is in a knot I secured with a bent fork from his kitchen because hair ties don't exist in this home, and I know, I know, that I still have flour on my face because I can feel it there, tight and dry on my cheekbone, and I didn't get it all no matter how many times I swiped at it with my wrist.
Something changes in him.
I see it happen in real time. The shift in his body language from functional to something predatory.
His shoulders were squared and loose from the work and now they tighten.
His chin drops half an inch. His green eyes, rain-dark and narrowed against the cold, lock onto my face with an intensity that makes the air in the cabin feel suddenly insufficient.
He doesn't move for three seconds. Four.
Just stands there by the woodbox, dripping rainwater onto the floor I just swept..
Then he walks toward me.
Not the efficient, purposeful stride from this morning when I burned my fingers.
This is slower. Deliberate. Each boot falls heavy on the planks.
His wet jacket is unzipped, the thermal underneath dark with sweat and rain, and he is so tall and so broad that the cabin shrinks around him with every step.
I should step back. I should laugh, ramble, fill the silence with some nervous joke about the flour situation.
My mouth opens and nothing comes out. The broom handle creaks in my grip.
He stops. Close. Too close for the careful distance he's maintained since I peeled myself off him this morning. Close enough that I can see individual water droplets caught in his beard, can feel the cold radiating off his wet jacket mixing with the heat that pours off his body underneath it.
His right hand comes up. Slow, like he's fighting the motion, like his arm is acting against direct orders from his brain.
His thumb, rough and calloused and carrying the cold of the rain, presses against my cheekbone.
Drags. A slow, firm stroke across my skin, wiping the flour away, and the contact sends a shock down through my jaw and my neck and my back, where it goes off silently.
His thumb is sandpaper on silk. Cold and rough against the flushed warmth of my face, and he doesn't stop at the flour.
He traces the line of my cheekbone all the way to my ear, his fingertips brushing the loose strands of hair at my temple, and his hand is so large that his palm hovers over my jaw without touching it.
Cradling the shape of my face without closing the distance. Close enough to hold. Choosing not to.
I can't breathe. My lungs have forgotten the mechanism.
My lips are parted and I'm staring up at him from what feels like the bottom of a well, this vast distance between my height and his, and his eyes are that dark blown-pupil green again, the same as this morning, but worse now. Hungrier. Staying there.
"You are making a mess of my cabin."
His thumb strokes back across my cheekbone, collecting the last ghost of flour.
His hand still doesn't close around my jaw, still holds that fraction of space between his palm and my skin, and the restraint in that gap is louder than a touch would be.
I can feel the tension in his fingers, the fine tremor of control, and I understand with sudden, dizzying clarity that he is holding himself on a leash. That the leash is fraying.
"Just the cabin?" The words come out in a whisper. I don't know where they come from. They don't sound like me. They sound like someone braver, someone who holds the gaze of mountain men in firelit cabins instead of flinching away.
His jaw tightens. The muscle at the hinge flexes hard enough that I see it move beneath his beard.
His eyes don't leave my mouth. His thumb is still against my skin, resting at the corner of my jaw now, and his fingers slowly, slowly curl, his palm finally settling against the side of my face.
The warmth of his hand seeps through the cold of the rain on his skin.
He holds me like I'm something fragile. Something he could crush without meaning to.
He leans down. The distance between us compresses.
I can feel his breath, warm and unsteady, against my lips.
His nose nearly touches mine. Those dark green eyes fill my entire field of vision, and this close I can see the ring of gold near the pupil, the thin white scar that cuts through his left eyebrow, the way his lashes are spiked and dark with rain.
"My cabin. My kitchen. My head."
His gaze drops to my lips. Holds. Burns.