Elle
The toaster earned a spot right next to the coffee grinder on the counter. I was still arguing with Harrison about whether I should name the grinder Bearnard or Grizzly Adams. I’d already named the toaster Brownie. Why? Because most of the toast I made turned out a very lovely shade of brown.
“Bearnard,” he said, against my ear. “Obviously.”
“Obviously. And I assume you want to be properly thanked for this gift as well?”
“Obviously.” He grinned down at me. “But, for the record, that’s not why I buy things for you.”
“It’s not?”
“No. I buy them because I want to. Not because you ask, but because you never do. Because I like to see that look on your face every time the delivery guy comes up the driveway.”
“Did you ever think, Mr. Frosty Mountain Man, that maybe I was eager to see the driver, not the package he was bringing?”
I let my fingers walk up his chest, holding his gaze and smiling.
“Are you trying to get into trouble again?”
I thought of the last time he’d decided I needed a lesson for some imagined infraction of a rule he’d invented purely to keep me safe.
I’d decided to try chopping wood without him.
It had ended with me pinned against the woodshed wall, breathless, making all kinds of promises about rules I had no intention of keeping. “What do you think?”
“I think,” he growled, backing me straight into the counter, unhurried about it, the same way he did everything when he’d already decided how the next twenty minutes were going to go, “I think you are trying to be a bad girl today.”
I looped my arms around his neck. “And if I am?”
“Then I’m going to enjoy every second of dealing with you.”
I gasped as he lifted me up onto the counter.
He didn’t say a word as he started to unbutton the flannel shirt I was wearing.
We both knew I was wearing nothing underneath.
He took his time taking it off me, kissing every part of my body that was revealed to him.
My shoulder, the side of my neck, my breast. He nudged my nipple with his nose. “Still sore?”
“Yes,” I murmured. I looked down at my breasts.
The nipples were still red, still bearing the marks of his beard.
He’d made me come last night just by touching them.
Well, he’d done more than just touch them.
He’d pinched them, rubbed his thick stubble across them after he’d sucked on them, wetting them. He’d bitten them, twisted them.
He’d made me come.
He settled between my knees, hands pushing the flannel from my shoulders.
There was no foreplay, but I didn’t need it.
I was wet, ready to be claimed by the mountain man once again.
He lowered his sweatpants just enough to free himself.
Taking himself in hand, he placed the tip of his cock at my entrance.
Then, with one long, hard stroke, he seated himself to the hilt.
I gasped, the way I always did. I’d never get used to his strength. His size. His dominance.
He knew what he wanted and took it. But more importantly, he knew what I wanted and gave it to me.
He pulled back out, one hand tangling in my hair to tip my head back. “Look at me.”
I did. Eyes dark, that same arrogant satisfaction in them he always wore right before he proved a point, along with the want and need that kept me with him.
He set a rhythm that had the counter’s edge biting into my thighs, and I stopped caring about anything but the feel of this man taking me — deep, unhurried strokes that had my nails dragging down his back and my whole body chasing his rhythm like it had never known any other one.
“Harrison—”
“I’ve got you.” Low, rough, exactly steady even when nothing about the moment was. “Let go.”
I did, his name tearing out of me with the last of my breath, my whole body drawing tight around him, and he followed a few strokes behind, forehead dropping to my shoulder, both of us breathing like we’d run the whole mountain.
He kissed my forehead, then lifted me off the counter. He carried me down the hallway to the bathroom. I knew what was coming and reached up and kissed the warm, tan column of his throat.
Round two.