Chapter 15
LUCY
“I’ve got news,” Ethan calls out from the guest room doorway.
I’m fighting with a fitted sheet, wrestling the corner loose. “Does your news come with a help to make the beds?”
He huffs a breath that’s nearly a laugh as he crosses to the other side of the mattress. He grabs the far corners and together we take the whole set off and toss it toward the door.
“Always happy to help.” He shakes out a clean sheet and throws it across the bed, and we start to make the bed with fresh linens. “I received a call this morning with terrible news,” he says. “My dad had a stroke.”
My hands go slack on the sheet, and I jolt upright. “Ethan. God. Is he all right?”
“Better than they expected, considering his condition.” He squares his corner with far more attention than a bedsheet needs.
“But he’s stable and talking fine. He’ll need somebody with him while he gets his feet back under him, and my sister’s uprooting her whole family to be closer, which doesn’t happen overnight.
So until she’s settled in, that somebody is me. ”
I round the foot of the bed and grip his forearm. “Family first. That’s not even a conversation. Go.”
He glances down momentarily. “I’ll head out in the morning, as soon as I’ve got the check-in sorted.
” He moves to tug the top sheet smooth. “That’s the other thing.
There’s a booking for tomorrow that I only locked in this morning, a bachelorette party, six women, in for the Lumberjack Deluxe.
One night only, so it’s yours to run, I’m afraid, and I hate handing it to you like this. ”
Worry curls up in my chest, but if my grandmother can run this place, then I can survive one rowdy night of brides-to-be in the woods, right?
“Yeah, I’ve got this,” I tell him, and I’m maybe seventy percent convinced. “What’s the worst a bachelorette party in the middle of nowhere can throw at me?”
“You really want to say that out loud?” He grips his hips. “The three guys in the program are running the daytime activities for us, and I’ve put Grayson on the dinner duty, so you’re not carrying the whole thing. Schedule’s on the fridge. Meals, timings, all of it. Nothing you can’t handle.”
“I appreciate that a lot, but you just focus on going to be with your dad.” I stuff a pillow into a fresh case. “Hey, can I ask you something nosy?”
“You’re going to regardless.”
“When’s it your turn?” I fluff the pillow, watching him sideways. “All this family-first, provider, drop-everything-and-run business. When do you settle down with somebody of your own?”
He laughs, but it’s shallow because he rarely talks about his private life. “Soon. I want a few things nailed down first, so I’m able to give them a real life, you know? Can’t offer somebody a future I haven’t built yet.”
“Ethan, there’s no perfect moment. Nobody’s ever standing on a mountain of achievements going, ‘Ah yes, now I am finally worthy of a relationship.’ You just find your other half, or three, and you figure the rest out as it comes.”
“Says the woman who bolted into a mountain to hide from her own life.” He tosses a pillowcase at me.
“But yeah, I hear you. My dad was dead set on being a proper provider before he’d let himself have anything.
The whole family are Betas, so it’s not as difficult to find a match as it is for an Omega, but he didn’t marry my mom until he was forty.
You know we lost her years back, and well…
” He shrugs. “I don’t plan to wait as long as he did. ”
I hadn’t realized that under all the easy grins, Ethan’s carrying the overthinking about not running out of time.
“That’s actually wise,” I admit out loud, but he goes quiet, so we finish the bed and start hauling the mountain of used linen out to the trolley in the hall.
“You know what I’m dreaming of?” I say. “A season so booked out that we’re forced to hire actual staff to do these rooms.”
“From your mouth to the bank’s ears.” He’s chuckling as he wheels the trolley toward the next room. “We were in the red for a long stretch here at the lodge. Eve emptied her savings into this place, and I worked every day to help out, plus whatever the logging brought in. It’s been lean.”
“I’m aware. That’s half of why I’m up here.” I rest against the trolley handle. “To take some of the weight off my grandma.”
Then he straightens, stretching his back. “I could run this place blindfolded and one-handed. When I’m back from Dad’s, you ease off. Spend time with your men and sort out what you actually want next.”
“Just look after your dad,” I tell him with a grin. “The lodge and I will still be standing when you get back.”
“Yeah, I know, but you don’t want to be spending your future here. Don’t you want to see the world, work out where you want to grow your career?”
“It almost sounds as though you don’t want me around. A girl can easily get offended,” I tease.
He comes over and drags me into a quick, fierce hug. “It’s really good having you home. You know I missed you. But I’m just saying, don’t let this place snatch your future. It’s so easy to forget that a bigger world exists outside these woods.”
“Well, my background is in event planning, so truthfully, the lodge is right up my alley.”
He gives me this weird half smile, then his phone buzzes, and he’s off down the hall answering it.
I move on to the next room, and somewhere at the back of my mind, I wonder what the three Alphas are doing, as I haven’t heard a word from any of them all day.
Of course, it’s by my own design, because after the nightmare and the crying and the maple syrup yesterday, I needed one day where the only voice in my head was mine.
And I mostly got it. Except they’re still there, deep in my thoughts.
So I refocus on cleaning up these rooms.
It’s late in the day by the time I finally shower back in my room. I tug on a short denim skirt and a soft, floral long-sleeved shirt that always slides off one shoulder. I’m dragging a comb through my wet hair in my bedroom when I catch a shape out on the balcony.
I go rigid, comb frozen halfway down a tangle.
The sun has dropped low, darkness spilling out through the trees, and there’s a figure sitting in my balcony chair, dead still, and every drop of blood in me turns to ice water. My first thought flies to the man from the woods—fake Roman.
My attention darts to my bedroom door, locked, exactly how I left it before the shower. I grip the comb like it’s going to do a single useful thing against a grown man, and I inch toward the balcony doors. Those are locked too, from the inside, bolt thrown, no way anyone got through them.
Then the figure turns his head, and the light from my room slides across his face. The terror drops straight out of me and lands somewhere far more dangerous.
Roman’s grinning at me, and I narrow my gaze at him.
I throw the bolt, haul the door open, and chuck the comb onto the bed. “What the…? How? What are you doing out here, and how did you even get up on the balcony?”
He shifts his seat in my direction, and I’m left checking him out, having zero control over how easily my body melts for him.
White T-shirt stretched over his chest, jeans, and he’s sprawled across my chair with strong legs spread, and arms reclined on the armrests as though he’s sitting on a throne.
With the black woods behind him and my inside light throwing hard shadows over the planes of his face, he comes across as danger hiding in the dark.
“I was starting to think you were avoiding us.” He cocks his head. “So I climbed up. Easier than it looks.”
I step out to peer over the railing, and it’s a real drop, my stomach swooping on his behalf. There’s a fat, old pine standing right beside the balcony, its lower branches thick and close, a staircase for anybody unhinged enough to trust it.
“You’re completely insane.” I face him again. “You could have snapped your neck on the way up.”
“Done worse climbs for worse reasons.”
“That’s not the reassurance you think it is.
” I haul the second chair around to face him and drop into it.
“And I wasn’t avoiding anybody. As if I could, honestly.
Yesterday was… a lot. More happened in twenty-four hours than I’ve had time to process, and I needed some space to sort through the mess in my head before my anxiety did it for me.
” I shrug, unsure of what else to say but the truth.
He reaches out and takes my hand. I read it as tenderness, the sweet, careful Roman I know, right up until his grip tightens and he pulls me straight out of my chair.
I gasp from the sudden movement and barely make it to my feet before he draws me toward him, catches me around the waist, and guides me down across his lap in one smooth motion.
The whole world tilts, and now I’m sitting sideways on his lap, my legs draped over one side, the breath punched clean out of me.
“Roman!”
“Better.” His arms fold around me, one banded across my back, the other heavy over my bare thighs, caging me against him, and there’s nothing gentle about how easily he just moved me.
And now his face is a hand’s width from mine, and his scent floods over me, cinnamon and caramel.
Every scrap of composure I clawed back across my long, careful, solitary day burns off in a single breath.
Heat rolls through me from head to foot.
This close, I stare at the stubble along his square jaw, the absurd length of his lashes, those lips calling me, and I want to press my mouth right there. Yep, I’m in enormous trouble.
“I missed you,” he whispers. “All day yesterday and last night, then all of today. It’s been genuinely painful not seeing you.
” His hand moves slowly over my thigh, and my body responds embarrassingly fast, warmth spreading beneath his palm.
“Wolf and Grayson are beside themselves too. You’ve got the whole cabin in ruins. ”
“Oh, is that so?” My voice comes out breathless enough that his mouth spreads into a satisfied grin.