Chapter Forty-Three
The Cabin
Emmie
My mother hugs me for approximately forty-five years on the porch.
“Call me tomorrow,” she says into my hair. “And send me pictures of the ring in natural light. The porch photos were good, but I want golden hour. Golden hour, Emmie.”
“Golden hour. Got it.”
“And think about sage green!” she calls as Dad steers her toward the Buick. “Or dusty blue! Both are lovely!”
Dad gives me a hug—shorter, tighter, says more. He shakes Crew’s hand, claps him on the shoulder. They exchange that silent man-nod they do, the one that contains approximately seven hundred words neither of them will ever say out loud.
We stand on the porch and wave as the Buick reverses down the gravel drive. Mom’s waving out the window like she’s departing on the Titanic. Dad honks once. The trees swallow them up.
Silence.
Real, actual, nobody-is-here silence.
I turn to Crew.
He turns to me.
We stare at each other for maybe two seconds, and in those two seconds, I watch his expression shift from polite son-in-law to something significantly less polite. His eyes drop to my mouth. Then lower. Then back up.
“Inside,” he says. “Now.”
I don’t need to be told twice.
We barely make it through the door. His mouth is on mine before it swings shut, his hands gripping my waist, walking me backward through the cabin. I’m already pulling at his shirt—the one he put on in a panic ninety minutes ago—and he’s working the buttons on my flannel.
“Bed,” I manage against his mouth.
“Too far.”
He’s not wrong. The bedroom is down the hall and around the corner, and that’s approximately fifteen feet too many.
My back hits the wall next to the bookshelf—the one he built, because Crew Jensen builds things—and right now, I’m very grateful for his craftsmanship because I need something solid behind me.
His shirt comes off. My sports bra gets dragged over my head. His hands are on my skin, and his mouth is on my neck, and I’m making sounds that would be embarrassing if I had any shame left, which I don’t, because my mother already identified the hickey, so really, what’s the point of dignity?
“I’ve been thinking about this,” I tell him between kisses, “for the entire brunch.”
“You were talking about blue napkins.”
“And underneath the dusty blue napkin conversation, I was thinking about riding you on this wall.”
The sound he makes is gratifying.
“Your father was sitting three feet from me, Emmie.”
“I know. I’m a monster.” I grab his waistband. “Take these off.”
He does. I shimmy out of the leggings. We’re both naked in the hallway of our cabin in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, at 11:47 on a Saturday morning, and honestly? This is the most myself I’ve ever felt.
He lifts me. I wrap my legs around his waist, my back presses against the wall, and his forehead drops to mine.
“Hi,” I whisper.
“Hi.” His voice is wrecked.
“You sure the wall can hold us? I don’t want to bust through the drywall and end up in the closet.”
“I reinforced the studs.”
“Of course you did.” I grin at him. “That’s so hot.”
“Structural integrity turns you on?”
“You turn me on. The structural integrity is a bonus.” I shift my hips. “Now please, for the love of God, finish what you started this morning before someone else shows up. The mailman. A yeti. I don’t even care. If we get interrupted again, I’m going to lose my mind.”
He slides into me, and every thought I’ve ever had exits my brain.
My head falls back against the wall. His grip tightens on my thighs. We both just… breathe for a second, adjusting, savoring, and then he starts to move, and I forget about blue napkins and my mother’s Pinterest board and every single thing that isn’t the way this man feels inside me.
“There,” I gasp. “Right there. Don’t you dare stop.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
It’s not slow this time. It’s not lazy Saturday morning sex. This is hours of pent-up frustration and a ruined orgasm and the unbearable agony of making small talk with my parents while my body was screaming at me to drag this man to the nearest horizontal surface. Or vertical surface. Any surface.
He’s murmuring against my neck—half-words, my name—and I’ve got my fingers in his hair, holding on because the rhythm he’s set is relentless and perfect and building toward the exact place I was this morning before the Buick from hell rolled into our driveway.
“Em, I’m—” he starts. “Getting close.”
“Me too. Don’t stop. I swear if anything interrupts us right now, I will commit actual crimes—”
The unmistakable sound of tires on gravel.
No.
No!
Crew stops moving. We stare at each other. His jaw is clenched so hard I can see the muscle twitching. I’m fairly sure my eye is doing the same thing.
“If that’s your mother again,” he says very quietly, “we’re moving to Alaska.”
A car door slams. Then another.
Then Foster’s voice echoes across the property, “JENSEN! OPEN UP! WE brOUGHT CHAMPAGNE, YOU ENGAGED SON OF A BITCH!”
And Sadie’s, right behind him. “EMMIE! I’M SO HAPPY FOR YOU! I’M GOING TO CRY! I’M ALREADY CRYING!”
I drop my forehead to Crew’s shoulder.
“This isn’t happening.”
“It’s happening.”
“Crew, I am naked on a wall and you are inside me and our best friends are in the driveway with champagne.”
He exhales through his nose. Slowly. The way he does when he’s talking himself out of something drastic. Like possibly committing a double homicide.
Then he pulls out—and the sound I make is not dignified. It’s a whimper. A genuine, pathetic, full-body whimper, because this is the second time today and my body is staging a revolt.
“Twice,” I say as he sets me down. My legs are jelly. I grab the bookshelf for support. “Twice in one day. That has to be a record. Some kind of horrible, unsexy, cursed record.”
“Get dressed.”
“I don’t want to get dressed! I want to finish having sex with my fiancé in our cabin without the entire state of Oklahoma showing up!”
More knocking. “JENSEN! I can see your truck! I know you’re in there!”
Crew, still naked, scans the room for something—I don’t know what he’s looking for until he grabs the potted fern off the bookshelf.
“What are you doing?”
He holds the fern at waist level.
“Oh my word,” I whisper. “You are not answering the door holding a potted plant over your—”
He’s already walking. Shirtless, barefoot, one hand gripping a potted fern like a fig leaf in front of his junk. He grabs his wallet as he passes the table.
I flatten myself against the wall—still naked, still throbbing, fully unhinged—and listen.
The front door opens.
There’s a beat of silence, then Foster laughs. “Dude. Are you naked?”
“You need to leave,” Crew says flatly. “Go to town, or something.”
Foster, still laughing, says, “We brought champagne—”
Crew repeats, “Go. To. Town.”
Next, I hear Sadie. “Is Emmie—oh. Oh. Are you guys in the middle of—”
“Sadie,” Crew warns.
“Yep. Going to town,” she says with an awkward little chuckle. “Love you both. Congrats on the engagement and the, uh, the—”
“What’s with the plant?” Foster asks.
I hear the unmistakable sound of what I think is Crew’s wallet hitting someone in the chest.
“Lunch is on me. Don’t come back for at least an hour.”
Foster makes a low whistling noise. “An hour?”
“Make it two.”
Foster, laughing now. “You absolute animal. Congratulations, Jensen.”
The door shuts.
I hear the car start, the tires crunch, and the sound of Foster’s laughter fading down the drive. Through the window, I catch a glimpse of Sadie in the passenger seat, fanning herself and mouthing “OH MY GOD.”
Crew reappears in the hallway. Still holding the fern. Naked and slightly breathless. His expression is somewhere between murderous and desperate.
He sets the fern down on the bookshelf.
Looks at me.
I’m leaning against the wall, naked, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised. Partly because I wanted to see his face when he came back, and partly because my legs are still not fully operational.
“Two hours?” I say. “That’s ambitious.”
“I have a lot of lost time to make up for.” He closes the distance between us in three strides—those long, purposeful strides that remind me he chases people for a living—and his hands land on my waist like they belong there. Because they do.
“If one more person drives down that road,” I murmur, “I’m installing a gate.”
“Already on the list.”
“With a lock.”
“With a lock.” His mouth finds my neck, and I feel him smile against my skin when my breath catches. “No more interruptions.”
“No more interruptions.”
He picks me up, and I wrap around him, legs locked at his back, arms around his neck. He carries me through the hallway and into the main room, and I’m expecting the wall again—but he walks past it.
He sets me on the dining table.
The wood is cool against my bare skin, and I suck in a breath, but then his mouth is on mine, and I stop caring about temperature.
He kisses me like he’s been starving for it—like the last four hours were a desert and I’m water—and I pull him closer by his hips until there’s nothing between us but heat and want and the absolute refusal to be interrupted a third time.
Then he’s pressing me back onto the table, one hand braced beside my head, the other sliding up my thigh.
“You okay?” he asks, looking down at me. His voice is low and rough, and his eyes are dark, and I will never, ever get tired of the way Crew Jensen looks at me when we’re like this—like I’m the only thing in the world that makes sense to him.
“Yeah.” I grin up at him.
He pushes into me, and my back arches off the wood, and I grab the edge of the table because I need something to hold onto. The sound I make isn’t cute or delicate—it’s raw and desperate and pulled from somewhere deep, and it makes his grip on my hip tighten in a way that sends sparks up my spine.
It’s frantic and hot and a little unhinged—both of us chasing the finish we’ve been robbed of twice, and I can feel it building already because my body has been hovering at the edge for hours, and it barely takes anything to get me back there.
He leans over me, mouth on my neck, my collarbone, the curve of my breast, and his hand slides between us, finding exactly the right spot because Crew Jensen is thorough about everything, and I mean everything.
“Right there,” I gasp, my hand fisting in his hair. “Don’t stop, don’t you dare—”
“Not stopping. Not if the entire Dallas field office shows up.”
I laugh, and it breaks into a moan because he shifts his angle and hits somewhere devastating, and my vision goes spotty at the edges.
“Em.” His voice is strained, barely holding. “I need you to get there because I’m about thirty seconds from—”
“I’m close, I’m so close, just—there—”
It hits me like a wave crashing after being held back all day.
I shatter, finally, finally, and it’s so intense that I cry out his name and my back lifts off the table, and I’m gripping him so hard I’ll probably leave marks.
He follows me seconds later with a groan that I feel in my chest, his whole body going taut and then boneless as he drops his forehead to the space between my breasts.
We lie there on the dining table, breathing like we just ran a marathon.
His cheek is pressed against my sternum, and I’m staring at the ceiling beams he installed last spring. My legs are dangling off the edge, and this is, without question, the least dignified position I’ve ever been in.
I’ve never been happier.
“We just christened the dining table,” I say.
“Mm-hmm.” He hasn’t moved. I don’t think he can.
“My parents admired this table an hour ago.”
He pauses. “Let’s not think about that.”
“My mom set her casserole dish right where my butt is.”
“Emmie. Please.”
I laugh, and it shakes both of us, and he makes a muffled sound against my chest that might be a groan or might be a laugh. His thumb traces lazy circles on my hip.
“Crew?”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm.”
“You threw your wallet at Foster.”
“I did.”
“All your cards are in there.”
“I’m aware.”
“He’s going to buy something ridiculous with your credit card. You know that, right?”
A pause.
“Worth it.”
I laugh into his chest, and he holds me tighter, and the morning sun moves across the cabin floor in slow gold stripes, and I think: Yeah. So worth it.