Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Lila felt damned cheerful working today. Happy that he was by her side. Because for the first time, she actually didn’t have any tension.
The secret was out.
Not only that, they had actually done something about it all. They had expressed the feelings. She had really thought of it as an exorcism, and it had been.
Not that her feelings for him were gone, they weren’t. It was just that she didn’t feel that deep, awful weight about it anymore.
Her bones ached when they finished for the day, but she wasn’t so tired that she didn’t want to go back to the tent and immediately explore his body.
She didn’t care if he was sweaty, she didn’t care if he was a little bit stinky.
It didn’t matter. In fact, she kind of thought his sweat smelled good, which maybe said some not-so-stable things about her.
But she was who she was. She was a Nolan vampire.
She couldn’t help it. She had been for a long time.
“What did you pack for food?” she asked when they got back to the camp.
The camp felt like their haven in a way she had never expected it to. Felt like something that belonged only to them.
“Steak.”
Her stomach growled. “Really?”
“Yeah, I’m going to set up my camp grill. Do some steak, corn on the cob. I hope you’re hungry.”
“I am very hungry, and I’m also very excited about this.”
“Good.”
“And excited to get you naked.”
His eyes went fierce, then he closed the space between them, and pulled her in for a kiss. His hands were on her face, holding her steady as he consumed her.
And when they parted, she felt blissful. “Oh, good,” she said. “I was afraid that I dreamed it.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, it’s real, sis, but you might not be that pleased about it in the fullness of time.”
His hand was on her hip, and it was the best thing she had ever felt in her life, so she knew already that he was just wrong.
“Yeah, yeah. Save the self-loathing bullshit for somebody who cares. Or maybe more accurately, somebody who wasn’t boiled in the same trauma broth.
” She jabbed him in the stomach with her elbow, and he wrapped his arm around her waist, lifting her up and hauling her over to a chair that he had set out by the fire, sitting her down in it.
She sat there, and he brought her a plate a few minutes later, with her dinner on it, and she was just... content in a way that she had never fully imagined being in her life.
Yes, she was mean to Nolan sometimes because of the way that she felt about him.
Because she wanted to distance herself from him.
But she carried herself with that kind of aggression a lot.
It was easy to build up walls of self-protection.
A lot harder to put yourself out there, try and actually be genuine, open yourself up. To not brace for impact all the time.
But she didn’t feel like she was braced for anything. She was just enjoying the moment. Enjoying being with him.
He sat down across from her, and she felt something inside of her relax. She hadn’t even realized it had been tensed up, but it was. Maybe for years.
“So, how long do you think it will be until we have this fully done?”
“Probably just a couple more sessions,” she said.
“So, two weeks?”
“Yes.”
“Are you confident enough in that to open it up to people who want to book a ride?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I think we should do that.”
“Great. Then we can get Walker to work on updating the website. See what the demand looks like.”
“I know we kind of made a list of all the ways that we wanted to do this. Obviously, we can’t sustain doing too many eight-hour rides.”
“No,” he said. “I think we should basically have different packages. We can do guided rides every so often, but that will be costly. But otherwise, different groups can come and use the trail. We can put together different packages where we offer horse boarding and dinners, include lodging in the hotel, things like that.”
“Perfect. So let’s say we get three or four packages live and ready to go, and then we can watch reservations roll in. And prove to Cody that he should have invested.”
“I admire your pettiness,” he said.
“He’s my older brother. So if I’m right, and he was hesitant, I’m going to be petty.”
But her real joy was sparked when he brought out a couple of cupcakes.
“You didn’t tell me that you brought dessert.”
“Yeah. Well. I thought that I would keep a few surprises in store for you tonight.”
“I hope that’s a double entendre.”
“Sure is.”
They ate together, and when they were finished, he brought out his knives, and foraged around the camp until he found some wood.
“Care to have a little whittling contest with me?”
“I don’t actually want to compete with you in something you’re that good at.”
“You remember I taught you how to do this. You’ve taught me a lot of very important things in my life, Nolan.”
He shifted, and she had the feeling that if he were a different man, he might have blushed.
He wasn’t, not even close, but still, she felt a little bit of pride over that.
Not just that. She knew it was beneath the surface, but that she could read him so well.
“I suspect I have,” he said.
She turned the piece of wood that he handed her over and started to try and get an idea for what she wanted to carve.
A pine tree. She would go simple. She started cutting away at the chunk of natural material in her hand, while Nolan did the same. His fingers were quick and expert. She knew other places and ways that they were expert.
But she did like watching him do this. This was a thing that she knew about him, but she hadn’t seen him do it all that much as an adult. She had never been to his current workspace, and she didn’t even know what he was working on now, which made her feel bad.
“What are you doing with your art currently?”
“Oh. I have one commission for a hotel in Bend. It’s going to be really fun to move the goddamn thing.”
“What is it? A salmon?”
He wasn’t descriptive about it.
“Okay,” she said. “And it’s really big?” She wiggled her brows at him.
“It’s a big fish,” he said. He chuckled, turning the wood in his hands. “It’s for a lodge on the river. They do fishing excursions and you can fish off the shore at the hotel. So, it makes thematic sense.”
“You probably haven’t really been able to work on it very much lately.”
“No, not much. But anyway, I built all this into the timeline. Plus, you can be capricious with deadlines when you’re an artist.”
“Capricious,” she said. “I like that word.”
“Yeah. Well, I like employing it when it suits me.”
“Little do they know, you’re the furthest thing from a capricious artist.”
He smiled, and she had to wonder how much that wasn’t true.
Nolan was complicated. If you didn’t know him, he wasn’t the most talkative, but he could turn on the charm when he had to. Still, she felt like most people never really got to know him.
It wasn’t such an apparent facade the way that it was with Walker.
Her older brother was proudly and obviously full of shit. Nolan wasn’t that. But he would evade questions, stay out of spirited debate. He was like a river that looked smooth on the surface, but had a dangerous current churning underneath.
And she wanted to get pulled in by it.
That thought, that realization, jolted her.
She held her little tree up. “There. That’s pretty good, right?”
“Very good,” he said.
She looked at what he was making. It was much more detailed than hers. A bear, standing on its hind legs, one paw curved in, and one pointed upward, almost like it was waving.
“I like your bear,” she said.
“Then it’s yours,” he said.
She leaned in and kissed him, because she couldn’t wait anymore.
Then he carried her into the tent, and showed her that their sleeping bags did indeed zip together.
She stripped her clothes off quickly, and he did the same, moving over her, thrusting inside of her with no real foreplay, but she didn’t care. She just wanted him.
“So good,” he growled, kissing her hard, lowering his forehead to hers as he thrust deep inside of her.
She was already wet for him. She had been, all day. The memory of this, of the two of them being together, it had kept her going all afternoon, and this was no sweet coming together, it was a storm.
Her fingernails dug into his skin, and he growled against her mouth as he kissed her. She came hard, clenching tight around him, and he groaned as he spilled himself deep inside of her.
“Lord almighty,” he said, rolling away from her and lying on his back.
She turned toward him, snuggling up against him. She listened as his heartbeat returned to normal.
“Is that a quickie?”
“Yes,” he said. “And I’m sorry about that. You deserve... More. A better performance.”
“I’m beat, Nolan. The fact that you can make me come in ten minutes is a gift.”
He chuckled. Then he wrapped his arms around her and held her close. She traced the tattoo on his forearm. There were mountains, and four bighorn sheep scaling the rocky face.
“What does your tattoo mean?” she asked. “I’ve always wondered.”
“You don’t know?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. If I did, I wouldn’t have to ask.”
“It’s us.”
She startled, moving her fingertips to the smallest sheep, climbing behind the larger ones. “Us?”
“Yeah. Making it in spite of how steep it all is. In spite of how hard the terrain is.”
Her eyesight went blurry. “Am I the little one?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice rough. “But look at you keeping up.”
“Did you tell the guy who did your tattoo that?”
He snorted. “Hell no, I just told him I wanted big ass tough looking sheep.”
“Ha!” She dissolved into laughter, clinging to his arm as she giggled helplessly. Until she was wrapped around him, head rested on that tattoo, her heart feeling sore.
She couldn’t remember ever feeling so... complete.
Nights for her were long and lonely, and now he was there. She had fantasized about him, but she hadn’t thought about this. Hadn’t realized that this was an option. This sweet sharing space, sharing breath, holding each other.
She pushed her knee between his legs, and ended up tangled all in him.
“Nolan?”
“What?”
“I like this.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I like it too, Lila.”