Chapter 14 #2
"They did this," I said carefully, "because they care about you."
"They did this because they care about us. " He said it simply. Like it was obvious. Like an entire family mobilizing to build a campsite for their brother's new girlfriend was just what people did.
I crossed the clearing and kissed him soft and slow and tasting of salt, and he held my face in both hands and kissed me back, and the valley stretched out below us and the afternoon sun turned everything to gold.
He cooked over the fire while the sun went down.
Steaks. Cast iron. Rosemary from Louisa's garden that he crushed between his palms. I sat by the fire with the whiskey — he'd packed a bottle of the good stuff, the one Ben Alvarez kept behind the bar at the Silver Spur — and watched him cook.
"You look like you know what you're doing," I said.
"I look like a man standing near a fire holding meat. It's genetic. Blackwood men have been fooling women into thinking they can cook for four generations."
"So the steak is going to be terrible."
"The steak is going to be incredible. But I need you to understand that's mostly the cow and the cast iron doing the work. I'm just here for the seasoning and the atmosphere."
"And the rosemary?"
"That's Momma's. I take zero credit for the rosemary."
I laughed until I tipped sideways in the chair.
We ate at the little table with the wildflowers between us and the sky putting on a show — purples and pinks bleeding into deep blue, the first stars puncturing through. He refilled my whiskey. His knee pressed against mine under the table, and neither of us moved it.
After dinner, he built the fire up. We sat in the Adirondack chairs with the cowhides draped over our legs and the cushions behind our backs and the valley dark below and the sky opening up into the kind of darkness you only get when you're forty miles from a streetlight.
"What did you want to be when you were little?" I asked.
"A cowboy."
"That's cheating. You are a cowboy."
"Fine. An astronaut cowboy."
"Better."
He reached across the gap between the chairs and found my hand. "What's the thing you're most proud of?"
"Maisie." No hesitation. "Everything else I've built, I had to fight for. Maisie, I'd burn the world down for." I turned my head to look at him. Firelight on the planes of his face. "What about you?"
"Right now? This." He squeezed my hand. "Being the man you trust with your Saturday night."
I got out of my chair. Climbed into his lap — knees on either side of his hips, the Adirondack creaking under our combined weight, his face tipping up to mine. He looked surprised for exactly half a second. Then his hands found my waist, and his eyes went dark.
I kissed him. Slow at first — whiskey-warm, the fire crackling. Then deeper. His tongue against mine and my hands in his hair, and the kissing turned into something that was rapidly leaving PG-13 territory, and the chair was groaning.
He pulled back. Breathing hard. "There's a tent."
"I see the tent."
"It has a bed."
"Does it."
"A very comfortable bed that I spent forty-five minutes setting up this morning, and I would very much like to use it before this chair collapses."
I laughed against his mouth. He stood — lifting me with him, my legs wrapping around his waist — and carried me across the clearing to the tent and held the canvas flap open.
Inside: the camp cot layered with sheepskin and blankets, a lantern casting warm light, more fairy lights strung along the frame. He'd thought of everything. He'd thought of me.
He undressed me slowly. Peeling layers like he had all the time in the world.
Kissing each new inch of skin he uncovered — shoulder, the inside of my elbow, the dip of my collarbone.
I undressed him the same way. Unhurried.
My hands mapping the body I was learning by heart — the ridges, the dips, the places that made his breath catch.
We fell into bed, and he gathered me against him and for a long time we just lay there — skin to skin, breathing together, his hand tracing my hip.
"You're shaking," he said.
"I'm not cold."
"I know."
He kissed me, slow, languid strokes of his tongue that I felt down in my toes. And when he moved over me and pressed inside, the sound I made was quiet — just a breath, just his name — and he stilled and held my face and looked at me in the lantern light.
"Stay here," he said. "Right here with me."
"I'm here."
He moved. Slow. Deep. His forehead against mine. His hips rolling in long strokes that made my toes curl and my breath come in hitches that matched his.
“Made for me,” he grunted, pushing deeper. My hips angled up, taking everything he wanted to give me. Needing it. “Fucking perfect.”
My nails raked down his back, clinging to him. The cot creaked with every roll of his hips, but I didn’t care. It could crumble beneath us, and it wouldn’t matter as long as it was him I was falling to the ground with.
“Yes,” I agreed. This was fucking perfect.
We were fucking perfect.
No rush. No performance. Just his body and mine and the canvas above us and the stars beyond that and the sound of the fire outside and his voice in my ear — not words exactly, just sounds, just breath, just my name repeated like something sacred.
I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him closer until there was nothing between us, and when I fell, I took him with me, and we lay there afterward wound around each other like a vine, his heartbeat slowing against mine, the lantern flickering, the night enormous and quiet outside the canvas.
I woke before dawn.
Grey light through the tent. His arm heavy across my waist. His breathing slow and deep and even. I lay still for a minute, just feeling the warmth of him, the solid weight of this man in my bed — in our bed, this temporary, perfect, stolen bed on top of a mountain.
Then I slid my hand under the blanket.
He was hard. Already, or still — the male body's morning loyalty to itself. I wrapped my fingers around him, and he stirred. A shift in his breathing. A low sound at the back of his throat.
"Callie —"
"Shh."
I stroked him slowly. Felt him harden further in my hand. His hips shifted — involuntary, instinctive — and his hand found my hair and his fingers curled into it.
"What are you —"
"Saying good morning." I slid down under the covers. Pressed my lips to his stomach. His abs clenched. I kissed lower. Lower. Took him in my mouth and his whole body arched and the sound he made — " Jesus " — echoed off the canvas.
I took my time. Learned the rhythm that made his hand tighten in my hair. The spot that made his hips buck. The way his breathing fractured when I did something with my tongue that I'd been thinking about since approximately the Silver Spur bathroom.
"Callie — I'm going to —"
I pulled back. Crawled up his body. Straddled him.
"Inside me," I said. "I want to feel you."
His eyes flew open. Dark. Wrecked. He grabbed my hips and I sank down onto him.
We both gasped and I braced my hands on his chest and rode him — slow at first, then faster, finding the angle that hit the spot that made stars burst behind my eyes.
His hands on my hips guiding me, his thumb finding me, circling, pressing —
" There — Clay —"
"I know — I've got you —"
I shattered. He followed three strokes later, his back arching off the cot, my name ripped out of him — and I collapsed against him, and we lay there panting and tangled and wrecked in the grey morning light.
Silence. Then: "Best morning of my entire life," he said. "And I've won a national championship, so the bar was high."
I stretched against him. Every muscle humming. "Not bad, Blackwood."
"Not bad ? After that ?"
"I'm a tough critic."
"You're going to kill me, Callie Monroe."
"Noted."
We puttered. That was the only word for it — we puttered around the campsite like two people playing house on a mountain.
He got the fire going, and I wrapped myself in a blanket and curled up in my chair and watched the valley emerge from the mist, silver and gold, the kind of morning that felt like the world was starting over.
He made my tea. He'd packed it — the Earl Grey, the good tin from my kitchen.
I didn't know when he'd taken it. I didn't care.
I wrapped both hands around the tin cup and closed my eyes, and the warmth of it and the smell of it and the sound of him cooking eggs behind me was the closest thing to perfect I'd ever experienced.
"Bacon's almost done," he said.
"I could stay here forever."
"Say the word."
We ate breakfast with our shoulders touching and the fire popping and the mist burning off below. His hand on my knee. My head on his shoulder. The kind of silence that doesn't need filling because it's already full.
"What time is it?" I asked. Not because I wanted to know.
He checked his phone. "Eleven-fifteen."
"And the handover's at —"
"Four."
My shoulders went up. Just an inch. The familiar tightening, the internal clock starting its countdown — the one that lived in my body like a second heartbeat, ticking down to giving her back.
Clay didn't say it'll be fine. Didn't say she'll be okay. Didn't try to fix it or counsel me through it.
He put his hand on the back of my neck. The same spot. The same steady pressure.
"I see you," he said. "And I'm here."
I leaned into his hand. Breathed.
"We should pack up," I said.
"I'll come back later to clean up. Let's just ride down and get our girl."
Our girl. I looked at him. He hadn't even hesitated.
I kissed him. Quick. Fierce. Tasting of Earl Grey and bacon and morning air.
We saddled the horses and rode down through the cedars, the light warm on our faces, and I held the reins with steady hands and thought: This is what safe feels like. This is what it was supposed to feel like all along.