Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
STEPHEN
She's sitting at my kitchen table with wet hair and one of my flannel shirts and I'm losing my mind.
I gave her the flannel because her clothes were soaked through and because I'm not the kind of man who lets a woman sit in wet clothing while I cook.
But watching Lydia Brooke in my oversized shirt with the sleeves rolled past her wrists and the hem falling to mid-thigh and nothing underneath except whatever she kept on from the waist down is testing every shred of discipline I've built over thirty-seven years of life.
The elk stew is simmering on the stove. My cabin smells like rosemary and garlic and woodsmoke, and underneath all of it, her.
Vanilla and rain and warm skin. She's got her legs tucked under her on the chair, bare feet, her braid drying in a loose rope over one shoulder.
Scout is curled on the floor beside her.
Duke is on his bed near the fireplace, one eye open, watching the new arrivals with the lazy surveillance of a dog who's decided these people are acceptable but wants it on record that he's reserving judgment.
"Your cabin is not what I expected," Lydia says.
I stir the stew and don't turn around. "What did you expect?"
"Military precision. Everything squared away. Hospital corners."
"And?"
"Books on every surface. A hand-carved chess set that you clearly play against yourself. And a framed photograph of a fishing boat that I'm guessing was your father's."
I stop stirring.
She's looking at the photo on the wall near the front door.
The Sea Maiden. My father's thirty-two-foot trawler, the one he took out of Astoria Harbor on a November morning when I was sixteen and never brought back.
They found the boat three days later, capsized, tangled in her own nets. They never found him.
"His name was Paul," I say, because she didn't ask and that's exactly why I want to tell her. She waits for things. She doesn't push. She just creates the space and lets whatever's inside find its own way out.
"Is that why you joined the Coast Guard?"
"I joined because I wanted to save the people the ocean takes." I set the spoon down and lean against the counter, facing her. "Turns out you can't save all of them. And the ones you can't save take something from you on their way down."
Her amber eyes hold mine across the small kitchen.
The fire crackles. Rain hammers the windows.
And this woman in my shirt, in my cabin, with her bare feet and her sharp mind and her hands that heal broken things, looks at me like she can see straight through to the wreckage and isn't afraid of what's there.
"Stew's ready," I say, because if I keep standing here looking at her, dinner's going to get cold.
We eat at the table. Close together because the table is small and because I pulled her chair to the side nearest mine without thinking about it. Our knees touch under the table. Neither of us moves away.
She eats like someone who's been working all day, which she has. No performance, no pretense. She tears bread with her fingers and drags it through the stew and makes a sound when she tastes it that vibrates straight down my spine.
"This is incredible."
"Family recipe. My mother taught me before she remarried and moved inland."
"Does she know you're here? In Montana?"
"She knows I left the Guard. She knows I'm alive. That's about all we manage these days." I refill her water glass from the pitcher. "What about yours? You said you're testifying against your parents. That can't make for easy phone calls."
Lydia sets her bread down. Wipes her fingers on the flannel. My flannel, on her body, and every time she moves in it, the collar shifts and I can see the line of her collarbone, the shadow of the chain she wears, the soft curve where her neck meets her shoulder.
"My mother texted me yesterday. Wanting to know if I'm coming to Thanksgiving." A bitter laugh that doesn't reach her eyes. "Like I can sit across from my father and pretend thirty-seven dogs aren't living in concrete runs the size of bathtubs behind his barn."
"Thirty-seven."
"That's the current count. It's been as high as sixty.
" Her voice stays steady, but her fingers curl around the edge of the table.
"They're not monsters. That's the thing people don't understand about cases like this.
My parents love each other. They go to church.
My mother makes the best apple crisp in Grafton County.
And they keep dogs in conditions that would make you physically ill because they've convinced themselves it's a business, not cruelty. "
I reach across the table and put my hand over hers.
She goes still. Her eyes drop to our hands. My fingers are rough and scarred and twice the size of hers, and something about the contrast makes my chest tight.
"You're doing the right thing," I say.
"I know I am." She turns her hand over beneath mine. Palm to palm. Her fingers thread through mine and grip. "Doesn't make it hurt less."
"No. It doesn't."
We sit there. Holding hands across a table littered with bread crumbs and stew bowls and the remnants of a meal shared between two people who've been holding themselves together alone for too long.
The rain comes down. The fire burns. Duke snores by the hearth and Scout's tail thumps once against the floorboards.
"I should go," Lydia says. She doesn't move. Her thumb traces a circle on the back of my hand.
"You should stay."
The words come out low and certain and completely irreversible. I don't take them back. I don't qualify them. I look at this woman who walked onto my property three days ago and systematically dismantled every wall I built, and I tell her the truth.
"I'm not asking you to stay because of the rain or because the roads are bad. I'm asking you to stay because I want you here. In my cabin. Tonight."
Her breath catches. The amber in her eyes goes dark and liquid. Her grip on my hand tightens.
"Stephen."
"Tell me no and I'll drive you back to town myself. Tell me yes and I'll spend the rest of this night making sure you don't regret it."
She stands up. My hand drops. For one terrible second, I think she's leaving.
She walks around the table, stops in front of my chair, and looks down at me with an expression that burns through every defense I have left.
"Yes."
I'm on my feet before the word finishes leaving her mouth.
My hands find her waist and I pull her against me, and the heat of her body through the thin flannel sears into my palms. She gasps, a sharp intake that I swallow with my mouth, kissing her hard, open, tasting rosemary and bread and the sweetness underneath that is just her.
Her hands fist in my shirt. She pulls, and I go willingly, walking her backward out of the kitchen and down the short hallway toward my bedroom.
Her back finds the wall and I press into her, pinning her there with my hips, and the sound she makes against my mouth is the most devastating thing I've ever heard.
"I've been thinking about this since you got out of your car," I say against her lips. "Since you walked across my gravel in those boots and looked at my property like you already knew every secret it had."
"Since you held my hand too long." She's pulling at my shirt, dragging it up. Her palms flatten against my stomach and slide up my chest, and the feeling of her hands on my bare skin makes every muscle in my body contract. "I knew right then."
I grip the hem of the flannel she's wearing. My flannel. On her body. The possessiveness of that thought goes through me like wildfire.
"I want this off." I pull it over her head in one motion.
She lifts her arms to help and the movement pushes her breasts toward me, and Christ, she's not wearing a bra.
Full, round breasts with dusky pink nipples already hard from the cold or from wanting me, and the sight of her half-naked in my hallway with her hair falling out of its braid stops my breath.
"You're staring," she whispers.
"I'm memorizing." I cup her breasts, one in each hand, feeling the weight of them, running my thumbs over her nipples and watching her eyelids flutter. "Because I want to remember exactly what you look like right now the next time I can't sleep at three a.m."
She grabs my belt and pulls me into the bedroom.
We hit the mattress together. I land over her, catching my weight on my forearms, her thighs opening to cradle my hips.
The press of her body under mine is electric.
Hot skin against hot skin, her chest bare against my bare chest, and when she rolls her hips up against my cock, already hard and straining behind my jeans, I drop my head to her neck and groan.
"Off." She's working my belt buckle with urgent fingers. "Everything off. Now."
I rear back and strip. Belt, jeans, boxer briefs. She watches me from the bed, propped on her elbows, eyes tracking every scar and line and contour of my body. I watch her looking. I let her see. The reef cuts on my arms. The rope burn across my ribs. The body I built pulling people from the ocean.
Her leggings are next. I hook my fingers in the waistband and drag them down her legs, taking the underwear with them. Plain black cotton. Nothing fancy. And still the sexiest thing I've ever peeled off a woman because it's her.
She's naked on my bed. Long limbs, sun-kissed skin, the athletic lines of her body softened by curves that make my hands ache. The silver chain catches the firelight from the other room, the pendant resting between her breasts.
I bend down and kiss that pendant. Then the skin beneath it. Then lower, my mouth tracing a line down her sternum, between her breasts, over her ribs. She arches into me. Her fingers slide into my hair and grip.
"I want to taste you." I look up at her from her stomach. "I want my mouth on your pussy and I want you to come on my tongue before I'm inside you."
Her whole body shudders. "God, yes."