CHAPTER THREE
AMY
The truck smelled like… him.
Not in a cologne way. In a mountain wrapped in pine kind of way. The kind of scent that made a woman forget basic survival instincts and consider terrible ideas. Like licking his neck.
Which was concerning.
Lawson’s hands were easy on the wheel despite the road being little more than a track with the mountain on one side and a drop-off I couldn’t look at right now on the other. There was a pulse of pain behind my eyes that I hadn’t shared with the EMT and that got worse every time we hit a rut.
“How far?” I asked.
“Ten minutes.”
“Great.” A pause. “Is it always this bumpy?”
He glanced over. The look was brief and assessing, the same one he’d been giving me since the river.
“Why’d you come here?”
I blinked at him. “To the rafting trip?”
A nod.
“I wanted to prove I could do it,” I admitted.
Lawson frowned slightly. “Do what?”
“Hard things.” I gave a small shrug. “Everybody always assumes curvy girls don’t do outdoorsy stuff. But mostly…” I looked out the window again. “I got tired of being scared all the time. I’ve said maybe next time so many times... I decided to change that.”
Lawson settled deeper into his seat and the move drew my eyes to his legs. Legs that were long and hard and big. I blamed it on the concussion that my gaze wandered where it shouldn’t have. “So, you came whitewater rafting?”
“I took swim lessons first. At a YMCA. I will have to go back and give them a better rating. The first thing they did was teach—or at least try—to teach me how to float.”
He glanced over at me. “I think you learned that lesson.”
“So do I. I floated long enough for you to snag me and drag me out of the river. Which, I might remind you, was a little rough. You’ll have to work on that.”
“Anything you say,” he murmured. He was looking out the windshield, not at me.
That voice. A woman could build an entire fantasy franchise on less, and the concussion had apparently fired my quality-control department, because I let myself start the first installment right there in his passenger seat.
I looked out the windshield and tried to be a normal person who was not sitting six inches from the most distractingly attractive man I’d ever encountered while soaking wet with only one shoe. But, I continued to be chatty. “You’re aggressively economical with words.”
“And you’re not. You argued with a river.”
“I was scared.”
“Most people get quiet when they’re scared.”
I tossed my head and regretted it at once. A tiny wave of dizziness washed over it. Not much, but enough to make me feel slightly off-balance.
Or maybe that was because I’d almost drowned and agreed to spend the night with Bigfoot.
I glanced down and sighed. Great. My t-shirt was still practically transparent and my hard nipples were poking at the fabric trying to break free. My breasts were big. Bouncy. And he’d had this view since the moment he’d taken off my life vest.
I crossed my arms over my chest, hoping he wouldn’t notice the move. But he did. His eyes dropped briefly. His hands flexed on the wheel. I pretended not to notice.
We rode the last few minutes in a silence that was, unexpectedly, not uncomfortable. Which was its own kind of dangerous. Comfortable silence with a man I barely knew while concussed on a mountain in Montana was not what I’d had in mind when I’d booked a brave adventure weekend. But here we were.
The cabin came into view through the trees and I understood immediately why he’d chosen it.
It sat like it had grown there, low and dark-timbered, tucked against the mountain with the easy permanence of something that belonged exactly where it was.
A covered porch ran the length of the front.
Firewood stacked with suspicious neatness along one side.
No decoration. No nonsense. Entirely him.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, before I could think about whether or not to say it. He didn’t answer, but the line of his shoulders eased a fraction. I was starting to understand that silence from Lawson wasn’t the same as nothing. It was — compressed. A lot going on in a small space.
He parked, got out, and was at my door before I’d processed that we’d stopped.
Before I could say anything, he lifted me out.
I looked at my feet with my one shoe still missing and simply enjoyed the ride.
I couldn’t recall ever being picked up by a man before.
Now this one had carried me up a trail, despite my weight and picked me up for a second time.
My entire body approved of the arrangement and put in a request for more.
“You carry women around often?” I asked, studying his face.
“No.”
“Good.”
He looked down at me. “Why good?”
“Because I’d hate to find out this is part of your regular customer service package.” The concussion was making me honest. More honest than usual, which was already more than was probably safe.
Inside was exactly what the outside had promised. Spare. Clean. A stone fireplace taking up most of one wall. A couch. A table. A kitchen at the back. No clutter, no photographs, no soft edges. I liked it on sight and found that slightly alarming.
Almost as alarming as the fact that I liked him.
He sat me on the couch and disappeared. I sat still and tried to take stock of myself for the first time since making the very bad decision to step onto that raft. Wet clothes. One shoe. Headache that came and went in slight waves.
And I was in a stranger’s cabin.
A stranger who had fished me out of a river and carried me to help.
And agreed to let me stay with him. At least for the night.
“I’m Amy,” I called out. “In case you were wondering who you fished out of the river.”
He returned to the living room carrying a stack of folded clothes in his hands. “Lawson.”
“Lawson. That’s a good name.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
I grinned. “You have a nice cabin, Lawson. Sparse. I’m guessing that’s intentional.”
“It is.”
“And you live up here all alone.”
“Yes.”
“Also intentional, I’m guessing.”
“You’re two for two.”
He laid the clothes down beside me. “You need to take a shower. Get warm.”
I sighed. While I loved to talk, I did enjoy the occasional conversation where the other person answered back with full sentences.
I glanced the clothing he’d found for me. A folded red plaid shirt and what looked like a pair of sweat pants that had been cut off into shorts.
I got up slowly and grabbed the clothes. “That explains the Bigfoot thing.”
He frowned down at me.
“The size, the beard, living alone in the woods.” I gestured at… all of him. “The whole situation.”
“I’m going to need you to stop calling me Bigfoot.”
“Probably not going to happen. But you can give a nickname.”
He gave me a slow once-over. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yes. Anything you feel suits me.”
“How about magpie?”
I stuck my tongue out at him. “Try again.”
He pointed at the bathroom. “Go take a shower, Amy.”
Something happened to me when he said my name. Something I was going to need to examine later, when I was dry and had more functional brain cells. He said it like an ordinary word, but it did not land like an ordinary word.
The bathroom was just like everything else.
One bar of soap. One shampoo. A single dark towel on the rail, and I could not have cared less whether he’d used it.
Everything in that room was his, and I was about to be naked in the middle of it.
I handled that thought with tremendous maturity and didn’t start the fantasy reel again.
Or I tried. I tried not to think about him in here with me, our bodies touching as he helped me wash my hair and then…
Getting out of my clothes took longer than it should have.
The leggings had dried onto me like a second skin, and I had to work them down over the cut on my thigh with my teeth gritted.
I stood there in the fluorescent honesty of a stranger’s bathroom and I got my first look at exactly how the day had treated me.
A bruise bloomed along my hip in an interesting shade of galaxy. Another was coming up on my shin. There was a small scrape on my cheekbone I hadn’t felt until right now. And the white bandage on my thigh reminded me I had gotten off lucky. Deciding it would get wet in the shower, I took it off.
I looked like I’d lost a fight with a river. Which I had.
I stepped into the shower and the hot water hit me and I just — stood there.
And here’s the thing nobody warns you about after the experience I’d had.
The adrenaline that had kept you going doesn’t give you any warning.
It just goes away. It had held me together through the rescue, the banter, the truck.
Now, alone, safe, warm, it packed up and walked out.
My hands started shaking. Then the rest of me.
I put both palms flat against the tile and let it happen — the full, wet, hiccupping ugly of it — because I had almost drowned today.
Actually almost. Real water, real rocks, real me under it, and no amount of narrating it into a comedy changed the three seconds where I’d been sure that was it.
I cried until I was done, which took less time than I expected, and then I washed my hair with Bigfoot’s shampoo and felt strangely, stupidly new.
By the time I turned the water off, I’d put myself mostly back together.
The flannel was soft in the way things only got after years of washing.
It hung off my shoulder on one side and hit mid-thigh, and the shorts were surprisingly big, despite my big hips.
I looked at myself in the small mirror over the sink.
Damp hair. Scrubbed face. Pink eyes I would be attributing to shampoo if asked.
“Okay,” I told my reflection. “You’re fine.”
My reflection looked unconvinced.
Lawson was at the kitchen counter when I came out, his back to me, and I stood in the bathroom doorway and looked at him.
The width of his shoulders. The way he moved—unhurried, dLawsonberate.
He’d changed clothes as well. Another black t-shirt and another pair of hip-hugging jeans. Yeah, I’d noticed.