CHAPTER FIVE
AMY
I woke up alone in a strange bed and lay still as memories of yesterday and last night came flooding back.
I might have been in a strange bed, but I knew exactly who it belonged to.
Lawson.
I ran my hand over the other side of the bed. Empty. But his pillow still held the dent of his head, and as if to confirm the whole thing was real, I pressed my face into it. “This is how women end up kidnapped willingly,” I whispered into the pillowcase.
I sighed. Waking alone was exactly what I’d expected.
It would have been too much to hope I’d wake up in his arms — although my imagination, unsupervised since the riverbank, had no trouble filling in what that would have been like.
All that heat at my back. One of those forearms banded under my breasts.
A hand the size of a dinner plate trailing down my body, those rough, fingertips slipping under the hem of my shirt, and finding nothing under that flannel but me, and —
And he wasn’t even in the building and I was already flushed. Wonderful. Great start.
Sitting up on the edge of the bed, I took stock of how I was feeling after my adventure yesterday.
My head was clear. No dizziness, no nausea.
Only morning light coming through a crack in the curtains, the sound of a creek somewhere in the distance, and the flat, undeniable fact that I had asked a mountain man if I could sleep with him and he had carried me to his bed and I had slept.
Beside him. All night. Without so much as rolling over into his space, which, in hindsight, felt like a criminal waste of proximity.
From outside came a sound I couldn’t place. Rhythmic. A dense thud followed by a small silence. Then another thud.
I got up, finger-combed my hair to some semblance of normal, and followed the sound through the cabin and out onto the porch, and then I stood there in my socks and forgot what I’d come out for.
Lawson was splitting wood. With no shirt.
I was a grown woman. I’d seen shirtless men before.
But there was shirtless, and then there’s whatever was happening in that yard — acres of tanned back, a spine like a plumb line, muscle moving under skin with every swing of the axe.
There was a scar low on his left side, another along the ribs, a knee brace strapped over his jeans.
Sweat ran a dark line down his spine into the waistband of those jeans, and I followed it all the way down before I caught myself, and then I didn’t catch myself.
He set up a round of wood, swung, split it clean, kicked the halves aside, and set another.
I kept watching. Why? Because I was a grown woman.
And my grown woman brain had thoughts. Thoughts about the flex of his thighs when he swung.
Thoughts about those hands choked up on the axe handle, and what else he could do with them.
Thoughts about whether he’d handle me with that same unhurried precision — set, swing, split — and whether I’d survive it, and whether surviving it was even a priority.
The man split logs like he had all day. I had a strong suspicion — and an ever greater desire to know — if he did everything like he had all day. My thighs pressed together on their own initiative.
I must have made a noise. Or he’d heard the door. Either way, he turned around. “There’s coffee.”
“You said no caffeine.”
“That was yesterday. Your eyes are tracking and you did four rounds of questions overnight without missing.” He turned back around and set another round on the block. “Half a cup.”
“You’re rationing my coffee?”
“Yep.”
“You can’t.” I took a deep breath not wanting to start this day looking like I was arguing with him. Because I would argue my case for more caffeine. “Why do you even need this much firewood?”
“Winter.”
“It’s July.” I stated.
“Winter doesn’t care.”
“That’s the most Montana sentence I’ve ever heard.
” I went back inside, poured my half cup, and came out to sit on the porch edge with it, and I watched him work.
It was hardly my fault the work he was doing required being shirtless, or that he worked up a sweat doing it.
Which, in turn, made his chest glisten. I was simply a witness. An extremely thorough witness.
“What’s the plan today?” I asked his back. “What does a Bigfoot do all day? Walk me through it. I want the full itinerary.”
“More wood. Then repair the garden fence. Something’s been getting in.”
“Something like what?”
“Deer. Maybe elk.”
“No bears? Are they afraid of invading Bigfoot’s territory?”
“Amy.” He said my name like a warning.
“Careful, Bigfoot. Keep saying my name in that voice and I’ll start earning the warning on purpose.”
That got me a look over his shoulder. Dark and deep. I smiled into my coffee as I took a sip, extremely pleased with myself. “What’s after the fence?”
“Truck needs an oil change.”
“Riveting. Then?”
“Dinner.”
He split another log, then buried the axe in the block and came toward the porch. He stopped one step below me, which put us eye to eye for the first time since I’d met him, and neither of us said anything while he took the mug out of my hand and helped himself to a swallow of my rationed coffee.
“Hey.”
“Quality control.” He handed it back. His fingers dragged across mine on the handle — slow, deliberate, nothing accidental about it — and every nerve I owned reported for duty.
His mouth had been on that rim. I put my mouth where his mouth had been, maintained eye contact while I did it, and had the deep satisfaction of watching his jaw go tight.
Two could play at quality control.
“So, that’s it? That’s the whole social calendar?” I wrapped both hands around the mug to keep them from doing anything unauthorized, like reaching out and dragging his mouth down to mine.
He braced one hand on the porch post above my head and leaned in past me to grab his shirt off the rail, and for two full seconds I was inside the heat coming off his body, close enough to count the six pack of his abs.
Close enough to lean forward three inches and put my mouth on his sternum, an idea my body had fully committed.
Then he straightened and pulled the shirt on. A sigh escaped me. Loud. Mournful. Entirely on purpose by the end of it.
“You following me around all day,” he said, “or you want to pretend to think about it first?”
He’d heard it.
“Following. Obviously. I’m medically forbidden from being left unattended.”
“That expired this morning.”
I looked up at him and shamelessly batted my eyes. “You wouldn’t want me to have a setback, now would you?”
He grabbed my chin and leaned down. For one crazy moment, I thought he might actually kiss me.
Instead, he searched my eyes, and I sat there in his grip trying to look medically fragile while his thumb rested at the corner of my mouth.
If I turned my head two degrees, that thumb would be between my lips.
I turned my head one degree. His grip firmed, holding me exactly where I was. His thumb pressed once at the corner of my mouth — half warning, half promise, impossible to tell which — and then, he let go. “Behave.”
The words make me was right there, on the tip of my tongue. The same tongue that wanted to dart out and lick that thumb. My restraint deserved an award.
“Your pupils are back to normal size,” he said. “How’s the leg?”
I stretched my leg out in front of me, pulling up the hem of the shorts — an inch or two higher than the bandage strictly required.
He pulled the bandage halfway off to reveal the long line which hetraced it with one fingertip. traced the “See? Doesn’t hurt at all.”
One dark brow rose. A gesture I was becoming familiar with. “Amy.”
“It pulls a little when I walk. So, what’s the verdict?” I asked as he put the bandage back in place, his thumb pressing into my skin.
“I should leave you inside. Resting.”
“You could. But where would be the fun in that?”
“Yeah,” he said, and picked up the axe again. “Figured. Wait here.”
He disappeared around the side of the cabin and came back with a pair of rubber muck boots, green, ancient, roughly the size of kayaks, and set them in front of me with two more pairs of wool socks which he proceeded to stuff in the toes. “Can’t work barefoot.”
I put them on. I clomped a test lap of the porch. I looked like a garden gnome who’d been drafted into the merchant marine.
“Not one word,” I said.
“Wasn’t going to.” He was already walking toward the fence line, but I’d caught it — the corner of his mouth, moving. That was two smiles I’d witnessed. I was keeping score.
***
Here is what I learned, trailing a mountain man through his day like a yippy little dog he’d made the mistake of feeding.
One. He worked the way other people breathed.
No wasted motion, no checking his phone, no standing back to admire.
He stacked the split wood in a line so straight it looked surveyed, and when I put a piece on crooked to see what would happen, he straightened it without breaking stride and without comment, and I had to bite down on a dLawsonghted noise.
Two. He listened. That was the trick of him, and it took me half the morning to catch it.
I talked — about my job, about the Brave Things list, item by item, everything from skydiving to salsa lessons to learning how to make bread that isn’t sad — and he grunted along when there was a silent moment.
Which wasn’t often. Then I’d loop back an hour later and he’d say something.
Not much, but enough to let me know he was listening. Maybe even taking notes.
And he touched me. That was the part I hadn’t been prepared for. Hoped for, yes. Prepared for, no.
His hand at the small of my back, moving me out of the path of a falling fence rail, and then staying two seconds past the danger. Two seconds I felt through the flannel, through skin, all the way down to that part of my body. The part that was soft and aching.