CHAPTER FIVE #2
Then there was the time his fingers wrapped over mine on the wire stretcher, adjusting my grip, rough palm swallowing my knuckles whole.
“Like that,” he said, low, close to my ear, and I held the wire and nodded and did not hear a single word of the actual instruction, because his mouth against my ear was too distracting, and making me imagine other things.
Him behind me, minus the fence. Minus our clothes.
His hands adjusting my grip on a headboard instead of a wire stretcher.
“Got it?” he asked.
“Mm-hm.” I did not have it. The fence sagged where I’d been holding it, but I regretted nothing.
When we moved down the fence line he’d steer me with a palm on my shoulder, my hip, the back of my neck once — brief, warm, gone.
Every touch left a print I could still feel hours later.
By the third post I’d started leaning into them.
By the fifth I was inventing reasons. My grip needed checking.
The post needed holding. My hair needed rescuing from under the collar he’d fixed, knuckles grazing my nape, and I had to disguise the sound I made as a comment about elk.
“You’re awfully handsy for a hermit,” I told him, in the tone of a woman lodging a compliment disguised as a complaint.
“Making sure you don’t fall in a post hole.”
“There’s no post hole.”
“Planning ahead.”
“You,” I announced to his back, “are not as oblivious as advertised.”
“Nope.”
“That’s it? Nope?”
“That’s it.”
He let me follow him. That was the part I kept turning over while I handed him fence wire and held the post level and asked four hundred questions about elk.
A man who’d built his whole life to hold exactly one person had a woman at his heels chattering about bread, and he hadn’t once looked at his watch or the road down the mountain.
Somewhere around noon it stopped feeling like tolerance.
He’d angle things toward me — hold the wire lower where I could reach, assign me the jobs that kept me in his shade, out of the sun.
He was building me into his workday like a tool he’d decided to keep within reach.
The afternoon had being great. It was with the hose — another encounter with water — was where it all went off the rails.
I’d been given one job — water the garden while he changed the truck’s oil. My only defense was that I was a city girl and hadn’t used a garden hose in decades. I lost the wrestling match in under ten seconds and took the spray directly in the face. And in the chest. Mostly in the chest.
Lawson laughed. An actual laugh, one short rusty syllable, startled out of him as he looked at me from under the truck hood.
“I heard that! That’s mine now, you can’t take it back!” I laughed as I tried to get the situation under control.
He stopped laughed, just standing there starting.
I looked down at myself and understood the situation.
It wasn’t as bad as it was yesterday, but it was still…
The flannel shirt was soaked through. Plastered to me, every soft generous curve on full broadcast in wet fabric, exactly like the riverbank, except this time I wasn’t half-drowned and he wasn’t checking my pupils. The water was cold. The evidence of exactly how cold was visible from space.
An old reflex fired — the one that reached for a towel, a crossed arm, a joke to beat him to the punch line. Twenty years of training. Get ahead of the flinch before the flinch gets you.
He didn’t flinch. He looked at me like the hose had done him a personal favor.
He’d gone quiet. When I looked back up, he had come out from under the hood and was standing dead still with a rag forgotten in one hand.
He was looking at me the way I’d caught him almost-looking since the river — except he’d stopped hiding it.
Heat, open and unapologetic, moving down me slow and coming back up slower, stopping everywhere the wet fabric clung.
My nipples… sweet heaven help me, my nipples were tight under the flannel, poking against the wet flannel like nobody’s business and a sweet ache set up shop low in my body and made itself known it wasn’t leaving.
He crossed the yard. Took the hose out of my hand.
Shut the nozzle off. Stood there, one foot of heated summer air between us, close enough that I could see his pulse in his throat.
He reached out and slid a strand of dripping hair off my cheek with one finger, and hooked it behind my ear, letting his knuckles trail down the side of my neck on the way back.
Those fingers didn’t stop at my neck. They kept going, tracing my collarbone where the wet flannel gapped, one knuckle dragging slowly downward.
“Drenched again,” I managed. “The water in this state has a vendetta.”
“I’m starting to think the water’s on my side.” His voice had dropped into some register that bypassed my ears entirely and reported straight to my girlie parts. His thumb was resting at the hinge of my jaw. His eyes were on my mouth.
“Lawson.”
His hand slid up and cupped my jaw — huge and warm and careful, so careful for so big of a man. He looked at me for one long second, a second with a question in it, and whatever my face answered must have been yes in every language, because then he kissed me.
And oh.
This was not a first kiss. First kisses are polite.
First kisses are handshakes. This was a man kissing me like he’d been resisting since the river and had an unholy number of things to make up for.
His fingers slide back into my wet hair and he closed his hand around the nape of my neck, tilting my head exactly where he wanted it.
His beard was soft against my chin, his tongue sweeping to my mouth without asking permission.
I made a sound into his mouth that I’d deny to my grave and hauled myself into him by the front of his shirt and kissed him back with everything I’d been saving and not realizing I’d been saving it.
He pulled me in. Or I climbed. Later accounts would differ.
All I know is his arm came around me and gathered me flush against him, soaked cotton and all, my softness pressed to the solid furnace of his chest, and he gripped a handful of my hip.
No hesitation, no polite hover, fingers flexing in like he’d been thinking about exactly that handful since the river — and hauled me up onto my toes, and I felt precisely how mutual this situation was.
All of it. All of him, hard against my stomach, and enormous, because of course, of course, the man was built to scale, and the whimper that got loose from me at that discovery was frankly nobody’s business.
Men before him had touched my body like a negotiation — hands hovering, editing, choosing the flattering angles. Lawson grabbed what was actually there, owning it. Owning me.
His mouth left mine and went to my jaw. My throat. The cold water on my skin felt like it turned to steam wherever his lips landed, and I tipped my head back and hung onto his shoulders and said something. Possibly his name. Possibly a rLawsongious statement.
“Amy.” Against my throat. Gravel all the way through.
“If you say something responsible right now,” I said against his mouth, “I will drown myself in the garden on principle.”
He pulled back far enough to look at me — wet, wrecked, my hands still full of his shirt.
Whatever he saw gave him his answer. He bent, and the world tilted, and then I was up, off the ground entirely, one of his arms under my knees and the other around my back, held me against his chest like I weighed nothing at all, which, for the record, I do not. But then he knew that.
He carried me toward the cabin. Not hurried. Very dLawsonberate, just as he’d chopped the wood this morning. Set, swing, split. The screen door was already in his hand when I recovered enough to be myself.
“You know,” I said, looping my arms around his neck, “at some point we should try getting me wet, umm, the traditional way.”
The sound he made was half growl and half laugh, and it was the hottest thing I’d heard in my adult life.
The screen door banged shut behind us.