CHAPTER SEVEN
AMY
I woke up the way a woman should always wake up. Naked, well-used, and buried against mountain man. Or in my case, a Bigfoot.
I still wasn’t used to the sheer real estate of him — all that heat at my back, one forearm banded under my bare breasts, his hand splayed across the stomach.
He was awake. I could tell because his thumb was tracing slow arcs low on my belly, each one drifting lower than the last, and because his cock was pressed hard and heavy against my ass, and had been, I suspected, for some time.
Patient. Like everything else about him. The man could outwait weather.
I could not.
I arched back against him, slow, with follow-through, and got a low sound against the nape of my neck for my trouble.
“Don’t start what you can’t finish,” he rumbled.
“I finished three times last night. My record is spotless.”
“Mm.” His hand slid up and cupped my breast, kneading the soft weight of it, catching my nipple between two fingers and rolling it until my whole body arched into his hand. “Then let’s talk about mine.”
He turned me under him — a move that had stopped surprising me and would never stop working — and settled his mouth where his hand had been.
Not gentle about it. He drew my nipple in deep, sucked hard enough that my back bowed off the mattress, then eased off to a slow drag of tongue, then the soft scrape of his beard across the now wet crest of it, and by the time he switched to the other breast I had a fist in his hair and had already lost the thread of every clever thing I’d been about to say.
“Lawson.”
“Busy.”
“I can see that. I’m endorsing it. I just — “ His hand slid down between my thighs, and they fell open for him with zero hesitation. One thick finger drew a long, slow line up the slit of my pussy — barely inside, teasing, discovering how wet I already was and dragging it up over my clit — and whatever I’d been about to say… it hadn’t been that important anyway.
“Look at you,” he said against my other breast, giving it the same treatment. A long deep suck, a drag of the tongue, scape of the beard. “Soaked before I even touch you.”
“That’s — you did touch me, technically the thumb thing counts as — oh.
” His finger slid inside me, unhurried, curled exactly where he’d learned I needed it, and his thumb settled on my clit in a lazy circle.
I heard myself make a sound the neighbors would have complained about, if he had neighbors, which he did not, which was becoming one of my favorite things about him.
“There’s the talker.” He kissed his way up my throat, working me open on a second finger, his cock a brand against my hip, and put his mouth at my ear. “Loud already. Haven’t even given you my—”
A truck horn went off in the yard.
Twice. Cheerful. The unmistakable rhythm of a man announcing himself who knew exactly what he might be interrupting.
Lawson went still. His forehead dropped to my collarbone, his fingers still deep in me, and he said a word into my sternum I’d never heard him use, and I noted it, with dLawsonght, for teasing him about later. Or asking him to do to me later.
“Expecting someone?” I asked, my breathing not entirely steady.
“No.” He withdrew his hand — slowly, one last drag of his thumb that made my hips chase him and his mouth curve against my skin, the sadist — and rolled out of bed and into jeans with military efficiency.
I admired the entire process from the pillows like the shameless woman I’d become. “Stay here.”
“Absolutely not,” I said, and pulled on one of his shirt and another pair of his shorts and followed on legs that had recently been promised better things.
Jared was standing in the yard beside the lodge truck, aviators on, grin already at full wattage, and at his feet sat my forgotten luggage and — I made an actual sound — my missing shoe.
“Morning!” he called, entirely too loud. “Thought I’d run your luggage up the mountain, seeing as it didn’t seem you were coming down anytime soon.
Jared looked at me. At the shirt I’d clearly just thrown on. At my bare legs. He looked at Lawson who were nothing but a pair of jeans, unbuttoned at the waist.
We looked like we’d just climbed out of bed.
His grinned. “Amy. You look… recovered.”
“I’m told my pupils are back to normal size.”
“The group headed home. I told everyone you were convalescing under expert care.” He toed the suitcase. “So do I load this back on the truck, or…?”
The or hung there in the yard.
I opened my mouth — and Lawson moved. Down the steps, across the grass, and he picked up my bright blue hard backed piece of luggage and my orphaned shoe, carrying them past Jared, up the steps, past me, and set them inside the cabin door.
Then he came back out onto the porch and stood behind me with one arm across my collarbones and his chin.
“She’s staying.”
A hummingbird went by. The creek ran. Jared took his aviators off slowly, the better to enjoy the scene being played out no doubt.
“You don’t say.”
Lawson gestured with his head. “Thanks for the bag. Goodbye.”
Jared sighed, backing toward the truck with his hands up, grinning like a man who intended to dine out on this for a decade. “Rafting discount for life, Amy. Family rate. I’m basically the godfather of this entire — okay, okay, I’m leaving — “
The truck rumbled off down the road and it was just us and the cabin. Again. Just the way we both liked it.
Lawson’s arm was still across my collarbones. “So,” I said. “I’m staying.”
“You’re staying.”
“You know what this means. The world is going to find out Bigfoot is real.
There will be sightings. Blurry photos of you buying flour in town.
Entire cryptid forums descending on this mountain with night-vision cameras, and I — “ I turned around in his arms so I could watch this next part land “ — I am going to confirm everything.”
To his eternal credit, he didn’t flinch. “They’ll never find the cabin.”
“They don’t have to, because I did. I fell into the river and Bigfoot saved me.”
“So I did.” He picked me up and carried me into the kitchen, sitting me on the counter.
“This is becoming a habit.”
“What? Me making you breakfast?” He put a pot of coffee on and took eggs and bacon from the fridge.
“No, the lifting. The relocating. I’m luggage to you—”
“You talk too much, Minnow.”
I stopped. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“Minnow?”
“Small. Loud. Slippery in water.” His hands slid up my bare thighs, thumbs tracing the inner seams of them, easing them apart, his eyes going exactly where his thumbs were headed. “Swims like a rock.”
“That’s — okay, one, minnows aren’t loud, that’s not a thing, and two, I am not small, I am — “
“You’re small to me.” Flat. Final. The way he said everything true.
One big hand settled warm between my thighs and a finger slid up the slick seam of my pussy just like it had in bed, slow, parting me, and my argument dissolved into a whimper against his mouth.
Because being a woman my size and getting a nickname that meant tiny thing I fished out of the river and kept — he was never getting rid of me now.
“Lawson,” I managed, as he pulled me to the counter’s edge and took off my shorts before going down on his knees on the kitchen floor.
“I didn’t go anywhere.” He looked up at me and I read the promise in his eyes. And I never will. He made me speechless yet again.
He hooked my knees over his shoulders. Pressed a kiss to the inside of one thigh, then higher, his beard soft against skin already humming for him, his breath hot against my center. “Now let’s finish what I almost started in bed.”
And then his mouth closed over me, certain and entirely unhurried. I had to brace myself against the counter with my hands to stay semi-upright.
He didn’t rush. But then, I’d never seen him rush. Not even when he’d rescued me from the river. One minute I bLawsoneved I was drowning. The next he was there.
He loved me with long, dLawsonberate strokes of his tongue, hard, deep thrusts of his thick fingers curling deep.
Before using them to grind against my clit, pressing hard, working me in rough circles until I tightened, and tightened, heels digging into that broad back, everything reduced to just the feel of his mouth and fingers, and the sounds I was making.
When I broke, I broke loud — my cry ringing off the log walls of the home I’d fallen into, one lost shoe, one wrong raft, one perfect river rescue ago — and he stayed exactly where he was through every wave of it, hands clamped on my hips, holding me to his mouth like I might try to leave. As if. As if.
He stood, finally. Wiped his beard on the back of his hand with a satisfaction I felt all over. Then he pulled me off the counter and into his arms, heading toward the bedroom. I grinned into his chest while my one remaining coherent thought floated up and presented itself.
I was, once again, drenched for my mountain man.