Chapter 39
SAWYER
The cabin was quiet.
Everyone was gone. Dollie had taken Emma, who had fallen asleep on the couch with Sir Chomps-a-Lot in one arm and Captain Fluffington wedged against her other side, and Josh had carried the bear to the car while Dollie carried Emma, and the logistics of fitting a sleeping child and a human-sized stuffed animal into a truck had been the kind of comedy that I would have enjoyed more if I had not been counting the seconds until the door closed.
My parents had left earlier. My mother had hugged Chloe four times.
My father had shaken my hand three times.
Each goodbye had been accompanied by more tears and more congratulations and more of the warmth that filled the room like extra candlelight, and I loved them for it but I needed them to go because the woman I had just asked to marry me was standing in my kitchen wearing my ring and I had plans.
The door closed. The truck pulled away. The gravel crunched and then went quiet and the cabin settled into the kind of silence that was not empty but full, full of the candles still burning and the warmth still lingering and the woman standing beside the table with her hand raised, turning the ring on her finger, watching the stone catch the light.
“They are gone,” she said.
“They are gone.”
She looked at me. Blue eyes. Bright from hours of crying and laughing and the particular glow that comes from a woman who has just said yes to the man she loves and is still feeling the aftershock of it in every part of her body.
I walked to her. Slowly. Not because I was being deliberate.
Because looking at her in the candlelight, with the ring on her finger and the flush on her cheeks and the soft curve of her smile, was something I wanted to take my time with.
Something I wanted to remember in detail for the rest of my life.
I pulled her against me. Wrapped both arms around her and held her with her back to my chest, my chin on top of her head, our bodies swaying slightly in the kind of rhythm that does not need music.
Her hands came up to cover mine where they rested on her stomach, and the weight of the ring, small and new and real, pressed against my skin.
“I cannot believe you proposed,” she said.
“I told you I was pursuing you.”
“I thought you meant flowers and dinner. Not a ring.”
“I am an overachiever.”
She laughed. Soft and warm, the kind of laugh that vibrates through the body of the person holding you, and I felt it in my chest and my arms and the place behind my ribs where she had lived since the first day I met her.
“You are shaking,” she said.
“I am not.”
“You are. Your hands are shaking.”
“That is the adrenaline. Proposing is stressful.”
She turned in my arms. Faced me. Put both hands on my chest and looked up at me with those eyes, and the candlelight made them darker, deeper, the color of the sky just before night falls when everything is suspended between light and dark.
“You were scared,” she said.
“I was not scared.”
“Sawyer Cole. You were scared I would say no.”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“The answer was always yes. It has been yes since the first day I showed up at your sawmill. It was yes when I kissed your cheek in front of your crew. It was yes when I left and it was yes every single day I was gone and it was yes the moment I came back.” She pressed her palm flat against my chest, over my heart. “It has always been yes.”
I kissed her.
Not hard. Not hungry. Not the way I usually kissed her when the need was driving and the patience was gone.
This was different. This was the kiss of a man who had just been given something he did not deserve and was treating it with the reverence it warranted.
Slow. Deep. My mouth moving against hers with a tenderness that I did not know I was capable of, one hand cradling her jaw, the other at the small of her back, holding her close.
She melted into me. Her hands sliding up my chest to my neck, her fingers threading into my hair, her body pressing against mine with a warmth that seeped through every layer of clothing between us.
The kiss deepened. My tongue found hers and the taste of her, wine and salt and something that was purely Chloe, flooded my senses.
I pulled back. Pressed my forehead to hers.
“I want to take my time tonight,” I said.
“Then take your time.”
I lifted her. She wrapped her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck and I carried her to the bedroom, through the hallway still lined with streamers from the celebration, past the candles that were burning low but still casting their warm glow on the walls.
The bedroom was dark except for the moonlight and two candles I had placed on the nightstand earlier, their flames small and steady, and I laid her on the bed and stood over her and looked at her the way I had been looking at her all night.
Like she was the answer to every question I had ever been afraid to ask.
I undressed her. Slowly. One piece at a time.
Her blouse, unbuttoned from the top, each button released with the careful patience of a man who was not going to rush this even if his body was screaming at him to.
Her skirt, unzipped and eased down her hips, my hands following the path of the fabric, tracing the curve of her waist, the swell of her hips, the smooth skin of her thighs.
Her bra, unclasped and removed with a gentleness that made her breath catch.
She lay beneath me in the candlelight and the moonlight, bare and beautiful, the ring on her finger glinting, and the sight of her made something inside me expand until it hurt. Not pain. The opposite. The kind of fullness that comes from feeling too much all at once.
I stripped my clothes off. Settled beside her on the bed.
And for a long moment I just held her. Skin to skin.
Her back against my chest. My arm draped over her waist. Our breathing syncing the way it always did when we were close, a rhythm that was ours, a frequency that only the two of us could hear.
My hand began to move. Slowly. Tracing the line of her collarbone. The curve of her breast. The flat of her stomach. Slow, lazy circles that were not going anywhere and were going everywhere, and I felt her breathing change under my touch, felt it quicken and deepen and catch.
I turned her onto her back. Kissed her throat. The hollow where her pulse was racing. The curve of her breast, where I took her nipple into my mouth and sucked gently, and the sound she made, a soft moan that she tried to stifle and could not, sent heat flooding through me.
I kissed lower. Down her stomach. Across her hip. I settled between her thighs and looked up at her and she was looking down at me with those dark blue eyes and her lips parted and her chest rising and falling with breaths that came too fast.
“Sawyer,” she whispered.
I put my mouth on her.
I took my time. Slow, deliberate strokes with my tongue, learning her rhythm the way I learned it every time, as if it were the first time, because the sounds she made when I found the right pressure and the right pace were different every time and I wanted every single one.
She gasped. Her hips lifted off the bed and I pressed them down with my forearm and worked her with a patience that was calculated to destroy her.
“Please,” she breathed. “More. Please.”
I gave her more. My fingers sliding inside her, curling forward while my tongue kept working, and the combination made her whole body arch off the bed. Her hands found my hair and gripped, pulling, and I groaned against her because the sting of it sent a bolt of heat straight through my core.
I built her up slowly. Deliberately. Every time she got close, I eased back.
Changed the pace. Shifted the pressure. Drew her to the edge and held her there until she was trembling, until her thighs were shaking against my shoulders and her breath was coming in broken gasps and my name was the only word she could form.
“Sawyer. Please. I cannot. Please.”
I did not let her fall. Not yet. I brought her to the edge again, then pulled back, and she made a sound that was half scream and half sob, a desperate, wrecked sound that told me she was exactly where I wanted her.
“Beg me,” I said against her skin.
“I am begging. Sawyer, please. I need to. Please let me.”
“Again.”
“Please.” Her voice cracked. Her back arched. Her fingers tightened in my hair until the pain was exquisite. “Please, Sawyer. I am yours. Please.”
I gave her what she needed. Increased the pressure.
Curled my fingers against the spot that made her vision go white.
And she shattered. The orgasm tore through her with a violence that bowed her body off the bed and ripped a scream from her throat that she caught behind her teeth.
Her body clenched around my fingers in waves that I felt in my own pulse, and I held her through it, my mouth still on her, drawing it out until she was shaking and gasping and pushing at my head.
I crawled up her body. She grabbed my face and kissed me, tasting herself on my lips, and the raw hunger in that kiss burned through whatever patience I had left.
I positioned myself at her entrance. Looked into her eyes. Blue met green in the candlelight, and the love in her gaze, open and unconditional and fierce, was the most powerful thing I had ever felt.
I pushed inside her.
Slow. One long, devastating stroke that buried me to the hilt, and the sensation of being inside her, surrounded by her, connected to her in the most fundamental way two people can be connected, made my arms tremble and my breath stop and my vision blur.
“Move,” she whispered. “Please.”
I moved. Slow at first. Long, deep strokes that pulled almost all the way out before pushing back in, each one drawing a sound from her that I cataloged and kept.
I watched her face while I moved inside her.
The way her eyes fluttered. The way her lips parted.
The way her expression shifted through shades of pleasure that made me feel like the luckiest man alive.
I increased the pace. Harder. Deeper. I hitched her thigh over my hip and the angle changed and the next thrust made her cry out, loud and sharp, and I covered her mouth with mine to swallow the sound.
“Harder,” she gasped against my lips. “I want to feel you everywhere.”
I gave her harder. Driving into her with an intensity that shook the bed, that made the headboard hit the wall, that turned the slow tenderness of the beginning into something primal and consuming.
She matched me stroke for stroke, her hips rising to meet mine, her nails raking down my back in lines of fire.
I pulled out. Flipped her onto her stomach.
Gripped her hips and pulled her up to her knees and entered her from behind in one hard thrust that made us both groan.
The angle was deeper. More intense. I could feel every inch of her around me, tight and hot and pulsing, and I gripped her hips and drove into her with a rhythm that was relentless.
“Oh God,” she gasped into the pillow. “Right there. Don’t stop.”
I did not stop. I reached around and found the spot that made her lose her mind, working it with my fingers while I drove into her, and the dual sensation pushed her over the edge again.
She came with a scream that the pillow barely muffled, her body clenching around me so tight that my vision went white and my rhythm stuttered.
I pulled her up. Her back against my chest. Both of us on our knees, her body seated on mine, and I wrapped one arm around her waist and the other across her chest and moved inside her from this angle, deep and grinding, our bodies rocking together.
“Come with me,” she whispered. “Sawyer. Come with me.”
I buried my face in her neck. Drove into her one final time, deep and hard and absolute, and came with a groan that I pressed into her skin, my arms locking around her, my body emptying itself into hers in waves that seemed to go on forever.
We collapsed. Tangled. Breathing. Her body draped over mine, her head on my chest, our hearts hammering in a shared rhythm that gradually, slowly, came down.
I pulled the blanket over us. Held her close. Her finger traced the tattoo on my chest, the one from the military, following the lines she had memorized years ago.
“I love you,” she said. Quiet. Certain. The voice of a woman who had said the words before but was saying them now with a ring on her finger and a future in front of her and a certainty that had been earned through fire.
“I love you,” I said. “More than I have ever loved anything. More than I thought I could love anything.”
She tilted her face up. Kissed my jaw. Settled back against my chest.
“Goodnight, future husband,” she said.
“Goodnight, future wife.”
She fell asleep first. I held her and watched the candles burn down to nothing, their flames flickering and finally dying, leaving only the moonlight and the warmth and the woman in my arms who had just agreed to spend her life with me.
I did not sleep for a long time. Not because I was restless. Because I wanted to stay in this moment. To memorize the weight of her against me. The sound of her breathing. The feel of the ring on her finger where her hand rested on my chest.
When I finally slept, I dreamed about the future. Not the vague, shapeless future I had feared for years. A specific one. A kitchen in the morning. Coffee and pancakes. Emma at the table. Chloe humming. A cabin that smelled like cedar and vanilla.
Home.