Chapter 17
HARPER
We don't talk on the walk back from the stables.
I take care of my horse. Logan shows me how to untack properly, hands moving over the equipment with the same unhurried efficiency he brings to everything—and the whole time, the silence between us is doing something I can only describe as loud.
He's close enough that I'm aware of him constantly: the warmth of him, the size of him, and the way he moves around the horses with the easy confidence as if he’s been doing this his whole life.
He doesn't look at me. I notice that he doesn't look at me.
By the time we start back toward the cabin, the silence has gone from weighted to something more like insufferable.
I replay the ridge in my head for the fourth time.
The way he'd leaned forward—small and unhurried, that quiet gravitational shift of a man who had decided something and was halfway to acting on it.
The way he'd looked at my mouth. The way I'd felt my breath change before I'd registered it was changing, felt everything in me go still and attentive and certain, and felt the distance between us reduce to something that wasn't really distance at all.
And then the way he'd pulled back.
Carefully. Deliberately. With that infuriating Logan composure that I have watched him deploy for a while now, like a shield he never fully puts down but which I have spent all this time finding admirable, I am currently finding something considerably less charitable.
He makes a sound at some point—something low and brief, not directed at me, merely a response to the terrain—and I feel it in my sternum and have to look away.
By the time we reach the cabin porch, I am quietly and thoroughly done.
I push through the door without waiting for him to hold it.
Inside, the fire has burned down to embers. The cabin is warm and dim, the last light coming through the window at a long angle. My body freezes in the center of the room and turn around before he's fully made it through the door.
"Don't close it yet," I tell him.
He stops. His hand is on the door frame. "What?"
"I need to say something, and I need to know you can't walk away from it." I cross my arms. "On the ridge. You were going to kiss me."
His features change. Not denial. He doesn't insult me with denial.
"And then you didn't," I continue. "And I've been walking behind you for twenty minutes watching you be perfectly composed about it, and I am—" I stop and search for the word.
"I am not composed about it, Logan. I haven’t been composed about it for some time now, actually, and I need you to stop being careful with me for five minutes and tell me what is actually happening between us. "
The silence that follows is different from all the others. This one has weight.
"You want the honest version," he says finally.
"I always want the honest version," I reply. "You of all people should know that by now."
He closes the door.
He doesn't move toward me yet—he stands there, one hand still on the door, steel-gray eyes steady on me—calm on the surface the way they always are and, underneath that, not calm at all.
"I feel something for you that I don't have a clean word for," he tells me, low and direct. "I have since the first night. And I haven't said anything because it wasn't mine to say until you were ready to hear it."
Something in my chest cracks open, only slightly.
"Why didn't you kiss me?" I press.
"Because you don't have the full picture yet," he replies. "And I don't want to be something that happens to you before you've had the chance to decide what you actually want."
I feast my eyes on him. The firelight is catching the angles of his face—the jaw, the ridge of his brow, the careful neutral that is costing him something to maintain—and I think about five years of someone making every decision for me and calling it consideration.
I think about what it feels like to be waited for instead.
"What if I've decided?" I tell him.
His jaw tightens.
"I know I haven't been here long," I continue before he can answer.
"I know everything is complicated. But I've spent five years in a relationship where every single thing was decided for me, and I know the difference now between someone taking something and someone waiting to be invited.
" I hold his gaze. "You've been waiting. I'm inviting."
He crosses the room.
He stops directly in front of me, close enough that I have to tilt my chin to hold his gaze, and he raises one hand and cups the side of my face with a gentleness that is somehow more undoing than anything forceful could ever be.
His thumb traces my cheekbone, slow and deliberate, and I feel my breath go unsteady.
"I've been waiting," he confirms, the words coming out quieter than he probably intended, like something he's been holding for a while and has finally decided to set down. "A lot longer than you know."
Then he kisses me.
It starts carefully—one hand still cupping my face, the other finding my waist—and it is the softest, most intentional kiss I have ever been given, the kind that asks a question and waits for the answer in the same motion.
I answer it by stepping into him, by pressing both hands flat against his chest and feeling the solid reality of him, the warmth through the flannel, and the steady beat of his heart underneath my palms.
Then I pull him closer, and careful becomes something else entirely.
His hand slides from my face into my hair—fingers curling into the chestnut waves with a grip that isn't gentle anymore, that is deliberate in a completely different way—and the other arm wraps around my lower back and pulls me flush against him, and I make a sound against his mouth that I don't try to manage.
He responds to it immediately, a low sound in his throat that I feel more than hear, and the kiss deepens into something that is less a question and more a statement.
I pull back far enough to breathe.
"Logan," I manage to say.
"Yeah," he replies, voice rough, and his eyes are darker than usual, the careful composure entirely gone now, and I realize I've never seen him fully without it before, and it is, without qualification, the most attractive thing I've ever seen in my life.
I reach for the buttons on his flannel and begin loosening them. From there, the heat between us takes over.
He walks me backward toward his bedroom door, kissing me between words, between breaths, one hand still in my hair and the other learning the shape of my waist through my shirt, and by the time the backs of my knees find the bed, I've lost the thread of everything except him.
He pulls back and looks at me—really looks, the way he looks at the territory from the ridge, like he's taking the full measure of it and intends to remember every detail—and his hands move to the hem of my shirt and lift it over my head slowly, watching my face the whole time.
The firelight from the other room catches the angles of him as he finally shrugs out of his flannel, and I get to look at him properly for the first time.
Broad shoulders that fill the room differently when there's nothing between them and me.
The powerful build earned through years on this mountain—chest wide and solid, stomach flat and carved, the kind of body that doesn't come from a gym but from actual work, from splitting wood and running terrain and carrying the weight of a life lived physically.
Dark blond chest hair, a trail of it running south.
The old pale scars along his forearms that I've been looking at for all this time and am only now allowed to touch.
I trace one slowly with my fingertips and feel him go very still.
"These," I tell him quietly. "Someday you'll tell me about these."
"Someday," he agrees, and the certainty in it lands in my chest like an anchor.
He reaches around me and unclasps my bra and slides it off my shoulders, and then he looks at me—unhurried, entirely present, his gray eyes moving over me in the low light with an attention that bypasses self-consciousness entirely.
I don't feel exposed. I feel seen, which is different and better and something I didn't know I needed until right now.
"Harper." Only my name. The whole sentence.
He lays me back against the pillows and kisses down my throat, my collarbone, and the curve of my breast, taking his time at every point.
His mouth finds my nipple, and my back arches involuntarily, a sound leaving me that I make no effort to contain.
He responds to it with a low hum against my skin—deliberate, satisfied—and moves to the other side, and I get my hands into his hair and hold on.
He works my jeans off, hands running the full length of my legs with an unhurried attention that makes me aware of every inch of ground between my hip and my ankle, and when he hooks his fingers into the last scrap of fabric and draws it down; he takes his time doing that too, watching me the whole way.
Then he settles between my thighs, and I feel his breath against my pussy before I feel anything else, and the anticipation of it makes me grip the pillow above my head.
"Logan," I manage to moan out.
"I've got you," he replies, low. "I've got you."
He lowers his head, and his tongue finds me, and I stop existing as a coherent person.
He reads me the way he reads everything—with full, unhurried attention—learning what makes me gasp and what makes my thighs tremble and what makes his name come out of me in pieces I don't recognize as words anymore.
My hips roll toward him instinctively, and he lets them, one hand flat on my stomach, anchoring me without restraining me, and the pleasure builds the way everything with Logan builds—steadily, with total commitment, not rushing any of it.
"You taste—" he starts, low against me, “so good.”
"Don't stop talking," I tell him, breathless. "And don't stop doing that."
He doesn't stop doing that.