Thirteen.
Rhett
I drop my keys on the hook by the door and peel my sawdust-covered hoodie over my head, tossing it in the laundry basket we keep near the front door for this very reason.
With my boots off, I stride down the hall to find Levi in the kitchen.
Which means he finished early at the resort and decided the best use of his Saturday evening was to construct what appears to be the tallest sandwich in recorded history.
“How’s the inventory?” he asks without looking up.
“Short on the two-by-fours we need for the suite framing. I put an order in. Should be here by Wednesday.”
“Wednesday’s tight.”
“I know.” I move to the fridge and pull out a longneck. “We’ll push the demo back a day, frame Thursday and Friday. We’re still on schedule.”
Levi stacks another layer onto his sandwich. “Jenn’s not going to love that.”
“Jenn doesn’t have to love it.” I lean against the counter and roll my neck, feeling the day start to unknot from my shoulders. “She just has to sign the check at the end.”
He snorts, eyeing me. “Heard you were out late last night.”
I take a pull of my beer. “Yep.”
He picks up his sandwich with both hands and levels me with a look over the top of it. “You gonna tell me what happened, or am I piecing this together from hearsay like everybody else?”
“There’s nothing to piece together.”
Levi stares at me as he unhinges his jaw to take a ridiculous sized bite.
I roll my eyes. “Tyler went missing for a couple hours. Shea called. I helped find him.” I set my beer down. “That’s it.”
“At two in the morning, I’m hearing,” he mumbles around a mouthful.
“Chew your fuckin’ food, man. Christ.” I pick my beer back up as I return to the fridge, pulling out pepperjack cheese to go with the hundred other fixings my brother has spread across the counter.
He chews. “You like her.”
I open my mouth to tell him to stop talking while he’s eating like the child he is when the doorbell rings.
Levi’s brow lifts, asking around another mouthful, “Expecting someone?”
“No. Are you?” I ask, and he shakes his head. I set the beer and cheese down and walk back down the hall, running a hand over my jaw. Best guess is it’s Ma or Pop, but they each have a key. And my brothers and Lily all know where the spare is if they need to get in.
I pull open the front door and—
Shea is standing on my front porch, curls loose around her shoulders, cheeks flushed from the cold. She’s got her hands shoved in her jacket pockets and she’s gazing up at me with a strange confidence I haven’t seen since we went over the original plans at the bar last weekend.
She doesn’t give me long to process her being here before she suddenly closes the distance between us.
Her hands find the front of my shirt and she drags me down to meet her. The second her lips hit mine, I’m a fuckin’ goner. She kisses me firm at first, then soft as her fingers curl into the fabric on my chest. I stop thinking entirely.
My hand finds her jaw. The other finds her waist and hauls her flush against me, walking her backward off the doorstep and into the house without breaking contact.
She gasps against my lips when her back meets the wall beside the door and I press into her letting her feel exactly what showing up here is doing to me.
“Rhett,” she breathes.
“Fuck, baby,” I groan against her mouth.
Her hands move. Up my chest, over my shoulders, fingernails scraping the back of my neck and threading into my hair, and the sound that comes out of me is feral.
I growl, angling her head back to deepen the kiss—tasting her, learning her.
Her lips part on a soft moan that travels straight to my already aching cock.
She tastes like cinnamon and coffee. Her hands are everywhere, restless and grabby in a way that tells me she’s been holding back as long as I have. I drag my mouth to her jaw, her neck, feel her pulse hammering under my lips.
“What are you doing here,” I murmur against her skin.
“I wanted to see you,” she manages, breathless.
I pull back just enough to gaze into those big brown eyes, soft and wanting. Her fingers smooth the front of my T-shirt where she’d fisted it, straightening the fabric with an almost-prim focus that makes me want to wreck her all over again. “Is this okay? Me being here.”
“I wouldn’t want you anywhere else.”
She smiles and I feel it like a hand around my heart. I lean in to kiss her again, slower this time, one hand braced against the wall above her head and the other trailing up from her waist along her ribcage, learning the shape of her—
“Oh, shit.”
At the sound of my brother’s shocked voice, we break apart.
Levi is standing at the end of the hallway with his half-eaten sandwich in one hand and a beer in the other, his expression is beyond pleased for a guy who just witnessed his brother pinning a woman against the front wall of their house.
“Howdy,” he says, grinning wide.
Shea makes a sound against my shoulder that might be a laugh or her soul leaving her body. I drop my forehead to the wall above her head and close my eyes. “Levi,” I say slowly.
“Rhett,” he replies. Then, to Shea, “Nice to see you again.”
“You, too,” she manages, her voice impressively composed for someone whose lipstick I just licked clean off.
A beat of silence.
Levi takes an enormous bite of his sandwich, chews, and points at the staircase to his left with one finger. “Anywho, I’m just gonna—” He gestures vaguely upward. “Finish this upstairs. Don’t mind me.” He turns and heads up the stairs.
A moment later and the sound of his door closing has me letting out a heavy breath.
I peer down at Shea as she gazes up at me with worried eyes.
And then she dissolves into laughter—real, helpless, face-against-my-chest laughter that shakes her whole body.
I smile, chuckling as I wrap an arm around her, not wanting to let her go or for this momentum to end.
“Come on in,” I tease when she surfaces. She blushes as I step back, closing the front door fully. “Can I get you anything? Water, coffee?”
She shakes her head, still smiling, and steps past me into my house like she belongs there.
And hell, maybe she does. She looks around, taking in the space.
“This is nice,” she comments, glancing over her shoulder as I follow closely behind her.
The urge to reach out and grab her becoming greater and greater by the second.
She has no idea the door she’s opened just now…
“Did you decorate this yourself?” she asks, drawing my attention away from her swaying hips and back to her gorgeous face.
“No,” I scoff. “My mom and sister did. Levi and I did the renovation, though.”
“You two live together?”
“For the last thirty-one years, yeah.” I chuckle.
She drifts toward the fireplace, running her fingers along the mantle. A row of framed photos sit there. “Big family,” she says softly.
“Six kids—five boys, one girl.” I lean against the doorframe between the hall and the living room, watching her. “Never a quiet moment.”
She picks up one of the frames—the five Montgomery brothers at some Christmas years ago. Levi’s maybe ten in that picture, which makes me twelve, Duke already taller than everyone. She smiles at it. “You look exactly the same.”
“Darlin’,” I start. “Why did you really come here?”
She sets the frame back carefully. “Well…” She turns to face me then, and her smile softens. “I wanted to see you, and tell you that I, um…”
I push off the wall and move in her direction as she stumbles over an explanation I have a feeling I already know the answer to. I close the space between us, drawing her into my arms. “And what is it you want to tell me, beautiful?”
Her breath catches as my hands settle at her waist, pulling her flush against me. Those big brown eyes search my face, and I watch the last of her hesitation dissolve.
“I think about you constantly,” she admits, her voice barely above a whisper.
“And I know it’s complicated, and I’m leaving in a few months, and I know you know all of that already, but I—” Her hands press flat against my chest. “I don’t want to waste any more time talking myself out of something that feels this… right.”
I cup her face and kiss her.
She melts into me, her hands now gripping my biceps like she needs something to hold onto. The kiss is slow, tentative, deliberate. When I pull back, her eyes stay closed for a moment. “However long we have, I want every second, Shea. I want you.”
Her eyes open. Relief, want, and something softer underneath that I don’t let myself name, stare back at me. “Okay,” she breathes.
“Yeah?”
Her hands slide up my arms, over my shoulders. “I want you, too.”
My hands tighten at her waist and her mouth curves, giving me all the permission I need. I bend, hook my arm under her knees, and sweep her clean off her feet.
She gasps, her arms flying around my neck. “Rhett!”
“The one and only, baby.” I grin, already moving.
Her laugh is surprised and bright and it bounces off the walls of the hallway as I carry her, her curls spilling over my arm, her soft sweater catching the low kitchen light as we pass through. She tucks her face against my neck and I feel her smile against my heated skin.
“You’re insane,” she murmurs.
“All Montgomery men are.” I chuckle.
My bedroom door is already open. I carry her through and set her down on the edge of the bed gently.
She looks up at me from under those lashes, cheeks flushed, lips parted.
The lamp on the nightstand throws the room in a warm gold and the sight of her in my space, on my bed, has every fantasy I’ve had since the moment I met her running ramped in my mind.
I brace a hand on the mattress beside her hip and lean down until our lips are a breath apart. I tilt my head and kiss along her jaw, down her neck, to the very top of her sweater. “I think about you, too, you know,” I groan, inhaling her scent deeply.
She releases a breathy moan, her head falling back as I lick and suck at the column of her throat. “Yeah?”