Chapter Eight
Epilogue
Rowan
Six months later…
The truck rumbles up the gravel drive, and I feel it in my chest. It’s the same road I’ve taken for years, the same one I took the morning I found her at Lou's, eating eggs like she was punishing them.
Now it's more than just the commute home.
Claire's Subaru is already in the drive, parked crooked like always, half in the gravel and half on the grass. I pull in beside it and kill the engine. The cabin looks different now in late afternoon light. It’s fuller.
I used to come back alone, to four walls surrounding the bare minimum and silence.
Now I come home. Where every inch has her in it, her boots on the porch, her jacket hung on the hook I carved into the wall because she kept leaving it on the floor.
I grab the groceries from the passenger seat. She sent a list this morning, which means she plans to cook, which means the kitchen will be a disaster and the food will be worth it.
The door isn't locked, and hasn't been since she moved in. I told her a dozen times, mountain or not, you lock the fucking door. She just looks at me, with that same look from the day we met. Make me.
I step inside, and the smell hits me. Garlic, something burning, and her.
She's standing at the old cast iron stove she refuses to let me replace in one of my old t-shirts, bare legs, hair tied up in a messy knot on top of her head that's already falling.
She doesn't turn around.
"You're late."
"Traffic." I set the bags on the counter and move up behind her, resting my hands on her hips, my chin resting on her shoulder. She smells like lavender soap underneath the smoke. "What are you burning?"
"Nothing." She elbows me, but she leans back into me, ass pressing exactly where she knows it gets me. "It's caramelized."
"Baby, it's black."
"Rowan, stop. It's caramelized." She removes it from the burner and finally turns to look at me. No makeup, cheeks flushed from the heat, that defiant set to her jaw that made me want her in the first place. "How did the new group do?"
"Fine. There are eight, two of them might actually survive if it decides to flood again."
"That’s good, right?"
“Babe, I was being sarcastic,” I laugh.
“Smart ass,” she comes back at me.
"They listened. Mostly." I slide my hands under the shirt, palms flat against her stomach. She's softer now than she was then. Not weaker. She’s settled into herself. Into us. “Asher called. He wants me to go with him to look at some new logging equipment before the season starts.”
She goes still for half a second. Still not too fond of him. "Are you going?"
"Yeah. Tomorrow. We’ll be back by dark."
"Good." She loops her arms around my neck. The spoon in her hand drips something dark on the floor. She doesn't care. Neither do I. "Because I have plans for tonight."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." She pulls me down, mouth against my ear, voice dropping to the tone that still makes my pulse spike. "And they don't involve you leaving this cabin."
I lift her onto the counter. She squeals, laughing as she wraps her legs around me. The spoon clatters to the floor. I don't care, though. I stopped caring about anything else the morning I woke up to find her still here.
She kisses me, hard, teeth nipping my lower lip, and it goes straight to my cock. The same way anything she does affects me. That kick in the chest, that certainty that I would burn the whole fucking mountain down before I let anyone take this from me.
"Mine," I say against her mouth. It’s not a question. Never a question.
She grins, wicked and warm. "Yours."
Something starts smoking, and the alarm will go off in about thirty seconds. It always does.
I don't dare move. Neither does she.
This is our life now. It’s not quiet. Not easy. Not safe.
Ours.