Chapter Eleven
“Help me!” she shouted at Sterling. “Kick it!”
Sterling stared at the door. He seemed to understand, raised a heavy boot, and kicked. The wood screeched.
“Again!” Cassidy screamed.
They kicked together. Once. Twice.
Finally, the ice cracked and broke into several large shards. The antique latch gave way, and the door swung inward with a shriek on rusted hinges.
Cassidy shoved Sterling through the frozen door frame and into the darkness of the shack. He stumbled, his legs useless, and collapsed onto the floorboards with a heavy thud.
Cassidy didn’t follow him immediately, she turned back to the screaming void.
She grabbed the reins of the horses. Whiskey and Shadow were huddled together, their heads down, their coats crusted with ice. The wind was trying to tear them off the mountain.
“Come on!” she screamed over the gale. “Don’t you die yet.”
She dragged them around the corner of the structure. The miners who built the place 100 years earlier knew the wind. They had built a lean-to on the leeward side, sheltered by the bulk of the cabin and the rock face.
She pulled the horses into the small, three-sided shelter, and the relief was instant. The wind howled past them, but the biting ice couldn’t reach them.
Cassidy worked with frantic, frozen fingers. She found a stack of rough wool blankets piled in the corner on top of some old crates. They smelled of mold and rodents, but they were thick. She threw one over Whiskey and another over Shadow, tucking them in to trap their body heat.
“Stay,” she ordered, patting Whiskey’s icy neck.
Her eyes caught a stack of wood against the far wall of the lean-to.
It was seasoned cedar, dry and gray. It would burn hot.
She grabbed an armful, hugging the rough bark against her chest. She knew she would need it later for the cast-iron stove inside, but right now, the priority was the man freezing to death on the floor.
Cassidy ducked back into the storm, rounded the corner, and threw herself through the cabin door. She kicked it shut with her heel, dropped the wood and slid the rusty deadbolt home.
The sudden silence was deafening, hitting Cassidy’s ears like a pressure change. The roar was gone, replaced by the sound of her own ragged breathing.
The pitch-black room smelled intensely of damp earth, musty pine, and rotting wood. It was the scent of abandonment.
“Sterling?” she gasped. There was no answer.
Panic spiked in her chest. She fumbled in her pocket for the waterproof matches she always carried and struck one against the wall. The flame flared, a tiny orange beacon in the gloom.
The light revealed the small, cramped space and dust motes dancing in the stagnant air. In the corner sat the old iron stove. Along the far wall was a narrow, built-in bed frame filled with rotting pine boughs and a thin, ticking mattress.
Sterling lay in a heap on the floor curled into a fetal position. His eyes were open, but they were glassy and unfocused. He wasn’t shivering.
As fast as she could, Cassidy quickly threw some of the firewood in the stove and grabbed a dry pine bough off the bed.
She lit another match and tossed it in. The cold air fought the flame, but it slowly started to catch fire.
She closed the iron door partially, just enough to let air in while the fire built up.
She looked over at the man curled up on the floor.
“Sterling,” Cassidy said. She dropped to her knees beside him and grabbed the lapels of his soaked shearling coat. “We have to move. Do you hear me?”
He blinked slowly. “Tired,” he mumbled. “Just…sleep.”
“No sleep,” Cassidy ordered. “We need to get you off the floor.”
She grabbed him under the arms. He was dead weight; a big man, heavy with muscle, and it took everything she had to drag him across the rough floorboards to the bed.
“Up,” she grunted. “Get on the bed.”
She practically threw him onto the rotting mattress. It creaked under his weight, smelling of old straw, but it was off the freezing ground.
“Clothes,” she said. “Now.”
She attacked the buttons of his coat. Her fingers were clumsy, slipping on the wet leather, and she cursed as she ripped the last button loose. She peeled the heavy, sodden coat off his shoulders and threw it into the corner.
Underneath, his cashmere sweater was damp with sweat and melted snow.
“Arms up,” she commanded. Sterling didn’t move. He stared at the ceiling as if hypnotized.
Cassidy grabbed the hem of the sweater and yanked it up. She fought with his stiff limbs, dragging the expensive fabric over his head.
His skin was pale, almost blue in the candlelight. A jagged scar on his collarbone stood out in stark relief.
“Boots,” she said.
She moved to the foot of the bed and unlaced his boots. She tugged them off, throwing them onto the pile of firewood. His socks were soaked, and she stripped them off, too, revealing his white toes.
“My turn,” she whispered.
She stood up and stripped off her Carhartt jacket. It landed with a wet thud. She unbuttoned her flannel shirt and shucked out of her jeans.
She stood there in her underwear, shivering violently. The air in the shack was bitter, but she knew the protocol. Body heat would be the only furnace they had until the fire got going.
She grabbed the remaining blankets from the foot of the bed and shook them out. Dust filled the air, but they were dry.
She climbed onto the bed next to him. The mattress dipped. She pulled the blankets over them, tucking the edges under their bodies to create a seal.
“Turn toward me,” she ordered. Sterling didn’t move.
Cassidy grabbed his shoulder and rolled him onto his side. She pressed her body against his.
The shock of his cold skin against her warmer flesh was startling. It felt like lying next to a statue.
“Come on,” she whispered. She wrapped her legs around his and pressed her bare chest to his bare chest. She rubbed her hands up and down his back. “Warm up. Damn you, Sterling, warm up.”
She held him, listening to the wind howling outside, impotent against the logs.
Minutes felt like hours. Then, she felt it.
A tremor.
A small shudder started in his core. Then another.
“That’s it,” Cassidy murmured. “Come back to me.”
The shivering began in earnest, racking his body. His teeth chattered, and he shook so hard the old bed frame squeaked.
“Cold,” he gasped. “Cassidy.”
“I know,” she said, holding him tighter, her skin chafing against his. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”
Slowly, the violent shaking began to subside. His breathing deepened. The blue tint faded from his lips. He opened his eyes and looked at her—really looked at her.
The distance, the corporate mask, was gone along with the “asset” calculation.
“You stayed,” he whispered roughly.
“I told you,” Cassidy said softly. “I’m loyal to a fault.”
Sterling reached up and touched her cheek with a trembling hand. His fingers were cold, but his palm was warming up.
“I almost killed us,” he said. It was a statement of fact without ego.
“Yeah,” Cassidy agreed. “You almost did.”
“I miscalculated,” Sterling said. He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them again. “The storm, the terrain… I treated it like a negotiation.”
“The mountain doesn’t negotiate,” Cassidy said. “Neither does this shack.”
She looked around the small, dim space. The stove was warming up and the firelight flickered on the rough-hewn logs.
“Who built this?” Sterling asked, running a hand over the wall. “It’s sturdy.”
“It was first built in the 1920s for the mining surveyors,” Cassidy said. “Then rebuilt back in the fifties before the vein dried up.”
Sterling looked at her. “The copper vein?”
“Yeah,” Cassidy said. “This whole ridge is hollow deep underneath us. My grandfather worked those shafts until the company pulled out.”
She shifted on the bed, pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders. The memory of her father’s voice echoed in her mind, a warning from a lifetime ago.
“My dad used to warn me about the drifts up here if you wander too far off the trails or logging road,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper.
“The snow covers the old air vents. They look like solid ground, but they’re just thin crust over empty space.
” She looked at Sterling with serious eyes.
“You step wrong, you drop three hundred feet into the dark.”
Sterling stared back at her. He seemed to be filing the information away, cataloging the danger.
“Liability,” he murmured. But there was no corporate edge to the word, just an acknowledgement of the lethal ground they were sleeping on.
“History,” Cassidy corrected him. “It’s part of the land. You can’t separate the danger from the beauty.”
He looked past her, at the rough logs of the ceiling.
“I won’t sell the horses,” he said.
Cassidy went still. “What?”
“The transport,” Sterling said. “I’ll cancel it. The horses stay. We’ll fund the therapy program.”
“Sterling…”
“I was wrong,” he said. He looked back at her, his blue eyes fierce in the dim light. “Value isn’t just a number on a spreadsheet. I see that now.”
The admission hung in the air between them. It was more intimate than the nakedness; it was a surrender. Cassidy felt a lump form in her throat. She looked at him—an arrogant, powerful, broken man—and felt something shift inside her chest.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Sterling didn’t answer. He shifted his weight, and his leg brushed against hers sending a spark through her body.
Now that the fear of death was receding, something else was rushing in to fill the void. Adrenaline, relief, and a desperate, gnawing hunger.
She was naked against him, her breasts pressed against his chest. Her groin was cradled against his thigh.
She felt him harden, and his cock stirred against her belly. It was a slow, heavy reaction.
Sterling felt it, too.
“Cassidy,” he warned. “I can’t…” His breath hitched.
“Don’t talk,” she said.
She needed to feel something other than the cold to know they were alive.
She shifted and moved her hand down his chest, tracing the line of his abs, moving lower and lower until she found him.
His cock was hard, thick, and heavy in her hand. It throbbed against her palm.
Sterling let out a low sound, something between a whimper and a moan. His hips bucked instinctively on the old mattress.
“Yes,” Cassidy whispered and pushed the blankets down just enough.
“Cassidy,” Sterling gasped. “You’re freezing.”
“Make me warm,” she said as she kissed him slowly down his body. Her hand tightly gripped his big dick as it was still getting harder, and she started to jerk him off slowly. When her head got low enough, she flicked her tongue on the tip of his shaft and gave it a soft kiss.
Then, she took him in her mouth, stretching her lips around his girth to fit it inside and over her tongue.
Sterling arched his back, and his hands tangled in her hair. He made a sound deep in his throat—a guttural, animal noise that had nothing to do with business. He reached full size and was as hard as the granite rock face just outside the shack.
She licked the broad head of his cock, tasting salt, sweat, and life. She swirled her tongue around the rim, then widened her mouth again to take his big dick even deeper.
Cassidy bobbed her head the best she could considering the circumference and length of his shaft and established a rhythm. She sucked him hard, breathing through her nose. With each slow stroke she reveled in the sensation of feeling the texture of the smooth skin with pulsing veins wrapped around.
“Fuck,” Sterling swore. “Cassidy.”
He bucked his hips, driving himself deeper into her throat. He was reclaiming his strength. The heat was returning to his body, centered right where her mouth was working him.
She didn’t stop, and little by little picked up the pace with each moment.
Her head moved up and down, and she used her hand to stroke the part of the shaft that couldn’t fit in her mouth while she sucked.
Her jaw muscles worked and clenched to create as much pressure as she could.
She wanted to drain him dry and taste his cum.
Sterling’s grip on her hair tightened. “Come here,” he growled.
He pulled out of her mouth, creating a gasping sound when air rushed back inside her, and pulled her up. He didn’t wait, flipping her onto her back to loom over her. The blankets tented around them, creating a private, warm cave.
The billionaire looked down at her, his eyes dark holes in the gloom.
“I need to be inside you,” he said.
“Do it,” Cassidy pleaded. “Please, Sterling.”
She spread her legs. She was incredibly wet; her pussy was waiting for him.
Sterling positioned himself between her thighs and guided his cock to her entrance.
He paused and looked into her eyes.
“Mine,” he whispered. “You’re mine.”
“Yours,” she agreed, nodding her head.
He entered her with a slow, deep slide, stretching and filling her completely. Her wet, viscous vaginal fluids ensured his length and girth went all the way in.
Cassidy gasped and wrapped her legs around his waist to pull him closer. She wanted no space between them.
Sterling began to thrust with a steady, powerful rhythm. He ground his pubic bone against hers. Every stroke hit her clit. Every thrust sent a wave of pleasure radiating through her frozen limbs.
“You feel so good,” Sterling moaned. “So tight.”
He leaned down and kissed her desperately. He devoured her mouth, biting her lip. To her, he tasted like desire and survival.
Cassidy clawed at his back, meeting his thrusts and matching his pace.
The heat built with every stroke; every time he pushed harder inside of her.
Just like when he was in her mouth, she reveled in feeling his size and touch sliding against her vaginal walls.
She could feel the ribbed texture of his thick veins and the friction of each pleasurable thrust as he touched her inner spot.
“Sterling,” she panted. “I’m close.”
“Come for me,” he ordered. “Let go.”
He reached down between their bodies, found her swollen clit with his thumb, and rubbed it.
That was the spark that ignited her orgasm.
It hit her like a lightning strike and clenched her womb, blurring her vision. Cassidy screamed and clamped down on his member.
Sterling roared and drove into her one last time, pushing his entire shaft as deep as he could possibly go. Then he came with a vibrating intensity.
She felt him pulse inside her, and could feel the hot jets of his seed filling her pussy. It was the warmest thing she had ever felt.
He collapsed on top of her, his weight heavy, crushing, and perfect. Sterling buried his face in her neck, panting. His heart hammered against hers.
They lay there in the silence of the shack. The wind still screamed outside, but it couldn’t touch them. Sterling kissed her throat, then her jaw.
“We made it,” he whispered against her skin.
“Yeah,” Cassidy said, running her fingers through his damp hair. “We made it.” She closed her eyes.