Chapter 27
FINN
With the sun beginning to dip low in the sky, I leave Darcy alone with the supply box for five minutes while I gather kindling. When I come back she's crouched over a nest of dry tinder with the flint from my supply kit in her fist, trying to get a spark.
She doesn't hear me walk up. Her tongue is set in the corner of her mouth, her sleeves are shoved up.
Every time a spark lands and dies she narrows her eyes at the tinder like she's holding a grudge.
It's a look I know well, considering it's only been a couple of weeks since she stopped looking at me like that too.
I stand there with an armload of kindling and enjoy the show.
"The trick is the angle," I say, and she jumps.
"How long have you been standing there?"
"Long enough to fear for the flint."
I set the kindling down and hunker in behind her, knees bracketing hers, and reach around her to put my hands over her hands.
She goes still. Not startled still. Aware still.
I feel it move through her back where she's settled against my chest, and every plan I already have for later tonight gets more detailed.
"Firm and slow," I say, close to her ear.
"That's what she said," she tosses back at me without missing a beat.
We chuckle together, and it takes most of my concentration to focus on the task and not the way even the most basic contact with her ignites my desire for her. "You're snapping at it. It's a scrape, not a fight. Use the whole edge and send the sparks where you want them."
She makes a small, frustrated sound. "I was sending them."
"You were attempting to murder them. Different technique."
Her laugh vibrates through both of us. I fold her fingers back around the striker and draw it down the flint with her, slow, so she can feel the pressure it wants. Sparks jump, bright and useless, and die in the grass an inch short of the nest.
"Closer," she mutters. Not to me. To the sparks. She's coaching them now.
We strike again. Nothing. Again, and this time a spark lands where we aimed it, and the tinder catches it and holds.
"Don't breathe yet," I say, low, like the flame might overhear.
She's got both hands cupped around the nest. I've got mine cupped around hers. We feed it dry grass a pinch at a time, heads bent together, and coax it, breath by breath, until a flame the size of a thumbnail decides to live.
She leans back into me and huffs like she just delivered a baby. I keep my arms where they are. She lets me hold her, despite that our flame is taking shape now.
"We are excellent at this."
"Agreed." I press a kiss to her temple, and for a while we stay right there on the ground, watching our fire eat its first kindling, her spine warm against my chest. I've been building fires my whole life. This is the first one I didn't want to hurry.
"You had our fire going in seconds last night," she says, twisting around to look at me, suspicion arriving as she speaks. Her eyes go from the flint in her hand to my face.
I grin, reaching into my jacket pocket, and holding a lighter up between two fingers.
"Oh, my God!" She smacks my arm. "You had that the whole time? Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because you were so fucking cute trying to do it the hard way. Besides, this was more fun."
"You're a terrible wilderness guide."
"I got you a fire, dinner, and this view. I'd say I'm the best guide you've ever had."
"You're the only one I've ever had."
I drop a kiss on the tip of her nose. "Then the title's mine by default. I'll take it. Come on, let's eat."
Dinner is sandwiches and good cheese out of the cooler, and the second bottle from the family vault poured into tin cups. We eat on the log with the fire cracking and the valley going dark below the ledge, and I look at her longer than I look at the view.
She's got pine sap in her hair and scratches across her knuckles and the start of a sunburn on the bridge of her nose.
Her hair gave up its knot somewhere around midafternoon, the way I figured it would.
I've seen this woman in candlelight. I've seen her in a wrap dress that took me three tries to untie and in nothing at all.
This version beats every one of them, because she earned it.
Every scratch, every mile, out here in my world, on her own two feet.
I want her all the time now. Tonight I get to do something about it.
But first, the treat I brought that I think she's really going to enjoy.
I go back to the cooler and come out with a box of graham crackers, several chocolate bars, and a bag of marshmallows.
Her whole face lights up brighter than when I served her Michelin-star tiramisu the other night at the guesthouse.
"You did not."
"Of course I did. What's a campfire without s'mores?"
I hand her one of the skewers I brought just for this purpose, then we both stab a fat marshmallow onto the ends and stick them into the fire.
In moments, her marshmallow is a masterpiece.
She rotates it low over the coals, golden brown on every side, and assembles her s'more as though it's being judged at the county fair.
Mine catches fire because I'm mostly watching her mouth instead of my marshmallow, and I have to blow it out and eat it charred.
She stares at my blackened mess and shakes her head. "I think yours is technically charcoal."
"Still delicious," I reply, pinching it between the graham crackers and chocolate.
She laughs as she starts eating hers. There's a smear of chocolate at the corner of her mouth, and I reach over and wipe it away with my thumb.
Before I decide what to do next, she catches my wrist and pulls my thumb into her mouth.
Her tongue moves over it once, sucking the pad against the wet pillow of her tongue, her eyes holding mine.
"Mmm," she moans around my thumb.
I go hard so fast it's practically a medical event.
Then she lets go of my wrist, picks up her cup, and settles back against my chest like she didn't just do that. We have all night and she knows it.
"Want another s'more?"
I'm still trying to recover from the instant hard-on I'm sporting, but she's already gone back to the bag of marshmallows for seconds. She hands me one, her dark eyes dancing in the firelight.
The woman is a menace. She's a menace and a surprise, and I can't get my fill of either side of her.
We roast our second s'mores, then settle back afterward into a comfortable silence.
The fire burns down to embers while she sits back between my knees, my chin near her hair, both of us watching the coals breathe.
It's the quiet that happens when two people have stopped performing.
It's contentment. I didn't know either existed until tonight.
"I've camped my whole life," I say into her hair. "And every trip, no matter where I am, some part of me is already gone by now. Planning the next adventure. Wondering what I might be missing one ridge over." The coals shift. Her hand comes to rest on my forearm.
"Is that what you're doing now?"
"No. Tonight there's no next thing. I'm not anywhere else. I'm just here."
She doesn't say anything for a second, and her hand tightens on my arm like she heard everything inside it.
She inhales a soft breath as if she's trying to find her voice. "Thank you for this, Finn."
I don't ask her to explain what she's thanking me for. I don't want to break whatever spell has fallen over us, and questions will only beg answers. Answers I don't have, and promises I'm not sure I can ever make her, no matter how heavily they sit on my tongue.
Neither of us asks where we're going, or whether it can last.
All I know right now is this. Darcy is the person I trust most in the world. More than Wyatt. More than my brothers. Her. I've handed this woman the most vulnerable parts of my history and she's never once used an ounce of it against me, never made me smaller with it.
I have money I couldn't spend in ten lifetimes, a company with my name on the side of it, a life most men would take sight unseen. I've never had this. Somebody to share myself with, my days and nights, even my morning afters.
I turn her chin up and kiss her. She tastes like sugar and chocolate, hints of woodsmoke in her hair.
The kiss starts warm. Then it goes serious, her hand coming up to my jaw, her body turning in my arms, and when we finally break apart, the firelight is in her eyes and tonight has exactly one place it's going.
She stands and holds out her hand.
"That tent I built is still standing," she says. "It would be a shame to waste it. There's a perfectly terrible sleeping pad in there with our names on it."
Smiling, I bank the fire and take her hand.
Inside, I zip the flap and the world gets small.
The lantern stays off. The last of the firelight comes through the fabric in a low orange wash that moves when the flames do, and every sound outside sharpens.
The stream working below the ledge. Wind moving through the pines.
An owl calling somewhere down the valley.
No town. No walls. I have never been this alone with another person in my life.
She kneels on the double sleeping bag, and I kneel in front of her and take the hem of her henley in both hands.
I peel it off her one inch at a time. Then the base layer under it, her arms rising for me, her thick dark hair falling loose. I inhale when I see the lacy bra underneath.
"I like the way you pack for camp," I say, drawing it over her head. "I like you even better with nothing on at all."
She laughs low in her throat, and then she's bare to the waist in the moving light and the laugh fades, because I've stopped to look at her, and a man should look at this properly.
Full breasts, her nipples already tight in the mountain air, the dim glow of firelight sliding over her skin.
My mouth waters and my hands are not entirely steady.
I've quit pretending either fact is under my control.