Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
NORA
Day six. One day left on the deal I made him, and Hunter Marsh still hasn't touched me since the ridge.
Two days ago, his thumb on my cheek, flour and mountain air and hazel eyes gone dark with something he didn't want to feel. Two days since Bette's phone call shattered the moment and he stepped back so fast you'd think my skin burned him.
Since then, nothing. Careful distance across the kitchen. Controlled conversation at dinner. Eyes that track me when he thinks I'm not paying attention, then snap away the instant I turn my head.
The man is at war with himself, and I'm the territory he's trying not to claim.
Tonight, though, something is different.
The power went out at four. October storm rolling down from the north, wind hammering the cabin, rain turning the windows into blurred sheets of gray.
Hunter came in from the workshop soaked to the bone, water streaming from his hair into his beard, flannel plastered against a chest that I am trying very hard not to catalog in detail.
He stripped the wet shirt off at the door, grabbed a dry thermal from the hook, and pulled it on while I stood at the woodstove pretending to stir soup.
The thermal is dark gray. It fits him the way clothes fit a man who doesn't buy for style but whose body makes everything look deliberate anyway.
Tight across the shoulders. Loose at the waist. Sleeves pushed up to the elbows because his forearms apparently need to be visible at all times for my personal torment.
Now we're sitting on opposite ends of the leather couch, the woodstove throwing orange light across the room, candles on the mantel because the generator only covers the essentials and ambient lighting isn't one of them.
Rain beats against the windows. The cabin creaks under the wind, groaning at the joints the way old timber does when the weather pushes hard enough.
Hunter is reading. An actual book. Dog-eared paperback, something about forestry management that he's been working through all week.
He reads the way he does everything. Focused.
Thorough. One hand holding the book, the other resting on his thigh, fingers tapping a slow rhythm against his knee that he's not aware of.
The candlelight catches the scar on his left hand every time the flame flickers.
My own book sits open in my lap, unread for the last twenty minutes because the words keep rearranging themselves into observations about the man three feet away.
The way his breathing has slowed since he sat down.
The way his jaw unclenches by degrees when he thinks nobody's watching.
The way the firelight turns his hazel eyes more gold than green, warm and deep and completely unguarded for the first time since I arrived.
This is who he is when he's not performing solitude.
Not the scowling mountain man in the driveway.
Not the controlled, careful host serving dinners at six and disappearing into his workshop until dark.
This is the version underneath all that.
Quiet. Settled. A man whose body finally remembers how to be still when there's another heartbeat in the room.
And tomorrow is day seven. Tomorrow he tells me to stay or go.
The soup is simmering on the woodstove, filling the cabin with garlic and thyme and roasted tomato.
His bread recipe, which he taught me two nights ago without being asked.
Just walked into the kitchen while I was measuring flour, stood behind me close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his chest, reached past me for the salt, and said, "More.
The dough needs more salt than you think.
" His hand brushed my wrist when he pulled back. Neither of us acknowledged it.
"You're not reading."
His voice pulls me out of the spiral. Those hazel eyes are on me now, book lowered, head tilted slightly against the back of the couch. Observing.
"How do you know?"
"You haven't turned a page in twenty minutes."
"Maybe it's a very dense page."
The corner of his mouth moves. That almost-smile I've been chasing since the ridge. "What are you thinking about?"
"Tomorrow."
The word settles into the room. The fire pops. Rain drives against the south-facing windows with renewed force, and the candle on the mantel gutters sideways before straightening.
"What about it?"
"It's day seven. End of the deal." My book closes in my lap. "You tell me to leave or ask me to stay."
Hunter's fingers stop tapping against his knee. His whole body goes still with that particular quality of attention that means he's processing something he doesn't want to process.
"I know what the deal is."
"So have you decided?"
Silence. Long. Weighted. The woodstove crackles through it, and somewhere outside a branch breaks loose from a tree and crashes through the undergrowth with a sound like bones snapping.
"You reorganized my spice shelf."
The statement catches me off guard. "What?"
"My spice shelf. By cuisine. Italian together, Mexican together, baking on the right.
You fixed the cabinet hinge with the screwdriver from the workshop without asking where I keep the tools, which means you found the workshop, went through my toolbox, selected the right bit, and put everything back exactly where it was.
" He pauses. "You identified a fence section that needs work that I hadn't noticed because you walked my eastern boundary while I was cutting on the south slope.
You made bread at five forty-five in the morning because you couldn't sleep, and when I asked you to come mark trees, you read my forest better than men who've been in the timber industry for thirty years. "
Each observation lands carefully, precisely, the way he places each mark on a tree. Measured. Intentional.
"You handled my chainsaw yesterday."
"You saw that?"
"You were cutting a downed limb off the access road. Proper form. Weight balanced, bar angle correct, chain tension checked before you started. Where'd you learn that?"
"My dad. He put a saw in my hands when I was fourteen. Said every person who lives near timber should know how to use one safely."
Something moves through his expression. Not surprise. Recognition. The same thing I saw on the ridge when I pointed to the garden spot. This man keeps finding pieces of himself reflected in me, and it keeps catching him off guard.
"You look at my land like you're already planning where the garden goes."
"Because I am."
The couch is three feet wide between us. Maybe less. Close enough that if I extended my leg, my foot would touch his thigh. The firelight paints his face in planes of amber and shadow, catching the lines at the corners of his eyes, the silver threading through his beard at the jaw.
"Nora."
"Yeah."
"Tomorrow isn't going to go the way you think."
My pulse picks up. "What does that mean?"
He sets the book on the side table. Turns his body toward me.
Full attention. Those hazel eyes are dark now, green swallowed by something deeper, something that has been building for six days in this cabin between carefully maintained distances and conversations that ended exactly one sentence before they needed to.
"It means I was supposed to spend this week proving to myself that you don't belong here. That Bette was wrong. That a woman who showed up with two suitcases and a letter from an agency I never contacted has no place in a life I built specifically to keep people out."
My breath shallows. The book slides off my lap onto the couch cushion. Neither of us looks at it.
"Did you?"
"No." The word comes out raw. Almost angry, but not at me.
At himself. At the situation. At whatever wall he built eight years ago that is apparently no match for a former librarian who bakes bread at dawn.
"Every morning you're in my kitchen before I get back from the porch.
Every night you sit at my table asking questions nobody has asked me in years.
You smell like flour and you read forests and you wear my flannel like it's yours, and I can't?—"
He stops. Jaw tight. Hands gripping his own knees, knuckles white.
"Can't what?"
"Can't stop thinking about what would have happened on that ridge if Bette hadn't called."
The candles flicker. The storm presses against the windows. The entire world narrows down to this couch, this man, this moment that has been building since I stepped out of a rental car with flour on my future and a letter in my pocket.
"So stop thinking about it."
His eyes snap to mine.
"Stop thinking about it and find out."
Something breaks in him. I see it happen. The controlled, careful, self-imposed discipline of a man who has spent eight years keeping people at arm's length fractures along a line that runs right through the center of his chest, and what's underneath is not calm at all.
His hand finds the back of my neck. One motion. Not tentative, not testing. Decisive. Fingers threading into my hair, palm warm against my skin, and my whole body lights up from that single point of contact.
He pulls me forward.
The kiss is not gentle. There is nothing exploratory about it, nothing questioning.
Hunter Marsh kisses me with the same precision he brings to everything else.
Thorough. Devastating. His mouth opens against mine and the taste of coffee and woodsmoke fills my senses while his other hand finds my waist, pulling me across the couch cushion until there is no space between us at all.
My fingers curl into the front of his thermal. The fabric bunches in my fists as his tongue finds mine, slow, deliberate, a man who takes his time because he has decided this matters and he does not do anything that matters halfway.
A sound escapes my throat. Low. Involuntary.
His grip tightens at my waist in response, fingers pressing into the curve above my hip, and the kiss deepens.
His beard scratches against my chin. His chest is hard and warm under my hands.
His breathing has changed, gone rough, gone uneven, the carefully controlled rhythm of Hunter Marsh disrupted by a woman sitting in his lap in candlelight while a storm tries to peel the roof off his cabin.
When he pulls back, just barely, his forehead rests against mine. Our breathing fills the space between us, ragged, too fast.
"Tell me to stop." His voice is wrecked. Low and scraped raw.
"No."
His eyes find mine. This close, the hazel is almost entirely gold. Firelit. Burning.
"Nora. If I don't stop now, I'm not going to."
My hand slides from his chest to his jaw. The beard is softer than it looks. Underneath, his pulse hammers against my palm.
"Good."
He kisses me again. Harder. Deeper. His arm wraps around my lower back, hauling me fully into his lap so my knees bracket his hips.
My back arches as his mouth leaves mine, trailing down the line of my jaw, my throat, the hollow below my ear where his breath comes hot and rough and his teeth graze the skin just hard enough to make my hips roll forward against him.
A groan. Deep. From his chest. His hands flex on my waist, thumbs pressing into the soft skin above my jeans, and his hips push up to meet me. The evidence of what this is doing to him presses against me through denim. Thick. Hard. Unmistakable.
"Six days." His mouth moves against my throat. "Six days of you in my kitchen. In my flannel. Walking my land like you were born on it." His teeth catch my earlobe. "Do you have any idea what that does to a man who told himself he didn't want this?"
"Show me."
He pulls back. Looks at me. One long, searching look that takes in my flushed face and my swollen mouth and my hips pressed down against his and whatever he's been carrying since a rental car pulled up his driveway and changed the shape of his silence.
"Not here." He lifts me off his lap. Sets me on my feet like I weigh nothing, which, given the size of him, I probably don't. "Not on the couch."
My hand catches in his. "Then where?"
He stands. Six foot four of decision made, battle lost, wall down. His hand is enormous around mine, warm and rough and certain.
"My room."
Two words. No question in them.
He leads me upstairs instead of the guest room where I've been sleeping for six nights in clean sheets in a bed that isn't his, past the bathroom, to the closed door at the end of the hall that I haven't opened because it felt like a line I wasn't supposed to cross.
He opens it. Pulls me through.
The door closes behind us, and the storm rages outside, and tomorrow is day seven, and the answer was never going to be no.