by Maisey Yates
“That’s dangerous,” he said.
“I’m open for a little bit of danger where you’re concerned.”
She was. He was worth it. Every sharp edge. Every complication.
She was resolved in that.
She looked right into his eyes, the blue in them glistening like diamonds, and she was positive they could cut into her soul like glass. But she didn’t want to run from it. Not from the intensity. Not from the potential hard road that might lie in front of them.
Because it wouldn’t only be hard. There would be good to it also. There would be easy and fun along with any potential pain. She couldn’t see the future. There was no way. And what she knew for sure was that she was committed to a complicated road, whatever twists and turns it might take.
She smiled. Because growth, at least in her life, wasn’t about being perfect. It was accepting this. That she couldn’t guarantee what lay ahead, but she could accept it. That sometimes this all felt too close and too real, but she still wanted it.
She didn’t want to dull it, didn’t want to hide from it. Didn’t need to use “therapist-speak,” as Jacob called it, to get any distance between him and her.
“I’m pretty open to whatever comes our way,” she said.
There was a sadness in his eyes suddenly, and she didn’t know what she’d said to put it there. But just like that it was gone, and the intensity had returned. “Well, that’s good to know,” he said. “Because I can’t guarantee you much, but I do guarantee you life will continue to happen.”
“I’m pretty sure that I can deal with it. As long as it’s with you.”
He said nothing to that, but she kissed him anyway, because that was the choice she was making. Regardless of what was going on inside him.
* * *
“WHY DON’T YOU come up tonight and look at the property? We need to find a site for the home.”
“Okay,” she said, looking up at him, her brown eyes looking slightly startled.
“I guess you haven’t been in my place, have you?”
It seemed strange. Given the intimacy they’d shared. But she had not actually been inside his cabin. And she certainly hadn’t wandered all over the property.
“Should I bring some pajamas?” she asked, smiling coyly.
“Hell no.”
“Because we’re going back to my place?”
“Hell no,” he said. “It’s just that you never need pajamas when you wear nothing but your skin.”
She blushed, and he liked that.
She made him feel grounded. Connected in a way that he wasn’t used to. She was so damn resilient. So hardy, and in many ways, he felt like she put him to shame. Everything she’d been through... She made him want to stand taller. Stand stronger.
She made him...
Well, she had always made him want to be a hero.
For that brave girl going through that loss the first time he’d seen her. That fear. That pain.
He’d needed to be a hero for her then. And he damn well wanted to be one now.
But you know you can’t do anything to keep her safe.
He pushed that to the back of his mind. They dropped her car off at her property and then piled into his truck and drove up the dirt road together, all the way to the top of the mountain, where his cabin sat.
It was a beautiful spot. And he loved it, but he still didn’t want his child anywhere near the edge.
“Why did you pick this spot?” she asked when she got out of the truck and looked around. “Knowing what I do about you now...I guess it doesn’t make sense that you would pick it.”
“Well,” he said slowly. “You’re back in Gold Valley, aren’t you? And in some ways, that doesn’t make any sense. Because it was a place where a whole lot of bad stuff happened. But you came back.”
She frowned. “I guess...sometimes you have to face it, don’t you?”
“Maybe,” he said, wandering past the cabin over to the rock face that overlooked the valley below. “I haven’t found an answer standing up here, though.”
“Do you think if you keep looking you might?”
“I always have. At least, I did when I bought the place. It was damn beautiful.” The sunlight taking all the green and dipping it in gold, and the ends of Vanessa’s hair too, all lit up in the sunlight.
“That’s the frustrating thing,” he said. “You stand there, and you look for answers, and after time there isn’t a damn thing out there. Just nothing but...silence.”
“It was the silence that always used to scare me,” she said. “I thought if I sat in the silence for too long I was going to hear things I didn’t want to. Or just have to start feeling my own feelings.”
“Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the silence.”
“I found a lot of truth in it, though,” she said. “I think that’s the real problem. Getting down to that silence is one of the hardest things any of us can do. But that’s when you hear it.”
“Hear what?”
“Call it what you want. The voice of God. Your conscience. But it was in the silence that I heard some real answers for the first time in a long time.”
“How did you get to the silence?”
She laughed. “Court-ordered rehab? I mean, I didn’t go quietly, and I didn’t particularly go willingly. It seemed preferable to going to prison for possession, and that was about it. But once I did go...when I was quiet, I was able to hear my own self for the first time in years. That’s when I painted. It’s when I fell. All these things that I’d been avoiding. I think it makes sense in a way that you go back. To the thing that hurt you. Try to find the answers there once you look for them everywhere else.”
“I’m sorry that your family hurt you,” he said. And he meant it. From the bottom of his soul he meant it. Because if her family hadn’t... Maybe if her parents had been different she never would have gotten on the path she had. Maybe if they’d been there when she’d been in pain...
He clenched his teeth. “I’m sorry I didn’t know you. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you more than I was.”
Her eyes glossed over. “You were there for me more than anyone else. It was real. It was real for me.”
“I wish I could’ve punched him back then.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay,” he said. “What happened to you wasn’t okay.”
She took in a sharp breath. “I know. And I wasn’t okay for a long time after. I wasn’t. But I am now.” She put her arm around his waist. “Here with you, I feel pretty all right.”
“Come on,” he said. “Let me walk you down the trail, and I’ll show you where we might build our house.” They tripped up into the trees, beneath the thick, shaded canopy cover.
“We have to cut some of these down, wouldn’t we?” she asked.
“Just some. It’ll be pretty easy to widen this into an access road. But you don’t want to just walk in every day. Not when you have baby stuff.”
“We’re going to have to get a babysitter,” she said.
“Well, we do work on my parents’ property. I’m sure that we’ll have help there.”
“Your relationship with your parents seems complicated,” she said.
He thought about it. “I think it’s more complicated for Gabe. My issues come from somewhere else.”
“Well, in large part, so do mine. But that base-level stuff tends to come from your parents. The stuff that gets you into the other—”
“Yeah,” he said. “Fair enough.”
“I think my dad taught me to run. When things got hard he just...went back on the road.” He looked down at her. “My dad is a nice man. But he’s hurt a lot of people. He loves my mother, but he’s spent a good portion of their marriage betraying their vows. That is... Well, either he’s not actually a nice man, or he’s great at running.”
“Yeah. Sounds like it.” She sighed heavily. “I know too much about doing things that make you hate yourself to say that your dad isn’t a nice perso
n. But he’s probably a damaged one.”
“Definitely.” They stopped in front of a space that was mostly clear. “Can you imagine it?” he asked. “Isolated, quiet. Just trees for company.”
“You know, most people would consider that lonely.”
“Woman, I consider it a gift.”
“I said most people,” she said. “But...I think I’m okay being lonely here with you.”
Her words made his heart ache, made him long for things that he didn’t have a name for.
But that feeling in his chest, bittersweet and perfect, described by her words perfectly.
Being lonely with someone else. He couldn’t think of anything better. At least, he couldn’t think of something that would work better for himself.
He wished he knew a way to get rid of the lonely. But the very idea... The very idea made him feel threatened in the same way the suggestion that he let go of his guilt over Clint’s death did. Like it was something he needed, though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why. “I think this is perfect,” she said, touching him softly. He felt it like the impact of a bullet. She slid her fingertips down his arm, took his hand and led him back toward the cabin.
The sun had sunk behind the mountains, and the gray sky was beginning to pop with the appearance of silver stars.
He looked down at her, and she smiled up at him, and something about it suddenly felt so easily broken.
So temporary.
She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. Almost beautiful enough to block out the ugly things he’d seen.
The body of his friend. His other friend in a coffin, his widow weeping over the casket.
There was new life in this period with her. But it was also so fragile and tentative that he wasn’t sure he could bear it. He wasn’t sure he could breathe past. And for a man who had learned to read through anything, smile through anything. Drink through anything, it was world stopping. World ending.
“Do you think that you could be happy here?” he asked.
He was happy to change the subject away from any and all internal musings. And get back to more practical things like plots of dirt where he could put a house. A way that he could take care of his woman and his child.
“Yes,” she said softly. She walked up to him and put her hand on his chest, moved her hand up to his shoulders and back down.
He groaned, but not just with desire. It was something deeper than that. Something that touched him in a way that seems to go beyond the surface. That went beyond the physical.
Her touch did something to him, and it always had.
He didn’t believe in fate or any other kind of mystical crap. If he believed in fate, maybe it would be easier. Easier to excuse himself because everything that had happened in his life would have simply been about a force beyond himself.
Sadly, he believed that what he did affected things around him.
And that was a much harder reality to bear.
But there was something about Vanessa that felt a lot closer to fate than anything else he ever experienced.
And it terrified him. Down to his core.
“Why don’t we go check out my cabin?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t mind,” she said, looking at him from beneath her lashes.
They both knew what he meant by that. That his intentions weren’t really to give her a tour of his one-room Lincoln Logs setup.
When they came out of the trees, it was dark, the stars really blanketed overhead. He opened the door to his house and let her inside.
It was rustic. To say the least.
He hadn’t come up here to be comfortable. He had come up here to be alone.
To cut himself off.
To make sure that he didn’t care. That he wouldn’t hurt so bad anymore.
Those thoughts, like bullets, tore through the skin.
Guilt.
Guilt was a much easier way to interpret his actions.
Fear was something else entirely.
He gritted his teeth, pushed it away.
“This is it,” he said, gesturing around the large great room. The only other room was the bathroom, through a door just next to the kitchen. Everything else was all there in one space. There was a skylight at the center of the room, filtering pale moonlight inside. There was a table shoved up against the wall with one chair added, a fridge, a microwave that he never used.
And a bed in the corner. It worked for him. It was all he needed all this time.
“This is where you live?”
“It was never my intention to keep the house. I was going to build something new.”
“And then you didn’t.”
“It didn’t seem necessary.”
She reached for him again, her fingertips rising up the side of his neck, moving to touch his face. She brushed her fingertips along his stubbled jaw, her eyes never leaving his. “Sweetheart, you have to stop punishing yourself someday.”
“A cabin in the woods isn’t my idea of punishment,” he said, but his voice had gone rough because she had called him sweetheart, and looked at him like she meant that word, and he didn’t even know quite what to do with it.
He swallowed hard, not certain why it was such a difficult thing to do.
“If you say so,” she said softly. She lifted her other hand, pressed her fingertips to his face and stroked him gently. “You’re a beautiful man,” she whispered.
“I’m glad you think so,” he said. “Since you’re going to be looking at my face for the next eighteen years at least.”
A small smile tugged at her lips. “You know I don’t even mean your face.”
“Oh yeah?” He was about to say something crass, something about his body, but the look in her eyes stopped him.
Made him feel like there was a rock lodged in his chest.
He didn’t think he could speak. Wasn’t entirely sure if he could breathe.
She stepped back away from him, moving beneath the silver light coming down through the ceiling, and she slowly pulled her shirt over her head. She took her bra off, wiggled out of the rest of her clothes, and the breath rushed out of his lungs. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Ever.
And he just stood there and stared, let her silhouette burn into his brain. Because something felt so strange and tenuous about this moment. This moment where they were planning their future, planning their forever.
And somehow, he just didn’t feel it. Didn’t feel like it was possible.
Like it could happen.
His brain rejected the thought, and he pushed it away, moving to where she stood. He didn’t want to touch her. It was like there was some kind of spell cast over them in this moment, like she was a vapor, a silver wisp that he might frighten off if he approached.
There he was, thinking magic things because of Vanessa Logan.
The woman was a phoenix. Reborn from ashes while he just lay there burning. Reduced and unable to figure out the way forward. And here she was, in all her glory, magic and new and better for all the things she had overcome, not damaged irreparably, but glorious and glowing and everything a man could need.
That thought terrified him.
Another stone thrown down into the pit of his stomach, where all that heaviness he’d been ignoring his whole life lay.
He approached her, and he leaned in, kissing her lips, not touching any other part of her as he did. Slowly, achingly so. He took it deeper, sliding his tongue across the seam of her lips and requesting entry.
And when she gave it... Oh, when she gave it, he took it.
He kissed her like that, his hands down at his sides, until neither of them could breathe. And then he fell to his knees. He touched her calves, running his hands up the sides of her smooth legs, until he came to grip her hips, eye level to that gorgeous V between her thighs, that he craved more than just about anything else.
He leaned in and tasted for himself. He lost himself in her. In the sounds she made as he
pleasured her, and the way she coated his tongue, and the feel of her.
He wanted to remember it forever. This moment. The way that she consumed him as he consumed her. There was nothing else like it.
There had been other women. But he couldn’t remember them. And he didn’t want to. Because right now, his past felt burned clean, magic done by Vanessa and her strengths, a gift that he didn’t deserve, not even for this moment.
And it was a beautiful moment.
He ached with the need for her. And he didn’t know that he would ever be able to get his fill. Not if they had tonight, not if they had forever.
She threaded her fingers through his hair, holding him tight, and he pushed and pushed until she went over the edge, until the sounds of her pleasure filled his cabin. A space that had never heard the cries of a woman’s pleasure—at least, not while he was here.
And now he would hear an echo across these walls for the rest of his life.
He didn’t know why he had that thought, because in theory, he wouldn’t be living here.
But it all felt temporary, and he couldn’t shake that sense. Couldn’t shake the bittersweet edge that burned across every breath he took.
But she cried out her pleasure, and he stood, lifted her up off the ground and wrapped her legs around his waist, carrying her over to the bed.
He brought her down onto the mattress, loomed above her. She smiled, her hand back on his face.
She liked to touch his face, and he didn’t know why. But he liked it too.
“You have too many clothes on,” she said softly, moving her hand over his chest.
“You going to do something about it?”
“I suppose I could,” she said, treating him to a coquettish grin. She pushed her hand underneath his T-shirt, pushed it up higher, those clever fingertips teasing his stomach, and everything in him went hard.
He helped her get his shirt up over his head and then marched forward, and she gasped as his denim-clad body brushed up against hers. She arched into him, pleasuring herself on his body, her eyes going glassy. He could feel her heat, could feel her intensity, and her desire. And it mirrored his own.
He wanted to extend the moment, to make it last, but he didn’t know if he had the strength. Didn’t know if he had the willpower. At this moment, he didn’t know he had anything in the whole world except for Vanessa, soft and naked in his arms, and he didn’t care if he did.