by Claire Adams
"Why'd you stop?" he asked. He whispered even though they were both awake, and it was just them in any case for miles. She pulled the covers up to her neck, hiding herself. She was silent as he approached the bed. She watched his dark figure approach and released the covers when he pulled them from her hands. He threw them aside, looking down at her. "I want to watch."
She swallowed, trying to wet her throat that suddenly became parched. Her face was hot, and her hands shook, but her arousal was keen, throbbing from her core.
"Natalie," he said to her. There was a command in his voice. That and a dangerous edge of desire. He had told her what he wanted. Part of her wanted to see what he would do if she defied him. The other wished a light was on so she could see his face as he watched her. She flattened onto her back, maintaining eye contact with him in the dark. She brought her fingers, already wet with her arousal, to her mouth and wet them with her tongue. Her hand disappeared into her clothes, to her aching folds. Sighing as she pleasured herself, she closed her eyes, losing herself in the sensation.
His weight as he joined her on the bed made her aware of his presence. She opened her eyes. They adjusted, seeing him as he disrobed. For the second time that night she wished there was more light. His hands groped in the dark for her clothes. She aided him, raising her hips off the bed so he could strip her. When they were both naked, he moved on top of her. Maybe it was the feeling of her bare skin against his or the anticipation of having her, but the moment their lips found each other in the dark, he was gone. Any semblance of restraint left him.
His hands moved across her skin, frantic and demanding. His lips bruised hers, kissing harder, deeper. His body claimed hers. She felt at one moment his hard member pressed between his abdomen and hers, then the next, pressure at her core as its thick crown penetrated her. Deeper and deeper still until she completely engulfed him. Heat rushed through her. Wanton desire urged her hips up to meet his as he thrust into her. His body was hard. The solid muscles of his back and arms rippled under her hands. He kissed her neck, chest, and face as her heat embraced him.
There was nothing then, only them. The sounds of their flesh meeting, their sighs of pleasure, the heat from their friction and the waves they both rode, hurtling towards their release. He was immersed in her, her feel, her scent, her heated flesh. He was close, so close but couldn't let himself fall. When she cried out below him and her fingernails stung the skin on his back and shoulder where she held him, his body responded, ejaculating powerfully into her. She whispered his name in his ear, holding him where he was. He looked at her, but her eyes were closed. He ran a hand over her face, kissing her.
"Natalie," he said. "Natalie."
I was sweating. Was I asleep? I opened my eyes. It was dark. It took me a few minutes to realize I was alone. I was alone, and I was still fully dressed. It hadn't happened. I closed my eyes, covering my face. Oh god. Oh my fucking god, what the fuck.
I sat up and scrambled out of the bed, padding carefully down the steps to the floor. The fire was smaller but was still going. On the couch, asleep on his side, was Cameron. I hurried to the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water. What the hell, Natalie. No, no you did not just have a fucking sex dream about that man out there.
No. It had been a long day. I was tired. I was in a strange place, and I was on edge. That was it. I wasn't attracted to my dead boss' son.
Ha, I thought. Maybe if I repeated it to myself enough times, it would start being true. It wasn't true. It was the farthest thing from the truth, but that wasn't even the worst part. I didn’t buy into the dream analysis stuff. A sex dream with someone I didn’t want to fuck, I would have questioned. One about someone I was attracted to, who I also happened to be snowed in with, was pretty obvious in its meaning.
And what, I thought, coming out of the bathroom and walking back up to the loft. You like him. Congratulations. Unless you want to spend the rest of your time here tiptoeing around him, you are going to keep that to yourself. He was Cameron Porter. He owned the fucking company I worked for. He had just lost his parents. It didn't matter how much I wanted to kiss him. This could never turn into anything. Sex had to be the last thing on his mind. A relationship? Totally off his radar.
A relationship, Natalie? Seriously? I had to reel it in. There was nothing between Cameron and I, and it was going to stay that way. That wasn't what he was looking for, and I knew better than to push it. It had to be two, maybe even three or four more days here though. If I had another dream like that... I got back into the bed and stared up at the ceiling, afraid to fall asleep. He could never know, I thought. He would never know.
Chapter Seventeen
Cameron
She got up before I did. I had panicked a little hearing another person in the cabin before I remembered that I wasn't alone. I wasn't in my bed; I was on the couch. Natalie was here. Still here. I stretched and sat up on the couch, scrubbing my hands over my face and hair. Well, you did it. You lasted one night; you can last another.
Since moving out to the cabin, I had been getting up at sunrise every day. Last night had been hell, and it hadn't been the fire keeping me up. It had been her: the woman in my bed who I couldn't fucking touch. No, it wasn't her fault; I couldn't be mad because I couldn't have her. She had gone out of her way to make sure I was okay up here. I looked over my shoulder and saw her in the kitchen. Her hair was up in a ponytail, and the sleeves of her white sweater were rolled up her arms as she cooked.
I watched her moving through the kitchen for a few seconds. I had been asking myself how I hadn't talked to her or otherwise made a move since she had started working at the company, but then here we were. We never would have gotten to this place without all the fucked-up shit that had happened so far. People always said dark clouds had silver linings...
"Oh. You're up," she said, smiling over her shoulder at me. This was new. I had woken up to an empty house for too many years now by choice. It was a frosty Sunday morning and Natalie was making us breakfast in my kitchen. I didn't wish I was alone now. I smiled at her.
"So are you."
"Did you sleep okay?" she asked. The couple hours I had gotten when I wasn't distracted having her so close, yeah, but those hadn't been many.
"Fine," I said shortly. "You didn't have to do that by the way."
"What? Cook? You made dinner last night. I took your bed; it was the least I could do," she said with another smile over her shoulder. Watching her there, suddenly there was a part of me that always wanted to see Natalie in my kitchen first thing in the morning preparing breakfast for the two of us. This should have felt more uncomfortable. I should have felt crowded, annoyed that she was there and I couldn't kick her out. Stop it, I thought. Fucking stop. You made it one night; you can make it the rest. You're staying up here; she isn't. She isn't the last beautiful woman you'll ever meet. It's been too long. She's right there; that's why you want her. Every excuse in the book ran through my head, and none of them were working. I cleared my throat.
"Is it still snowing?" I asked, trying to stop the cycle of my thoughts.
"A little, but it's definitely let up since yesterday," she said. I went over to the door and let myself out. The cold felt like walking into a wall. There was little to no wind, but everything was blanketed in white. I could see our cars out there almost totally covered in snow, and the usually clear path from the road to the house was completely obscured. I had gotten myself a snow shovel but wasn't looking forward to trying to tackle that mess. The snow was still falling, but it was light. If it went on the whole day though, it would probably add a couple inches to the already thick cover we had. Traveling was totally out of the question, but I had known that. I had just needed confirmation that this torture was going to continue so I could start to prepare myself.
I grabbed some wood from the pile to buy myself some time before going back inside. Just a couple more days, I thought darkly. You want her to leave and stay at the same time; fucking relax. Don't do anything
you or she is going to regret. I walked back inside and went over to the fireplace, building another flame.
"How's it looking out there?" she asked from the kitchen.
"Not great. I hope you weren't busy today."
"No," she said lightly. "I'll just have to make some calls, so nobody thinks I went missing. I hope you're hungry." I was. Living alone as long as I had been, I was used to feeding myself and eating alone, but I wasn't as opposed to sharing space with Natalie as I thought I would have been. She had made eggs and a potato hash with corned beef. We ate on the couch and after doing the dishes, headed outside to see how bad the storm had been.
"Wow," I murmured from the porch. The snow had come down heavy. It was freezing. Fluffy snow dusted the railing and the porch. It was everywhere. We took the stairs down carefully and walked around the front of the house.
"Doesn't come down like this in Provo," she said. "Good thinking with the wood."
"What? Oh, yeah. I know wet wood doesn't burn so…" I shrugged. That was basic level survival skills. I'd be surprised if there were people who didn't know at least that much. "I hope it's enough."
"When I was a kid, my brothers and dad would have competitions splitting logs," she said. I looked at her, raising an eyebrow.
"In Montana."
"In a small town an hour from Bozeman," she looked up at me. "On a cattle ranch."
"No way."
"It's a dude ranch now. My parents run it with one of my brothers. When we were younger, summer and fall were wood harvest—"
"Wait a minute," I said, cutting her off. "A ranch?" she hadn't mentioned anything about that yesterday. All she had said was she came from Montana. Looking at her, nobody, and I mean nobody, would put her on a fucking ranch.
"My dad would always beat them," she continued, undeterred. "He could split wood like a machine, even now in his fifties. He wouldn't use a block. He would take four or five logs on the ground and chain them together so they stayed standing. Made your swing longer and brought more force down on the log, he used to say. Got the job done in half the time with half the energy."
"Why were you cutting up firewood on your ranch?"
"My parents were homesteaders. That meant heating the house, growing or killing our own food—"
"Killing?" I asked.
She grinned. "One of my brothers, Aaron, has been shot about three times on hunting trips. Once by me. I said it was an accident, but really, it wasn't. My aim was just bad." This was a lot. Natalie Cooke looked like Malibu Barbie but had grown up chopping firewood and hunting elk. She had mentioned one brother, but the total was four, all older than her.
"Are you serious?" I asked, not because I thought she was lying but because I couldn’t believe it. She looked like a girl who wouldn't know what end of the ax to use to chop the firewood, much less someone who knew how to use a gun.
"Good times," she said, looking out at the front of the house again.
"When were you going to tell me this?"
"I don't know where you grew up," she said.
"No, I mean that you had done this shit before?" I asked. "Oh my god, no wonder you knew what to bring up here yesterday."
"It's been a long time," she said, "and you seemed to have a good enough system going by yourself."
"Seriously?" I asked. She looked at me and bit her lip a little.
"Well," she started, "for wood storage, a shed would be best. A parking structure for your car too if you don't feel like shoveling snow every day during winter."
"Anything else?"
"A snowmobile or ATV are the only things that can take these roads in the snow," she added.
"You knew I was coming out here for how long? I told you weeks ago."
"I didn't think you'd actually come out here with nothing but a rusty ax and pretend you were Hugh Glass. I figured you'd try to learn something first. Obviously, the best way to learn something is by doing it anyway, so who was I to interfere?"
"Your interference would have saved me a hell of a lot of trouble."
"Just don't go out to the middle of nowhere again with no way for people to reach you. That's how people die."
"Thanks, I guess," I said.
"Are you mad at me now?" she asked. I looked at her up and down and tried to imagine it. Natalie with straw in her hair on horseback doing a cattle run.
“I feel like I don’t even know you anymore,” I joked.
She shoved me playfully. “You didn’t need my help.”
“It would have been nice; just saying.” We walked back to the cabin in silence.
“Well, you’re doing great,” she said. “Just remember: hardwood burns long. Smaller splits burn hot.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said, holding the door open as we went inside. “Too bad you can’t stay, I could use you around here.”
“Neither of us is going anywhere for a long time,” she said, walking over to the fire. The cabin was warmer than outside, but we were both cold from the walk. With that snow out there, she was right. We were stuck there, and I had no complaints. I went to the kitchen and pulled a saucepan out.
“Get that fire going. I’ll make us something warm,” I said, looking over my shoulder at her. Cattle ranch in Montana. Guess that was how reliable it was to judge a book by its cover. It was surprising, in a good way. Like I knew a secret about her nobody else did. She had depths I had no idea about. I couldn’t wait to get to know her better.
Chapter Eighteen
Natalie
"Who taught you how to make this?" I asked, taking a sip of my hot chocolate. It was thick and rich. Some whipped cream and marshmallows, and it would have been perfect, but I hadn't thought that far ahead shopping for him. It was still delicious though.
"My mother."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"Why? Is it bad?" he asked lightly.
"No. It's delicious. About your parents."
"Thanks. It's not like I'm trying to get over it or anything." I flushed, looking down.
"Cameron, I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"Don't," he said with a small smile. "It's okay. Really. I haven't talked about it much is all. Not like this, I mean. As soon as they died, people were more interested in interviews and discussing wills. I don't really have a lot of people to reminisce about them with."
"You were close to them."
"Yeah, but it was just me," he said. "I don't have any siblings, and the rest of the family was never that close to us."
"Guess the grass is always greener on the other side. I used to wish that I was an only child. Being born last, there was a short time before I left for college when I was the only one still at home, but so often it felt like a competition since we outnumbered my parents by three."
"My mom used to make this stuff for me when I came to their bedroom at night because I couldn't sleep. At some point, I just started getting up and going to their room because I knew she'd get up and spend time with me even though I was meant to be asleep." He paused, swirling the liquid around in his cup. "My dad told me when I was fourteen why I was an only child."
"What did he say?” I asked cautiously.
"After having me, they had wanted more children, but my mother had a cancer scare when I was about two or three. It was in her uterus. She couldn't get pregnant again after going through treatment, even though they had detected it early enough for her to have fully recovered."
"That must have been painful for them."
"I asked him why they hadn't adopted or used a surrogate or done something about it. I knew that they could have if they had wanted to."
"What did he tell you?"
"He said he hoped I would never have to choose between what I already had and what I hoped I could get when I was an adult." I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything. I took another sip of my hot chocolate, watching him. He had been looking down this whole time into his cup like he was watching his memories play out inside of it. "I used to wish that I had siblin
gs but not because I was lonely. I don't remember ever feeling like that. I wanted them because if there had been more of us, I wouldn't have had to be the one to take over the company. If my parents had had three or four kids instead of just one, at least one of them would have wanted to follow in my dad's footsteps since I hadn't."
Do you think that was why your parents had you, I started to ask before the vibration of my phone on the coffee table interrupted. I picked it up to see who was calling me.
"Sorry, do you mind if I take this?" I asked. He told me it was fine. I took the phone and walked to the front door, letting myself out before answering. "Hello?"
"Natalie?" It was Brett. Mr. Brett Hamm, who had been waiting to hear back from me since Friday. I hadn't said anything about the initial visit I had made to Cameron's cabin because we had agreed to talk about it on Monday at work. Yeah, work. The place I would not be going tomorrow because I was stuck here.
"Brett. Hi," I said. Oh shit.
"Natalie? I'm sorry for calling you like this, but I think we have a problem."
"What?"
"I heard a news report. There was a snow storm yesterday that rolled in from the mountains. I think Cameron's cabin is right in its trail." My stomach unclenched but just a little.
"Brett, I have something to tell you." I started at the beginning skipping over the embarrassing details, particularly the one where I had had a dream about Cameron and I having sex. He listened silently until I got to this morning.
"When were you going to tell me all this, Natalie?"