Page 83 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“Look at me,” he said.

I opened my eyes. Green met blue. And he began to move again. Slower this time. Deeper. Each stroke deliberate and consuming, his eyes locked on mine, and the intimacy of it after the roughness was almost more than I could bear. He was not just claiming my body. He was claiming all of me. Every piece. Every part. The woman who had walked out the door and the woman who had come back and the woman underneath both of them who had always, always been his.

“Come with me,” he said.

The orgasm was different this time. Slower. Building from somewhere deep, somewhere fundamental, and when it broke it broke through my entire body. I cried out and he groaned and his hips stuttered and then he was coming, his body rigid, his face buried in my neck, his hand crushing mine against the mattress as he emptied himself into me with a groan that sounded like surrender.

We lay tangled. Breathing. The room dark and warm and smelling like sweat and us and the cedar that seemed to be embedded in his skin no matter where we were. His weight was on me and I held it gladly because the pressure of his body on mine was the most reassuring thing I had ever felt.

He rolled to the side. Pulled me against him. Pressed his face into my hair.

The silence was thick and warm and full of everything we did not need to say. My body was humming, buzzing, every muscle loose and spent. His fingers traced lazy circles on my hip, and the gentleness of the touch after everything else made my eyes sting.

“You are really something else, Sawyer,” I said.

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. “You needed to remember.”

“Remember what?”

“That you belong to me.” His arms tightened around me. “That no matter where you go or who takes you or what deal you try to make, you belong to me and I will come for you. Every time.”

My throat closed. The tears came again, quiet ones, slipping down my cheeks and onto his chest, and he did not wipe them away. He let them fall.

“I always belonged to you,” I said. “From the first day I showed up at your sawmill with those stupid cookies. I was yours before you even knew it.”

“I knew it,” he said quietly. “I knew it the second you smiled at me and I forgot how to breathe. I just did not know what to do about it.”

I tilted my face up. Looked at him in the dark. His eyes were soft. The mask gone. The walls down. The man underneath, the one that only I got to see, looking at me with a tenderness that was almost unbearable after the ferocity of what we had just done.

“I love you, Sawyer,” I said.

He smiled. Not the ghost. Not the almost. A real, full, wide smile that transformed his entire face, that made him look younger and lighter and like the man he might have been if the world had been kinder to him. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

He kissed me. Slow. Soft. The opposite of everything that had come before, a kiss that was all tenderness and certainty and the quiet devastation of a man who had finally stopped fighting the one thing that could save him.

“I love you too,” he said against my lips. “Now go to sleep before I decide to remind you again.”

I smiled. Tucked my head under his chin. And fell asleep in his arms for the first time since I had been taken, and the last thing I felt before sleep pulled me under was his heartbeat against my cheek, steady and strong and beating for me.

30

SAWYER

Iwoke up at four in the morning to bake a cake.

This was, without question, the most ridiculous thing I had ever done. I had survived a war. I had taken a bullet two weeks ago. I had stormed a farmhouse to rescue the woman sleeping beside me. And now I was standing in a kitchen in the dark, in someone else’s house, with one working arm and a phone propped against the sugar jar showing a recipe for chocolate cake that required skills I did not possess.

But it was Chloe’s birthday. And she had forgotten.

I had found out by accident. Dollie had called the day before, whispering into the phone like a spy delivering classified intelligence, and told me the date. Tomorrow. Chloe had not mentioned it. Had not hinted. Had not circled it on a calendar or dropped a single clue, because the woman had spent the last two weeks being kidnapped and rescued and worrying about whether I was going to get shot again, and somewhere in all of that her own birthday had slipped through the cracks.

That was not going to stand.

I cracked the eggs one-handed. The first one went into the bowl. The second one went onto the floor. I stared at the yolk spreading across the tile and considered my options and then cracked the third egg with more care and decided the floor could wait.

Dollie arrived at five. She let herself in with the key Josh had given her and found me in the kitchen covered in flour with a bowl of batter that looked questionable and a mess that looked criminal.

“Oh, Sawyer,” she said.