Page 17 of Her Mountain Man Protector

"It's excellent."

"There. Growth." She points her fork at me. "Now admit the floor is stupid."

"The floor is tactical."

"The floor is you being afraid of a mattress."

I set the fork down. The room feels smaller. She has sauce on her thumb and a challenge in those vivid green eyes that makes the one bed look like a bad idea and the only idea left.

"I'm not afraid of a mattress."

"Prove it."

"That isn't how this works."

"That is exactly how this works. You issue decrees. I decline them. We end up doing the thing you were going to do anyway after you waste an hour pretending you're made of stone. Save us the hour."

I should put her in the bed and sit at the door and call it done. I have six brothers who would mock me into the next decade if they saw me losing a logistics argument to a woman who looks like pure sunshine. I also have the memory of her hitting my chest when the cabin window went, all that stubborn brightness packed into a frame I keep putting behind me, and the memory is louder than the mockery.

"Rules," I say.

She lights up, victorious. "I'm listening."

"Clothes stay on. You stay on your side. If I take a call, you don't follow me onto the deck half asleep. If something hits the glass, you go to the bathroom floor and you stay there until I pull you out."

"Clothes on is adorable. My side is negotiable. The bathroom floor we can revisit if the glass actually hits. Anything else, commander?"

"Don't call me commander."

"Don't sleep on oak and I won't."

I take the bowls to the sink because if I keep looking at her across the table I'm going to do something unwise with the space between her mouth and mine. She follows after me. I wish the dishes as she dries. Our hands overlap on a towel. She doesn't pull away first. I do, and I feel the loss of it all the way up my arm.

Night comes down hard this high. I kill the deck lights and leave one lamp on low in the main room. She comes out of the bathroom in a borrowed Equinox shirt Marin must have stashed in the closet, dark and too big, hanging off one shoulder in a way that is going to ruin the next six hours of my life.

"Your side is the door side," she says from the mattress. "So you can leap heroically without crawling over me. I'm being generous. Document that."

I toe off my boots at the base of the bed. The mattress gives under my weight. She’s already under the blanket, facing me on purpose, hair a wild dark spill on the pillow, watching me, daring the night to start.

I lie down on top of the blanket first.

She tugs it. "You'll freeze, you ridiculous man."

"I'll live."

"You'll shiver and I'll have to hear it, and then I'll do this anyway." She yanks the blanket over my shoulder with zero ceremony, which puts her closer, which puts her knee against my thigh, which puts the whole long, lush, disastrous fact of her in my space. I go still. She goes still.

"This is a terrible idea," I say.

"The worst," she agrees, almost soft. "If you start issuing fresh decrees I'm going to put my cold feet on you."

"Try it and you're on the rug."

"You wouldn't. You already lost the rug argument."

She's right. I lost it the minute I climbed into bed. I keep my hands to myself by making them a fist against the mattress and staring at the beam over her head because the beam is safer than her mouth. Her breathing evens by degrees. She doesn't talk in her sleep, at least not yet. She does shift closer in increments so small she could claim innocence in a court of law, until her forehead is almost at my shoulder and the heat of her is a second blanket I didn't request and can't seem to decline.

My burner buzzes once against the nightstand, a single vibration I feel more than hear. I ease out from under the blanket. She makes an annoyed sound and reaches across the empty space I left, fingers closing on nothing, and that small grab lands in my chest with more force than the shots on the cabin porch.