Page 13 of Mountain Man's Sunshine Girl
I lifted my head. His eyes were dark, locked on mine with that same steady intensity that had undone me from thevery beginning. The river murmured below us. The hammock creaked softly.
And then we came together—my second release crashing over me just as he drove deep and spilled inside me with the quiet, broken sound of my name.
We stayed tangled like that afterward, still joined, the hammock swaying gently as the river kept moving. Finally, I shifted until I was tucked against his side with my eyes closed and one hand still resting on my belly.
“Cade?”
“Mm.”
“The rope swing.”
He was quiet for a second. “What about it?”
I opened my eyes and looked at the yard—at the two white oaks the hammock was strung between, at the slope of the ground toward the water, at the old oak at the yard’s edge with the branch that leaned out over the river below. The rope swing he’d put up two summers ago hung still in the afternoon air. Millie’s favorite thing in the world. The thing she ran to every single morning before she’d even had breakfast.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just like that it’s there.”
He looked at it. I felt him do it, the way you feel someone shift their attention without seeing it.
“Me too,” he said.
The river moved below us. The rope hung still. Somewhere inside the cabin, Millie slept, unbothered and certain and completely herself. The way she’d come into the world and the way she’d stay.
I closed my eyes and let the hammock hold us.
