Page 105 of Shared By the Mountain Men Triplets

“She always misses us,” Cade adds.

I lower the radio and laugh under my breath because he’s right.

By early afternoon, I’m back at my research shed, which is a little weathered outbuilding that the men repaired and painted for me as a surprise. One day after a regional meeting in the city, I came home to find the door painted a beautiful grassy green. Inside, there were three matching green handprints on the doorframe. Mine is there now, too.

I covered one wall with maps, and a monitor in the corner shows wildlife feeds from the trail cameras. Field guides, soil samples, and specimen jars fill the shelves. I smile every single time I come through the door.

As I finish uploading the data I collected in the morning, I smell smoke, but it’s not the dangerous kind. It smells of applewood, charcoal, and Boone’s spice rub.

I lock the shed, grab Boone’s cooler from the back of mytruck, and follow my nose to the cabin’s back door with my mouth watering.

Boone opens the door just before I reach for the handle, and his smile hits me with the same force it always does after we’ve spent a day apart.

He reaches to help with the items I’m carrying. “My cooler.”

“I brought it back.”

“After putting dirt in it.”

“Professionally collected soil samples.”

He steps aside so I can enter. “I ought to charge you a rental fee.”

“You already threatened to make me pay.”

His charming grin turns into something warmer and darker and full of the same promise that made my face heat earlier.

“That I did.” He slides an arm around my waist, pulls me against him, and gives me the kind of kiss I often daydream about when I’m out working in the field. Even though we had breakfast together, he kisses me like he hasn’t seen me in a week, and he smiles against my mouth before he ends the kiss.

He pats my bottom and winks before he returns to the stove, where peppers and onions are sizzling in a skillet. “Wash up,” he says. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

As I round the corner into the main room, my eye goes first to the wildflowers in a crock on the dining table. It sits in the center of a woven runner I’d admired at a summer market, and Cade hadinsisted on buying.

There’s a fuzzy throw over the arm of the couch, and a photograph I took of a bull elk hangs above the mantel. When I said it was the best picture I’d ever taken, Rhett had it enlarged, framed, and hanging there two days later.

There are plants on the windowsills that Boone insists are mine, though he’s the one who waters them every morning. There are four mugs beside the coffeemaker, four toothbrushes in the bathroom, and four pairs of boots by the door.

I’m washing my hands at the kitchen sink when Cade comes in. He pauses for a split second when he sees me, and his shoulders ease. He crosses straight to me, stopping close enough that I have to tilt my head back to look at him. He brushes a loose strand of hair from my face and lets his hand linger against my cheek, then he leans down and presses a gentle kiss to my lips.

“I missed you,” he says.

“I missed you, too, though I knew you were out there somewhere with me.”

“When you two are done being devastatingly tender, could someone slice the bread?” Boone says.

Cade grins at me, then puts his hands under the water to wash up.

As I’m drying my hands, Rhett comes in from the direction of his bedroom office with his reading glasses still on. When I told him how appealing he looked in those glasses, he said he had no idea what I meant, but he seems to wear them more often now.

He folds his glasses and slides them into the neck of his shirt as he looks around at me, Boone, and Cade, as if he’s taking a mental roll call, and his expression changes in a nearly imperceptible way I’ve learned to read.

Then he walks over, cups the back of my neck, and closes his mouth down on mine. Boone’s kiss was playful and hungry, Cade’s was quiet, and Rhett kisses me like he’s confirming something.

I’m here, I came back, and everyone he loves is under the same roof.

“Everything clear?” he asks when he lifts his head.

He means the trails Turner used, and maybe even the fear that still rises when a branch snaps unexpectedly.