Page 80 of Shared By the Mountain Men Triplets

The way she looks at me cuts through the dirt, the scrapes, the cold, and the fatigue, and I have to look away, because holding her gaze is too much after days of only seeing rocks, trees, armed men, and a future narrowing toward violence.

“I’m fine,” I say, though I know she’s not buying it.

I’ve been fine for years, because fine is easy. Fine is waking up and doing what I need to do.

Wren pushes away from the door and reaches for the hem of my shirt. “Let me.”

I lift my arms, and she pulls the shirt over my head. Her gaze roams over my bare chest, my shoulders, my arms.

Her fingerstouch a bruise along my ribs. “Cade.”

“From the rock shelf. Not a wound.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“It’s accurate.”

My stubborn biologist meets my eyes again with a look that’s afraid, annoyed, and relieved all at the same time. “I missed your terrible reassurances.”

I catch her wrist before she can pull away. “I missed you.”

My words are too rough and too blunt. I can lie under cover for fourteen hours and slow my breathing until I practically disappear, and I can put a round exactly where it needs to go while everything inside me is quiet and cold, but I don’t know how to tell Wren that missing her was like hunger. It was a constant gnawing ache that had me picturing this cabin every night and counting how many men were guarding her, and still I couldn’t get my mind to settle.

I don’t know how to explain that I’ve survived a lot of things, but wanting something as badly as I want her might be the thing that finishes me.

Instead, I say, “I kept thinking about coming back.”

Her lips part, and her eyes brighten, then she steps closer and presses her mouth to mine.

I breathe her in, and any part of me still trying to be careful gives up the fight. I cup the back of her head and kiss her like I’ve been thinking about this for three days, because I have.

Her mouth opens for me, and the sound she makes goes straight through me.

I back her against the sink without meaning to, and she digs her fingers into my shoulders, then up into my hair, her nails scraping lightly over my scalp. I groan into her mouth.

“Shower,” she whispers between kissing me back.

“Trying.”

She laughs, and I feel it everywhere. Then she pushes at my chest, and because it’s Wren, the only person outside my brothers I would let move me, I step back.

She turns on the shower, then faces me again, her fingers going to the hem of my thermal shirt that hangs loose on her body.

My shirt.“I like you in that.”

As steam starts to curl against the mirror, she pulls the shirt off, and my focus narrows.

She stands in front of me in nothing but her bra and leggings, her hair coming loose from her braid, her cheeks flushed, and I reach for her again.

I set a hand at her waist and stroke her soft skin with my thumb. “I thought about this, too.”

“On reconnaissance?”

“Before, during, after.”

She stretches to kiss me again. “That seems distracting.”

I kiss her back, deeper now, letting her feel the need that’s been building. It’s the kind of need I’ve always avoided, because wanting can become weakness, and weakness canbe exploited, but Wren doesn’t make me weak. She makes me more focused and present than I’ve ever been.