Page 41 of Forbidden Protector

Her thumb stays on the skin as she holds my gaze. A gust hits the barn broadside hard enough to bow the wall. The heifer calls once from inside, and the finch abandons the wire, and neither of us pulls back.

"This doesn't mean what you think it means," she says.

"It means exactly what I think it means."

"Then we have a problem."

I turn my arm so her hand slides down to the inside of my wrist, where the pulse is. And I hold it there.

"We've had a problem since the airport, Mackenzie."

Her fingers tighten. The wind pushes her hair across her mouth like it did in the snow over Jacob, and this time I reach over and move it back.

She lets me, and that is worse than all of it.

She doesn't let go.

TWELVE

MACKENZIE

Twice.

The word wakes me up the same way it put me to sleep, and my body hasn't stopped arguing about it since.

My thighs are raw from his jaw. Three days of stubble dragged up and down the insides of them while he took his time, agonizingly slow, patient as a man who'd said he would be and meant it.

Every time I shift in these sheets, I feel him there again and my hips roll before I can stop them. The muscles low in my stomach keep clenching around nothing, squeezing, and reaching for him.

The second time was supposed to prove the first was nothing and it did the exact opposite.

I lie in his guest room and listen. The house is empty.

He's been in the calving barn since midnight. Roy came for him, he pulled his boots on and went out without a word, because cows don't check the clock before they decide to labor, and calving season on a ranch this size means a man sleeps when the herd lets him and not a minute before.

Which means he's not here.

I go upstairs.

The loft stops me before the bedroom does.

The whole west wall is glass, floor to ceiling, and one mountain fills the center of it. I have no name for it. It stands apart from the rest of the Front. A single peak rising higher than everything around it, snow-loaded, its east face catching the first grey light while the wind tears snow off the summit in long white swirls that stream out against the dark sky behind it like smoke off a candle.

It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen and it does not care that I am looking at it. A deep couch faces it, worn in the right places, and more books stacked on the floor beside it. This is where he sits. This is the view he built this house around.

His bedroom door is open. I don't know if he left it that way on purpose or if it's habit. I step through it before I can talk myself out of the crossing.

Sparse, clean, the bed made with military corners even though he left it at midnight.

I should not be here. My heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth, and I keep one ear on the mudroom door the whole time. If he walks in right now, I have no story that survives the telling.

The closet first. Shirts on hangers, all dark, the kind of order that says a man decided a long time ago to stop thinking about what he wears.

Then the bathroom. And that's where it gets me.

Ombré Leather. Dark glass bottle on the counter beside a straight razor and nothing else. Of course a man who says four words a day keeps a bathroom with two things in it.

I pick it up, bring it to my face, and breathe him in with my eyes closed and my back against his bathroom wall. It hits me so low and so hard that I have to press my thighs together just to stay upright.