Page 48 of Devoured By the Forbidden Mountain Man

For a while there was only the rush of the shower and the sound of both of us trying to breathe normally.

Then she turned in my arms.

Wet hair clung to her shoulders and breasts, and her smile was so relaxed that I wanted to kiss it off her face.

So I did.

“We should probably wash now,” she said when I finally let her breathe.

“I thought we did.”

Georgia looked down at us, then at the soap still sitting untouched on the ledge.

“Not exactly.”

We laughed, and the rest of the shower was ordinary in a way that affected me almost as much as the sex.

I used Georgia’s soap because mine was at the house. I worked conditioner through the ends of her hair after she complained that the water pressure made rinsing it take forever. She scrubbed a patch of shampoo from behind my ear and informed me I would have gone to work like that if left unsupervised.

By the time we stepped out, the mirror was completely fogged and whatever schedule Georgia had imagined for the morning had moved by at least twenty minutes.

She didn’t seem concerned, and neither did I.

Georgia dressed while I pulled yesterday’s black henley, dark jeans, and boots back on for the short walk to the house. The morning was cold enough after the steam that she tucked her hands into the sleeves of her chocolate cardigan. Beneath it she wore a fitted sienna sweater with dark jeans and boots, warm colors that made her skin look richer against the silver light outside. Her hair remained damp down her back.

Once we were inside, I traded yesterday’s black henley for a slate one and pulled on a brown flannel before she informed me the combination worked with the gray in my beard.

I chose not to ask how long she had been considering my wardrobe.

The kitchen windows had begun to catch brief slices of sunlight as the clouds broke apart over the mountains. Water still shone on the gravel between the house and field office, but the pines looked darker and sharper after the storm.

Inside, the refrigerator offered actual choices.

Two mornings ago, breakfast would have been whatever I could construct out of eggs and stubbornness. Now Georgia warmed the last of the roasted sweet potatoes and peppers while I cooked eggs and started coffee. Bread went into the toaster. There was fruit on the table before either of us thought about it.

We moved around one another without discussion, Georgia reaching behind me for a plate while I shifted automatically to give her room. At one point she opened a cabinet and pulled out the coffee mugs without looking.

I noticed because I had lived in the house five years and no one else had learned where I kept anything long enough for the movement to become automatic.

Georgia caught me watching and lifted her eyebrows. “What?”

“Nothing.” I handed her coffee before she could interrogate me.

We carried breakfast to the table.

The conversation stayed mostly with the day ahead. Georgia explained that the Lantern House owner wanted her to look at the arrival schedule because too many people were due through the rear service entrance within the same thirty-minute window the next afternoon. She wasn’t going back to redo yesterday’s work, and I could hear the difference in how she described the problem. She had already stopped treating the restaurant like someone else’s mess she was temporarily helping with and started thinking about what tomorrow needed in order to run.

“He’s nervous,” she said as she cut into her eggs. “That makes people want to rearrange things because action feels better than waiting. Half the setup is already right. What he needs is somebody willing to tell him not to fix what isn’t broken.”

“You’re good at knowing which things need touching.”

Georgia looked at me over the rim of her coffee mug, and the sentence suddenly sounded considerably less innocent than it had in my head.

I laughed. “Breakfast.”

Georgia went back to eating, still smiling. “Very responsible.”

I had spent years taking meals at that table without remembering them afterward: coffee before sunrise, takeout containers opened beside a laptop, whatever I could eat quickly between one job and the next.