Page 3 of Under The Mountain Man’s Spell

He didn't answer. His eyes went down the red dress and back up, slow, and his mouth opened and nothing came out of it. I had never once seen Grayson Carter short of words. Finally he asked, low and rough, "Do I know you?"

"No," I said, which was the truest thing available. "Nobody here does." I set my cup on the hay bale by the flap and held out my hand, palm up. "Dance with me."

He looked at my hand for the length of a breath. Then he took it.

The band was partway through something slow, and he walked me onto the boards and put one hand on my waist. The heat of it went straight through the dress. His other hand closed around mine, rough and dry, and he didn't pull me in. He left an inch of air between us, the same inch he kept at council, and I decided right then that the inch was coming with me or it wasn't.

Over his shoulder, Wyatt stood at the edge of the floor in a bandit mask with a cup in his hand and his mouth open. Then he grinned, wide and slow, and said something to Mia that made her turn and look.

"Your friend's enjoying this," I said.

"He's been telling me to dance for two years." His thumb moved once on my waist, and I felt him catch himself doing it. "Not usually my thing."

I didn't tell him how long I'd wanted to. I closed the inch instead, stepped in until my breasts pressed against his chest and his stubble was at my temple, and he stopped breathing for a second. Then his hand spread wide on the small of my back, and he breathed again, and the canvas and hay and warm bodies smell of the tent went away under the smell of him, soap and clean cotton.

We turned in a slow circle, and every step I took, I took a few inches toward the back of the tent, away from the torches, until the string lights gave out and the canvas wall was at my shoulder blades and the only light was what reached us from the band. He let me lead him there. He had to know what I was doing, and I wanted him to.

The song ended. He didn't let go of my waist.

"I came here for one thing," I said, "and it isn't the punch. Take me home. Tonight I'm exactly who I look like."

He went still, the way he did at council when something hit him hard. Then he reached up and tucked a wave of my hair back from the edge of the mask, rough fingertips grazing my cheekbone. Heat ran down my neck and along my spine, and my nipples tightened under the thin red fabric.

"That punch." He kept his voice down. "How many?"

"One cup. Forty minutes ago. I could pass a field sobriety test and name every cranial nerve while I did it." I swallowed. "Ask me the real question."

He looked at me a long moment, dark eyes steady behind the mask. "Do you know what you're doing, sweetheart? Because I don't do halfway. Say it plain."

Sweetheart. Two years of being just Molly, and that one word in that low voice ran down my bare back like his hand already had. I made myself hold his eyes and showed no fear.

"I know exactly what I'm doing," I said. "I want you. None of it is the punch."

I watched the words hit him, and he rocked back on his heels. Then he took my hand, swallowing it in his warm, rough one, and led me along the canvas wall and out the back of the tent, past the generator and into the cold. The night air hit my bare arms, though I barely felt it. Frost was coming, and the grass had gone stiff under my heels. Behind us the band swung into something fast, and I didn't look back once.

His truck sat at the dark end of the lot. He opened the passenger door and handed me up into the cab like I might break, which nobody had ever once assumed about me, then shut it and walked around the hood while I pressed my hands flat on my thighs so he wouldn't see them shake. My pulse was going everywhere at once, in my ears, my throat, my chest. I'd spent three weeks planning this, and I hadn't planned for the terrifying sound of the driver's door closing and shutting the two of us in together.

Chapter 3

Grayson

The woman beside me kept her hands in her lap for the first mile. Then she slid one across the seat and rested it on my thigh, light and sure, and left it there. I kept both of mine on the wheel, because if I touched her before we got to the cabin I wasn't going to stop, and I didn't take mountain roads in the dark with a woman in my lap.

By the second switchback her thumb had started moving, a slow back-and-forth just above my knee. By the third, her fingers had crept an inch higher. Cold air came through the cracked window carrying cut corn and frost, and under it, much closer, the warm, clean smell of her skin and a trace of Mia's punch every time she turned her head. My cock was pressing hard against my zipper, and her hand was six inches from it and knew exactly what it was doing.

"You move that hand any higher," I said, "and I'm pulling over."

"Is that a threat?" Her voice came out of the dark low and warm and amused, and a little too even, as if she were holding it down on purpose.

"It's a promise. Your call, beautiful."

She slid it up another inch and left it there, fingertips resting on the inside of my thigh, and I made the last two miles in about half the time they should have taken. By the time my headlights swung across the porch my pulse was roaring in my ears like I was first through a door, and I couldn't remember the last time anything off the job had done that to me.

I hadn't brought a woman to the cabin in years. That was policy, though I'd never written it down. The cabin was mine the way the job was mine, private, and I waited for the old alarm to go off as her heels clicked up my porch steps. It didn't. When I let us in and reached for the switch, her hand caught mine in the dark.

"Low," she said. "The fire's enough. And the mask stays on."

The flat way she said it brushed against something familiar, and I let it go past. Her voice was pitched low, held there a shade too carefully, and the mask and the dark made sense of that. A woman set on staying a stranger would hide her voice along with her face. She'd set a term, and I could keep terms. "The mask stays on," I agreed, and I fed the stove until the flames climbed and the room went amber and moving. When I turned around she was watching me the way I'd been trying not to watch her all night, and my mouth went dry.