Page 52 of Snowed In with Benefits

He’s quiet for a moment, then he does something I wasn’t expecting. He keeps talking.

“He used to leave notes in my lunch. Even when I was too old for it, even when I was sixteen and mortified. Little scraps of paper with terrible jokes on them. What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear.” He shakes his head, and there’s the ghost of something on his face that might be a smile on a less guarded man. “I found a whole stack of them in his desk after he passed. He’d written them out in advance. Months’ worth. Like he knew he wasn’t going to be around to hand them to me, but he wanted to make sure I still had them.”

My throat tightens. I know that kind of love. I know it so well it makes my chest ache.

“My grandma was like that for me,” I tell him, touching the locket around my neck. “She used to braid my hair every morning before school. Even when I was old enough to do it myself, even when I told her I could handle it. She’d just pat the chair and say sit down, baby, let me have this. I didn’t understand it then. I thought she was being stubborn. Now I think she just wanted to have that quiet time with me before the day took me away from her.” I run my thumb over the locket’s worn surface. “I miss her every day. Some days it’s a dull thing, like background noise. Other days it hits me so hard I can’t breathe.”

He looks at me for a long moment, longer than he’s ever looked at me before. His eyes are soft and warm, and there’s a look of recognition hiding under his beard, something unguarded and real that I don’t think he shows to many people. The moment passes slowly this time, not quickly, like neither of us wants to be the one to break it. Then he drinks his coffee, and the wall goes back up, and he’s as gruff and silent and closed off as ever. But the wall isn’t as high as it was before. I can tell.

I get myself another cup of coffee and sit with him. That’s all I can do to honor him opening up to me, just sit here with him and be present. I’d like to do more, but we aren’t at that place. Not yet, maybe not ever. He’s a secretive man, the epitome of a mountain recluse, and I’m sure he just tolerates my presence here the best he can. If I were to do something forward, put my hand on his, offer him a hug, he’d probably retreat even farther.

So I sit in silence with him and sip my coffee. He does the same. The silence isn’t awkward or uncomfortable… it just is. The way the walls are just wood, the way the yard is just covered in snow, the way the birds just find the best pinecones to pick at. It’s a quiet fact without moral weight.

We’re still sitting there when the guys come back in. They come in voice-first through the back door, breaking the silence with humor.

“Nice trick with the twine,” Hunter is saying. “You learn that in prison?”

“I’ll show you what I learned in prison,” Beau growls back.

My heart stutters. What?

I stand up as they come into the kitchen, my heart racing, my skin flushed. Beau meets my eyes from across the room, dark and intense as always. Fear almost sends me back to my seat, but lines have already been crossed between us that can’t be uncrossed. I walk around the table, my eyes still locked on his. He doesn’t move. He stands there, waiting for me, like he knows what’s coming.

“You’re a felon?”

He hesitates. His eyes shoot from me to Hunter to Emmett and back. He swallows, then nods. “Yeah.”

I stare at him. My heart is thundering in my chest. This man was inside me last night. This big, scary-looking man who I convinced myself was safe enough to fuck, was inside me, had physical power over me, and I had no idea. No idea about his past. No idea who he really is, no idea that he’s a fucking felon. I take a step back, letting him walk fully into the kitchen. He moves reluctantly.

“I—I need to take a walk.”

I can’t seem to catch my breath. I shove my feet into someone’s boots and pull on someone’s coat, then head out the back door, slamming it behind me. I gulp the fresh, cold air and look around, searching for a direction.

The cold hits my lungs like a slap and I welcome it. I need it. I need something sharp and real to cut through the fog in my head. The boots are too big, Emmett’s probably, and my feet slide around inside them with every step. The coat smells like woodsmoke and pine and something else, something warm and male that I can’t place and don’t want to think about right now.

The barn. The barn with the saggy roof and the apartment inside. I march through the deep snow, heading for the shelter of it. The snow is up past my calves and every step takes effort, my sore muscles screaming at me, my thighs burning in a way that has nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with last night. I keep going. The barn isn’t far but it feels far, the way everything feels far when your brain is running faster than your body can carry it. My breath comes out in white clouds that disappear before I can count them. The sky is that flat winter gray that makes it impossible to tell what time it is, like the whole day is holding its breath, waiting for something to happen.

I need space. I need to think.

Forgetting what we did last night is off the table now. Now, I need to contend with what I’ve done.

22

BEAU

“Son of a bitch,” I mutter under my breath as I watch her through the window. My stomach is in knots. Screw it. I don’t care. I shouldn’t have to care what she thinks of me. She’s just a stranger who crashed our cabin. She’ll be gone as soon as the roads clear. It doesn’t matter if she knows about my conviction, and it sure as hell doesn’t matter what she thinks about it.

I grab my coat. I open the back door. It doesn’t matter. She can have her little pouting session or whatever it is she’s doing. She can go ahead and sulk. It’s no skin off my nose.

I follow her outside, my boots crushing the shape out of her footprints.

I don’t care. I don’t. There’s nothing in this world that can make me care what some random woman thinks of me. She can scream, she can cry, she can do whatever she wants with the information. It doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter at all.

She went to the barn. There’s an apartment in there, a small, bare-bones space with a cot, a wood stove, and some storage. It’s a nothing space, just like her opinion of me is a nothing opinion. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t.

I open the barn door, the little one, the one sized for humans and not animals or machinery. She’s standing in the middle of the cold room with her arms crossed, breathing hard. Her back is to me. I let the door swing shut, announcing my presence without saying a word. She whirls on me.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.” Her eyes are shining and her cheeks are red. She looks like she’s about to cry or kill somebody. I can’t actually tell which.