Page 63 of Snowed In with Benefits

Something burns in my chest when she pouts her pretty lips at him. Her brunette curls are peeking out from under her hood, and her hourglass shape is apparent even under her thick clothes. She’s clearly flirting. Throwing herself at him. The touch on his arm is lingering, her fingers curling around his bicep like she’s done it before, like she has the right to do it.

Emmett, stone-faced as usual, steps outside and picks the packages up. The other two fall in behind him, picking up the things he couldn’t grab. She barely acknowledges them. She only has eyes for Emmett, and that makes my shoulders tight.

I watch from the doorway as they bring the packages inside. Denise follows, her boots clicking on the hardwood, her perfume cutting through the familiar scents of the cabin. She smells like department store samples and hairspray, and it’s wrong in here. It doesn’t belong. This house smells like woodsmoke and pine and coffee and the faint ghost of whatever Hunter cooked last night, and her perfume is an invasion.

I don’t like her. The thought arrives fully formed and I don’t even try to argue with it.

“I have your invoice here,” she says, batting her eyes at him again. What kind of overt flirting is this? She leans into his space, touching his arm again, and holds the invoice just out of his reach. If he reaches for it, his arm will be around her. She’s angling for it. She’s doing it on purpose.

Emmett doesn’t reach. He just stands there, stone-faced, and I can see the discomfort in the set of his shoulders even if she can’t. I know him now. I know what his silence means when it’s comfortable and what it means when it’s not, and this silence is not comfortable. He doesn’t want her touching him. He doesn’t want her in his space. He’s too polite to say it, or too unused to saying it, or too something, and she’s taking advantage of that.

Something hot twists in my gut. I can feel it building, this ugly, possessive thing that I have absolutely no right to feel. He’s not mine. I have no claim on him. I bandaged his hand and he made me hand balm and we shared a moment in his workshop and none of that gives me the right to feel what I’m feeling right now. I know that. I know it with my whole rational brain.

My rational brain is not in charge right now.

She leans closer. Her fingers trail down his forearm. She tilts her head and smiles up at him through her lashes, and I can see exactly what she’s doing because I’ve seen women do it a thousand times at Preston’s parties. The calculated tilt, the practiced pout, the way she’s making herself smaller so he feels bigger. It’s a performance. It’s a transaction dressed up as attraction, and Emmett deserves better than that.

He deserves someone who sees the rough pieces on the back shelf. Someone who understands that his silence isn’t emptiness, it’s fullness, it’s a man who feels so much that he had to learn to be quiet just to survive the weight of it.

Before I can think, I’m crossing the room and getting between them. I look her dead in the eye, fuming. “Did you come up here to do business or to flirt?”

The words come out harder than I intended. Sharper. They come out like I mean them, because I do.

Denise blinks, surprised. She looks from me to Emmett and back. Her eyes do a quick calculation, the kind of math that women do in an instant, measuring the distance between two people and the heat in the shorter one’s eyes.

“Sorry,” she mumbles. “I didn’t realize you were taken.” She shoves the invoice at me. I take it. She leaves and I shut the door behind her a little harder than I have to.

The click of the latch is the loudest sound in the world.

The room is silent. All three of the guys are staring at me as I’m standing here, invoice in hand, breathing hard. The atmosphere in the room is palpable, something living and so silent I can hear the rattle of my own heart thundering in my chest.

What did I just do?

I step aside, giving Emmett space, not looking anybody in the face. My hands are shaking. The invoice is trembling in my grip and I press it flat against my thigh to make it stop. I don’t know what came over me, but I do know that they all witnessed it and they’re all processing it the way they process everything. Silently.

The silence stretches. I can feel it pressing against my skin, heavy and expectant, like the air before a thunderstorm. I’m replaying what I just did on a loop. I crossed the room. I got between them. I looked that woman in the eye and I said those words and I meant every single one of them and now I’m standing here with the evidence in my hand and there’s no way to take it back.

I don’t want to take it back. That’s the terrifying part.

Next phase is⁠—

“The hell was that, Goldilocks?” Hunter asks, grinning.

Yep. The shit-giving. That’s step two in the processing SOP around here.

“I just—I know Emmett doesn’t like to be crowded and she was all up in his space and he wasn’t responding and she wasn’t getting the hint.” My cheeks flush and I’m flustered. The words are coming out too fast, tripping over each other, piling up like a traffic jam. “That’s all it was, it’s not like that—it’s not like I—” I close my mouth, cutting off the words I’m stumbling over.

I can hear how I sound. I can hear the desperation in my own voice, the frantic scramble to build a wall between what I did and what it means. I sound like I did when I was trying to explain to my mother why I ran from the wedding. I sound like someone who knows the truth and is terrified of it.

“Uh-huh,” Beau says dryly.

His tone says everything. Two syllables, loaded with the kind of knowing that makes me want to crawl under the couch and never come out. He’s not buying it. None of them are buying it. I’m not even buying it.

“Look, it’s not like that. I mean—she was wrong. I know Emmett doesn’t want me like that, she just misinterpreted my intentions, that’s all.”

I’m offering him the exit. I’m handing it to him on a silver platter, gift-wrapped and tied with a bow. All he has to do is grunt. One of his little grunts, the kind that means “correct” or “agreed” or “let’s move on.” That’s all it would take to put this whole thing back in its box and close the lid and pretend it never happened.

I expect Emmett to agree. To give me one of his little grunts. But he doesn’t.