Page 68 of Snowed In with Benefits

The memory of Hunter and Beau watching—talking dirty, the bulges in their pants thick and hard as their eyes tracked my every movement—fills my head. They want me. They want more. If I’m honest with myself, I want more too. I want all of them, over and over again. I want Hunter’s mouth on me while Emmett holds me down. I want Beau’s hands on my hips while Hunter whispers in my ear. I want things I don’t even have words for yet, combinations and configurations that my brain is only now starting to assemble, and every single one of them makes my pulse quicken and my face burn.

But that’s not the deal.

Sighing, I get up. There’s a small pile of clothes on the chair by the door, clean and folded. I stand there looking at them for a moment, my heart doing something complicated in my chest. Another one of Emmett’s shirts, a flannel that comes down to my knees. I pick it up and hold it against my face before I put it on. It smells like his workshop, like pine shavings and beeswax and something warm underneath that’s just him. His contribution to my comfort after a night of raw passion.

A pair of Hunter’s sweats, soft from a hundred washes, the elastic a little loose, the kind of pants that have been loved into submission. A sign of his care even after watching me get fucked by his friend. I step into them and roll the waistband twice so they stay up.

A t-shirt that has to be Beau’s, because he wouldn’t be left out if they were all contributing to my wardrobe for the day. I’ve seen him wear it. It’s dark gray, a little faded at the collar, and it fits me like a dress. I layer it under Emmett’s flannel and look down at myself. I’m wearing all three of them. Every piece of clothing on my body belongs to a different man, and the intimacy of that hits me harder than I expected. They’re all taking care of me in their own ways, attending to my practical needs after having me in the most intimate way. Even after having my world turned upside down and inside out by Emmett’s sex, I don’t feel used. I feel catered to, and it’s not something I’m used to feeling. I slide into my own socks, the only thing on my body that’s actually mine, then slip out of the room.

I can hear them in the kitchen as I head down the stairs and my heart pounds a little faster. Something about the morning after still makes me nervous, even after being with all three of them. I’ve never been this vulnerable with anybody, and being this vulnerable with a group makes me feel… something. Not afraid, not really. Adrift. Reliant. At their mercy. It’s not a bad feeling, but it is a new one, and I’m not sure what to do with it.

I pause on the stairs, listening to them, trying to read their tone before I go down. I can’t pick up on any tension from here. They’re bantering like they always do, Hunter with his emotive words, Beau with his stoic ones, Emmett with his monosyllabic grunts. They’re the same as ever. I don’t know if that should comfort or disturb me. Part of me wants them to be different. Part of me wants to walk into that kitchen and see something in their faces that says last night changed everything, that the world shifted on its axis and they felt it too. But these are men who throw food at each other the morning after a threesome. These are men who argue about fence posts while I’m upstairs cataloguing bruises. They process things differently than I do, or they don’t process them at all, and I still haven’t figured out which one it is.

How are they going to react to me now, though? Are they going to be weird about it, now that they’ve all had me? Hunter and Beau were quiet about it before, and I know at least some of that was because they didn’t want to shove it in Emmett’s face, but Emmett’s part of it now. Are they going to use it against me? Will they look at me differently? Taking a deep, steadying breath, I decide to face it head-on. Whatever is waiting for me in the kitchen won’t kill me. Probably.

They’re already eating breakfast. There are four cups of coffee on the table, and one of them is done up just how I like it, a little milk, a little sugar, stirred until it’s the color of caramel. The little attention to detail warms my heart and soothes my anxiety all at once and I smile at Hunter as I sit down. I know it was him, the same way I know it was him who made breakfast. Eggs and toast and some kind of hash that smells incredible. He smiles back and gives me a little wink, and the normalcy of it, the sheer ordinary sweetness of a man winking at me over breakfast, makes my chest ache in the best way.

“How are you feeling?” Emmett asks, his voice low and meant just for me. He’s watching me over the rim of his coffee cup, his gray eyes softer than usual, searching my face for something. Pain, maybe. Regret. I don’t know what he expects to find, but whatever it is, I hope he doesn’t find it.

My cheeks flush and I look down into my coffee. “I’m good,” I tell him. “A little sore, but good. Very good.” I take a drink of my coffee before I can start babbling about how good sore is better than bad sore, but I’m sore all the same, and the soreness is a reminder that I don’t want to stop being reminded of.

Hunter grins. “Emmett couldn’t stop checking on you last night,” he says. “Apparently he thinks his dick is so powerful that it could actually break you.”

Emmett scowls and throws a crumpled napkin at him across the table. I smother a laugh, not wanting to make Emmett feel bad for that because honestly, I’m touched. He was looking out for me, making sure I was okay. It warms my heart, and my smile lingers even if the laughter didn’t make it out of my mouth. I picture him standing in the doorway of my room in the dark, listening to me breathe, making sure I was still in one piece. The image does something to me that I’m not ready to examine.

“He checked on you three times,” Beau adds, almost smiling. “I counted.”

Emmett’s scowl deepens. “She was out cold. Someone had to make sure she was breathing.”

“She was breathing fine,” Hunter says. “She was snoring.”

“I do not snore,” I protest, even though I have absolutely no idea whether I snore or not. Preston never mentioned it, but Preston also never stayed awake long enough to notice anything about me that didn’t directly affect him.

“You snore a little,” Beau says. “It’s cute.”

My face is on fire. I bury it in my coffee cup and take a long drink, letting the warmth of it settle me. When I come back up, Beau is at the window, looking out at the snow glittering under the clear sky. He sips his coffee, looking like he’s lost in thought. I catch his eye and give him a questioning look. He tips his coffee cup toward the window.

“Weather’s clearing up,” he says. “Might be able to do some work on the barn today. It’s not just the roof that’s worn out.”

The words land in my stomach like a stone. Weather clearing up. Barn work. These are practical things, reasonable things, the kind of things that people who live on a mountain say to each other on a clear morning. But underneath the practicality is the thing none of us are saying. Clear weather means open roads. Open roads mean I can leave.

“It’s not clearing up that much,” Hunter says quickly, glancing at me. “I mean, it hasn’t snowed in a few days, but it could always snow today.” There’s a careful optimism in his tone, a cheerfulness that’s almost ironic. He’s not talking about the weather. He’s talking about me staying.

“Hunter,” Emmett grunts.

“I’m just saying, there’s no rush to… fix the barn,” Hunter says, obviously not talking about the barn.

I bite my lip. The weather really is clearing up, and it’s stayed clear for a couple of days now. The guys said I could stay even after the roads opened, and I still don’t know exactly where I’ll go when I leave, but at some point I will have to leave. This place is a bubble, a warm, safe escape from the wreckage of my real life, and every bubble has to pop sometime. I can’t hide inside it forever. I don’t have a job. I don’t have a plan. I have a car with no snow tires and a suitcase full of clothes meant for a tropical honeymoon and a locket from my grandmother and a camera full of pictures of three men I’m not supposed to want this badly.

But I can stay for a little while longer. What would I even do if I stayed here? My cheeks heat up again as the answer comes to me in a rush. Them. That’s what I’d do, in a universe where I could have anything I wanted and we didn’t have a one-time agreement, I’d spend the next however long doing them. All of them. In every combination. In every room of this cabin, on every surface, against every wall. I’d let Hunter take his time with me in the morning light. I’d let Beau pin me against the bathroom door. I’d let Emmett bend me over his workbench and I wouldn’t even care about the sawdust.

I’m spiraling. I can feel it happening, the heat climbing up my neck, the thoughts getting more vivid, more specific, more impossible to put back in the box. I take a sip of coffee and try to think about literally anything else.

Hold on a second. The one-time rule was mine, wasn’t it? I’m the one who said it, every time. The guys just agreed to it, that’s all. If I want something else, I can just say something else, can’t I? I could… if I had the nerve. Do I have the nerve?

I set my coffee cup down. My hands are shaking slightly and I wrap them around the warm ceramic to hide it. The guys are still talking, something about the barn roof and whether the supports need replacing, and I’m sitting here having a crisis of courage over my scrambled eggs. The old Josie would never. The old Josie would smile and nod and file this away in the drawer marked “things I want but will never ask for” and close the drawer and sit on it. The old Josie would be grateful for what she got and never, ever push for more, because pushing for more is greedy, and greedy girls get punished.

But the old Josie also stayed with Preston for years. The old Josie also walked down an aisle toward a man she didn’t love because it was easier than admitting she wanted something different. The old Josie’s judgment is not to be trusted.