Page 69 of Billionaire Lumberjack's Bride

She stares at me, soft, pink, swollen lips parted slightly with her heavy breaths, not bothering to peek down to see what broke.

My head still spins, and I waver slightly as I squat and glance in the bag, pulling out the few things that are salvageable and putting them into the other one. “I hope you weren’t personally attached to this jar of pasta sauce.”

Lyla doesn’t respond, just continues to watch me with wide eyes filled with a tempest of conflicting emotions. I push to my feet and use my boot to kick the glass off the road so no one ends up with a flat tire if they come up here, especially me.

When I turn back, Lyla still hasn’t moved. She stands dumbstruck in the middle of the mountain road, her hands hanging limply at her sides.

Jesus Christ…

What the hell have I done?

I scrub a hand over my beard. “Get back in the truck, Lyla.”

She shakes her head like she’s trying to clear it, her eyes snapping back into focus on me. “What?”

I approach her slowly, trying to rein in my body before I have to climb into that enclosed space with her again. “Get. Back. In. The. Truck.”

It comes out low, almost like a snarl, and I can suddenly understand how she might think I’ve been angry with her. Anyone being talked to like that would assume the same. But like every single day since she arrived on my doorstep, it’s my own failure that’s pissing me the fuck off.

Why’d you kiss her again, you fucking idiot?

Why did you say any of that?

Clearly, living up here alone for so long has made me lose my mind.

No, this woman has.

I’ve become what everyone here has always thought me to be—the crazy, dangerous recluse. Lyla almost died on my watch, and I’ve pissed her off again enough to make her want towalkback to town. Which is almost as dangerous as trying to chase a damn goat into the woods after dark.

And then I went andkissedher to try to make her stay when all it really did was complicate things more.

She still stands immobile. Her gaze darts past me down the road toward town before moving back to the truck—like she’s weighing her options.

I point a finger at her, tightening my grip on the bag in the other hand. “Don’t even think about it.”

Her mouth opens like she’s about to argue with me, but I stalk over to her, drop my shoulder, and flip her up over it to carry her toward the truck.

“Hey, what the hell are you doing?”

She pounds at my back and tries to twist out of my hold, but I wrap my arm around her ass, holding her tightly to my shoulder.

“I’m making sure you don’t do something stupid, like try to walk back to town.”

“You can’t do this.” She flails her legs and tries to smack my back hard enough that it would hurt, but there’s very little that could faze me at this point in my life. “Let me go—”

“You are not going back to town, Lyla. Stop pretending you are.”

“Who the hell are you to make that decision for me?”

I get back to the truck, open the passenger door, and let her slide down to her feet. With my arm still wrapped around her, holding her body tightly against my own, she stares up at me, her eyes heated with anger.

“Yourhusband.”

She almost flinches at the word, like it’s something that shouldn’t be said, by me or anyone else. And maybe it shouldn’t be.

It seems to have become a weapon, something we throw around to make a point as opposed to being something sacred as it is intended to those who give a shit about the sanctity of marriage.

We both understand what this is, and it doesn’t matter that I’ve developed a soft spot for Lyla because it can never be anything else.Ican’t be anything else. I don’t know how to be.

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