Page 79 of Shared By the Mountain Men

“Oh.”

“It kind of threw me for a loop.”

“Sorry.”

I felt him shrug. “It helped me figure some stuff out.”

“Like what?”

He squeezed his arms around me tighter. “You talk too much. My alarm goes off in fifteen minutes. Let’s enjoy this.”

“Deal,” I said.

Itwasnice to cuddle with the huge man; my body fit perfectly inside his like it belonged there. I was actually dozing off when his alarm did go off, as promised.

“Do you have to go?” I murmured.

Ash climbed over me in the tent and kissed my temple. He was wearing only a tight pair of navy blue boxer briefs, which gave me quite the show as he unzipped the tent and climbed out. The tent flap stayed open enough for me to watch him walk across the field and jump in the river. He immediately got out and strode back to me, steam rising off his body as the water evaporated.

“How are you not freezing?” I asked when he returned.

He grabbed a towel from the clothes line and began drying off. “My blood’s hot.”

From my warm little cocoon, I enjoyed the sight of him getting dressed. Then he leaned inside, brushed away a lock of my hair, and kissed me softly on the lips.

He hesitated, as if there was some deep battle within his soul. Then he blurted out, “The sight of you laying there makes me want to skip work.”

“When are you free?” I asked.

Ash clenched his jaw. “Tomorrow morning. I’ve got two mountain biking lessons, then a double-shift at Marlene’s.”

“How about lunch tomorrow, then?” I asked.

“We’ll see,” he replied, but there was a hint of a smile in his dark eyes.

He lowered the tent flap, started the truck, then drove away.

Noah made me pancakes for breakfast. While we ate together, I stared at the man and marveled at how he was nothing like I expected. When I first met him, he seemed like a straight-laced doctor. Warm and friendly, but not too adventurous.

Then he goes and suggests a wild threesome with sex acts I never evendreamedabout. It was a layer of delicious complexity that made him so much more attractive.

He dropped me off at my cabin on the way to work at the clinic. Jack wasn’t anywhere in sight, which I was relieved about. The last thing I wanted was his judgmental gaze watching Noah and I share a goodbye kiss.

I felt like a modern, sexually-liberated woman as I took a shower. And I wasn’t even talking about the threesome or other stuff we had tried last night. I’d never evendatedtwo men at the same time. All of my relationships were linear: I would date one guy, eventually break up, and then have a couple of months of buffer time before I started dating again. There was never any overlap with men.

But now that was different. Waking up in bed with one man, then cuddling with another in a sleeping bag a few minutes later. Noah and I had gone out several times, while Ash and I had just the single sexy interaction last night. But the way he pulled me into his sleeping bag and held me like I belonged to him… it hinted at something more. If something more was even possible with a man like him.

Regardless, I hadn’t realized it could be this way. It was surprisingly liberating. The kind of independence and freedom I was looking for when I came out here to Colorado, although obviously in a different context than the hike I had planned.

I don’t want to go home to Ohio.

The thought drifted across my mind while I toweled off. I didn’t feel like going back to Ohio. It wasn’t something I’d thought about until now, but the idea began to take root.

It was tempting, but too crazy tolegitimatelyconsider. I was a completionist. Even as a little girl, if there was a jigsaw puzzle that my mom and I had started, I had to sit down and finish it even if it took until midnight.

I needed to finish my hike and go home, like I had planned.

I was having so much fun here in Crested Butte, though. Maybe it wasn’t that I didn’t want to go home to Ohio, but rather I wanted to stayherelonger. That seemed much more doable. Why not stay in Crested Butte an extra week or two, just to make sure my ankle was healed?

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