Page 16 of Brooding Mountain Man

“You just left,” she said. “You checked out. You didn’t tell anyone where you were going. I didn’t even have your phone number.”

She said all that staring straight ahead, but I didn’t need to see her expression to know she was hurt. The last thing I’d ever want to do was cause her pain.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I freaked out.”

That was the best way to describe it. “Triggered” was the word people used for it these days. All I knew was waking up to an empty room frightened the hell out of me. It made me realize just how vulnerable I’d made myself to this woman.

“People leave,” I said. “They’ve left all my life. I learned not to get too close to anyone because I’d only get hurt.”

“And you think because I wasn’t there when you woke up, I left you?”

Now she looked over at me. The spark in her eyes showed me just how fired up she was. I wanted nothing more than to kiss her right now, but we had to resolve this first.

“When I woke up to find the room empty, all I knew was I had to get out of there,” I said. “You’d be at the front desk soon, so I checked out before you could show up. Alex tried to talk me out of it, but I told him I’d found somewhere else to stay.”

“I left to go home for a fresh change of clothes,” Georgia said. “When I saw you’d checked out, I assumed…”

She didn’t finish that. She didn’t have to. I knew exactly what she’d assumed. She’d assumed her first time had been a one-night stand. And considering the many women I’d slept with in my younger years, I couldn’t blame her. I’d done my fair share of sneaking out of bed in my time.

“I have a lot of healing to do,” I said. “I’ve known that for years, but I had nothing pushing me to get fixed. Not until I met you.”

Get fixed might be the wrong term for it. Wasn’t that what they said about dogs? I didn’t want to be fixed in that sense. In fact…

“I want a wife, a family, all of it,” I blurted. “But only if I can have it with you.”

Her mouth slowly spread into a wide smile, and my heart felt like it was finally beating again. Everything was going to be okay. Now that I’d found Georgia, my life could begin.

EPILOGUE

LUCKY

“Are you sure there aren’t bears? I really don’t want to get eaten tonight.”

I smiled at my wife’s question. This wasn’t the first time in our ten-year marriage that we’d been camping, but it was the first time without the kids. Maybe when they were with us, she was too focused on them to worry about the strange sounds that came from the woods when things got quiet at night.

“No bears,” I said, zipping the tent flap shut. “Just a man who wants to kiss every square inch of your body.”

She was seated on top of her sleeping bag, rubbing lotion on her hands—her usual nighttime ritual. Normally, she was sitting in front of the vanity in our bedroom when she did that, our kids asleep down the hall.

This weekend, our kids—two girls, aged seven and four—were spending the weekend with their cousins. Not their cousins on Georgia’s side, although they were close to those cousins as well, but my birth mom’s sister’s family, who’d become like family to us. We even spent Thanksgiving with them a few months ago.

“You know we can zip these sleeping bags together,” I said.

She looked down. “I might need you to keep me warm, especially once I get rid of this.”

And with that, she lifted off the oversized, long-sleeve tee she’d been wearing and tossed it behind her, baring her beautiful breasts. My cock immediately jumped to attention. It had already been stirring as thoughts of getting her naked ran through my brain, but she’d done part of the work for me.

Smiling, I grabbed my own sweatshirt and jerked it up over my head, tossing it to the ground before unbuttoning my jeans. We’d just arrived a few hours ago, and those few hours had been filled with hard work as we set up the tent and got a campfire going for roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. My skills in that area had improved since the first time.

“I’ve been thinking about doing this since we dropped the kids off in Raleigh,” she said.

The drive hadn’t been too bad—less than a few hours—but I’d been occupied with thoughts of getting her naked too. “You should’ve said something. I would have found a place?—”

“I wanted to do it here. In the woods. Surrounded by nature.”

We’d had plenty of good times in my truck—both on logging sites and while driving around town. More than once over the years my wife had pulled out my cock while we were driving. With two kids, we’d learned to work in sex where we could get it.

“Mmm,” she said, luring me out of my thoughts.

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