Page 9 of Forgotten Mountain Man

I ignored the pulse of arousal that half-hardened my dick on sight and turned my back to her, taking a too-large step that towed her along behind me.

“Sorry.”

My next step was a touch shorter as I turned the corner beside the fridge that thankfully kept everything cold until this morning when I walked out into the rain and poured fuel into the jenny anyway, well before she woke up. It had been my mistake in letting it run down the week before.

“It’s okay. Thank you for showing me around. This is—” Her words and breath hitched, both, and she stopped talking for a moment. “Fucking amazing,” Faith breathed at my back.

Light fingertips pressed into my spine on either side of my spine as I stopped in the middle of the small row that traveled long into the mountain side that turned a sort of corner.

So did my house.

The outside kept along the flat rock. That’s where the bedrooms were, where we slept the night before. Hers bordered onto the rock face at the back, which was why it got cold in there. Not because of the exposure to wind, but because the rock itself seemed to leech a sense of coldness into the room beyond the plaster Jude insisted I use rather than leaving the bald rock as the wall like I’d wanted.

In case someone ever visited, apart from him.

Like who?I’d asked back then. He’d sent me a knowing glance, and I nearly cuffed the kid who'd grown up to become one of my closest—and only—friends.

Having Faith in my space now and giving her a tour hadn’t seemed like a really shitty idea—until this moment. Her tiny hands pressed insistently to my spine, flattening against my back. My muscles tightened beneath my shirt, I stiffened in place.

“What are you doing?”

She shifted and shoved and woman-handled me until her tight body slid right around mine—her hands wrapping right around my waist somehow in their own personal discovery orbit—until she stood at my front instead of at my back.

“You are a big boy, aren’t you, Walker Roan? Wow. That was a journey. Now, you can’t tell a girl there’s coffee and a secret cave in your house, and then stand between her and both of those things, can you?”

My lips twitched. “I suppose not.”

It had been so long since I interacted with a woman—and certainly never a woman like Faith Somerset—that I’d forgotten what flirting felt like. It wasn’t like I didn't sort out my ownphysical needs when they hit me. I was a man like any other, and I took care of the urges as they came on. But having her in my space, so close, so tiny and soft and goddam tempting, smelling like my own damn soap and shampoo like I’d personally branded her and she had let me when she showered and used my shit last night—that was a different sort of torture.

One I liked way too fucking much.

She’s not staying. She can’t and she won’t if I ask her to stay.

And she'll annoy the shit out of me after more than a day.

I knew that last would be the truth. It was one of the reasons I left everyone else to their own devices—quite literally—and the world, and discovered my own personal slice of it. Plus, from what she’d told me earlier Faith had her own little setup down the mountain. She’d never leave that for a man like me.

My heart panged at the thought. An organ I long forgot resided within me. Hell, I didn’t even know how old she was. Thirty, maybe? That had to make her ten years or so younger than me.

She nodded decisively. “Good, then.”

Her tone caught me off guard. “Good, what?”

“I’ll go wandering. There’s no bears back here, right? Or traps?”

I smirked. “Don’t fall in the pool.”

“The what?”

I leaned against the shelving that held my beer and waited. Her footsteps, already light as she padded barefoot away from me, grew faint. I counted in my head, then my brow furrowed as nothing came back at me. Wait. Maybe she had fallen in. What if?—

“Faith?” I started forward, pushing myself off the shelfs with a burst of breath as my chest tightened at the thought of something happening to her on my mountain. The vision of yesterday, her car that could have had her in it tumblingbackward as I grabbed for her though she’d never been in any danger, thank Christ, strangled my heart. “Presh, tell me you?—”

“Holy fuck, big boy. You have been holding out on me.” Her voice echoed weirdly along the tunnel that I’d dug all the way to the hot/cold springs that gave me a source of freshwater as well as a therapeutic spa bath.

Coach lanterns I’d rigged up on wires kept the light dim but the tunnel usable.

“Don’t drink it, small town girl,” I warned as she dangled her toes in the hot pool, ignoring the cold ones where my taps ran from on the right, and a deeper one I used to wake myself up with occasionally. “That one is purely for bathing in.”

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