Page 25 of Snowed In with Three Mountain Men

CALLUM

“You sure youshould be going out there?” Charli hisses from behind me as I pull back some of the branches so I can get a better look at what’s going on.

I nod. “I need to make sure we’re okay,” I murmur. Moving the cover I placed over the entrance, I stick my head out and look this way and that.

I can’t make out anything in the forest right now—not a sound. Which is entirely wrong. Even when there are no people out here, there are always animals and various critters rustling about and making noise. But all of them have taken off after the shooting earlier, and now this place is silent. It doesn’t sit right with me. Whoever spooked them must be close enough to keep them hiding out, and we would be smart to do the same thing.

I slip back into the hollow beside Charli—she’s lit by the moonlight filtering through the branches, and her eyes are wide, her face pale. I can’t say I blame her. After what happened out here, she’s right to be scared. I know I should be too. But all I can focus on is how she’s doing, whether she’s alright.

I notice that she’s trembling as she sits beside me—I’m not sure if it’s the cold or the shock, but either way, she needs help.

I put my arm around her and pull her in close.

“Hey, hey,” I murmur. “You’re okay. You’re safe.”

“But whoever that was?—”

“Whoever that was, they’ve given up on looking for us for now,” I assure her. “And they won’t have found the cabin. It’s too deep into the woods, and the opposite direction to where they saw us running.”

At least, that’s what I hope. If they made it back to the cabin, I have no doubt that Chuck and Dax would have dispatched of them with a quickness—we keep guns in the house, though locked away at all times. Not that I’m particularly worried about whoever is after her getting a bullet to the head, but I don’t feel like explaining what a dead body is doing on our property to anyone who might have heard the shots ringing out.

“Right,” she breathes, and she rests her head against my shoulder. I can feel the tension in every inch of her body, and I rub my hand along her arm, trying to soothe some of it, though I doubt it’s going to change much.

“Thank you,” she murmurs, after a long pause.

“For what?”

“For saving my life,” she replies. “I—I wouldn’t have known what to do if it had just been me. I’ve never…”

She trails off. Her voice sounds a little hazy, distant, as though she’s struggling to stay in the here and now. It’s one I recognize all too well—both from myself and from my brothers.

“Hey, you’re okay,” I promise her, tightening my grip on her slightly. “You’re safe. You’re here with me, and nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“I’m so sorry,” she gasps all of a sudden, a sob wracking her whole body. “I—I should never have let you take me in. I should have left. I should have?—”

“You did exactly what you needed to do,” I tell her, and I reach for her face, guiding her gaze around to me. “Hey. Look at me, Charli.”

It takes a second for her eyes to focus, but after a few moments, she manages to meet my gaze.

“I don’t know who’s after you,” I admit. “And I don’t know when they’re going to stop. I know they’re dangerous, and I know you were right to run when you did. And I know that I’ll do anything to keep you safe. You hear me? Anything.”

Finally, something seems to soften in her. She reaches up to touch my face, her fingertips lingering on my cheek for a moment.

“I know,” she murmurs back. Her fingers continue their journey across my face, brushing over my lips, and my mouth parts. I can feel the coolness of her fingertips on my skin, bringing me back to a moment when we were together before. The way she’s looking at me, the care in her eyes, the trust…it’s not until this moment that I realize how much I’ve missed it.

Before I can think twice on whether or not this is a good idea, I pull her into my lap, push my hands into her hair, and kiss her for the first time in four years.

The moment our lips meet, it’s as though all that history between us has just fallen away. We could be at the very beginning of our relationship again, not hiding out in the hollow of a tree running from someone who’s trying to kill her.

She sinks herself down on top of me, legs on either side of mine, my comically large boots sitting on the soft earth beneath us. The scent of cold dirt fills the air, something fresh and rich and fertile, full of the promise of something new. And as my tongue slips past her lips and into her mouth, I can’t focus on anything else but how badly I want her, and how deeply I need to make her mine all over again.

Her hands slide down the front of my body, over my torso, and rest on the hardness swelling beneath my pants. She lets out a little gasp against my lips as she feels it, and my mind floods with memories of how she used to do this before. I grab her hips and pull her down onto me, letting her feel how hard I am for her already, and she moans against my lips, a smile crossing her face for a moment as she quickly tugs down the zipper of my pants.

In the small space, it takes a little fumbling for us to get undressed enough to do what we need to do—and it’s still so cold that I can’t exactly strip her down naked like I want to right now. But I don’t care. As I loop an arm around her waist and press my mouth into her neck, I can feel the throb of her pulse beneath my lips, her hand lacing around the base of my cock to hold me in place.

Shifting forward, she moves so that she’s hovering just above my erection—and without taking her eyes off me for a moment, she slowly begins to lower herself down on top of me. The feeling of her warmth and wetness wrapping around my cock out here in the cold of the forest is the most goddamn electric thing I have ever felt in my life. I let out a growl, grabbing her hips again andpulling her down onto me, needing to feel her exactly as I used to.

“Oh God,” she gasps, pressing her forehead to mine. There’s barely room for us to move in here, but it just seems to make every movement even more intense. I begin to grind my hips against her, stirring my cock within her and massaging every inch of her from the inside out—reminding myself how fucking perfect she is when she’s on top of me, when I’m inside of her. We fit together like we were meant for this, and I can’t do anything but let the sensations take control of me, our breath mingling in short gasps in the small space between us.

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