Page 51 of Dahlia Made A List

I looked at the top of her head from where I’d ducked down to grab a paper towel from the roll we’d apparently knocked off the table to the floor. “What?”

She pushed upright, rolling to her side on the table to face me. Splotches of bright pink filled her face, her neck, her chest. She held one arm over her breasts, as if I hadn’t just seen her tits rocking a minute ago.

“Outside. There’s a shower. It’s super cute. Come with me?”

This was the moment. The moment when I needed to remind her what we just did together wasn’t anything.Just a fuck. My coming like a fucking freight train meant nothing and I needed to be headed back down the mountain so I wasn’t hiking an unfamiliar trail in the dark.

Because she and I? We didn’t have any kind of future. After all our time together, I didn’t think she’d settle for what I could offer.

Instead, I stood with a grunt. I dropped the used condom wrapped in a paper towel into the trash, adjusted my dick back behind my jeans, and held out my hand. “Show me.”

With a grin, she hopped down, pausing at the door to the yurt to check the trail for hikers, then darted bare-assed around the back, dragging me in her wake. Her ass jiggled as she hustled around the curve of the canvas building. Desire and some feeling I shied away from naming kept every muscle in my body this side of too tight.

At the perimeter of the deck, someone had built a nice round shower stall. Dahlia scooted inside, twisting knobs and getting the water going. I shucked my jeans, tossing them across the nearby chair, added my boots, and then squeezed into the little space behind Dahlia. Warm water coasted over us from a rainfall showerhead, the sound of the water splashing to the stones under our feet filling the quiet.

“I probably shouldn’t have let my hair get wet. I didn’t bring any shampoo.”

Her gloomy mumble tugged a smile to my lips. “There’s some in my pack.”

She brightened, bumping her tits against me as she wiggled. My breath hitched in my chest.

“Really?” she asked.

I grunted. Before she could dart out of our little shower, I blocked her way. “Stay here.”

Naked as a jaybird, dripping water and sporting half a woody, I retrieved my pack from where I’d dropped it on the trail and took it inside the yurt. A minute later, I returned to Dahlia with travel size shampoo and conditioner. As she finished her shower, I toweled myself dry with one of the towels I’d pulled from the pack, tossed the other on the nearby chair and pulled on a pair of gray boxer briefs. Then I leaned against the shower, my eyes drinking in the sight of Dahlia in all her glory. Water cascaded over her as she tipped her head back and rinsed her hair. Her breasts, lush and full and just as amazing as I’d known they would be, swayed with her motions.

I should be dressing and heading back down the mountain and to the truck.

But my eyes refused to budge from Dahlia. And when she stepped out from under the water, her luscious body glistening beneath the mountain sunshine, I held up a towel. She snatched it from my hand before half-hopping, half-skipping across the deck and back into the yurt, her eyes avoiding mine the whole time. I popped my jaw and followed her inside.

She stood over her bag where it sat on the table, her chin against her chest to hold the towel up as she yanked out clothes. She fumbled with a pair of pants, but when she dropped a skimpy pair of pink underwear for the second time, I muttered a curse and stepped forward.

“Give me the fuckin’ towel, Dahlia.”

Bright red flagged her cheeks and still she ignored me. With a grunt, I crossed my arms over my chest as she dropped the towel and wiggled into underwear, pants, a matching lacy pink bra that made my fingers itch, and a long-sleeved shirt. When she dragged the chair from the table closer to the unlit wood stove, and took a comb to her colorful hair, I sighed. Loudly.

“The thing’s not even lit.” The growl in my voice would have sent most people scurrying for cover.

Dahlia didn’t even look up. “I realize that, Wyatt. But sitting so close to your moody glare was singing the ends of my hair.”

My lips twitched, but I turned away before the twitch turned into a full-fledged grin. I grabbed a couple logs from the pile of firewood outside. We were getting warmer weather during the days, but the nights still turned chilly, especially as far up the mountain as we were. By the time the sun set, she’d be shivering in that fuckin’ chair and refusing to admit a damn thing.

Back in the yurt, I rifled through my pack, tossed the sleeping bag and rolled up mat onto the rough wooden platform in the shape of a bed, and pulled out the crap I needed to get the wood stove going.

And she sat, sliding a comb through her pretty hair, her motions slow and methodical. For once, no chattering commentary describing antics from her roller derby practice. No random observations about the residents of Weston Mill from her walks home. No questions about her upcoming driving test that she already knew the answers to.

A little flame licked at the small twigs and sticks I’d stacked in the stove from the basket beside the wood stove. I poked it, stirring up more crackling and popping as the fire took hold. The noise drowned out Dahlia’s quiet but I rubbed down the irritation building at the back of my neck.

“Are you going to get dressed or what?”

I shot to my feet, naked other than my boxer briefs, and stared steadily through the little window on the stove at the growing flame licking and spitting around the logs. The fire would grow, the logs consumed and heat would fill the room. She’d be comfortable for several hours, at least.

“Or are you going to stay, Wyatt?”

The question burned over me like the fire in the stove; the answer as inevitable as the logs being consumed in the blaze. I rolled my shoulders.

“I’m gonna get you set up.”

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