Page 5 of Craving the Mountain Man
She steps closer, and now we're toe-to-toe. I can smell her sweet scent, as heat radiating from her body seeps into mine and as I watched the pulse fluttering at the base of her throat.
Her voice drops to barely above a whisper. "I want real. I want messy and honest and maybe a little rough around the edges." She looks up at me. "I want you. I want someone to show me how not ‘vanilla’ I am."
I curse and step back, because if I don't, I'm going to do something we both might regret. I'm going to back her against the counter and kiss her until she can't breathe, until she's making those little sounds I've been imagining since she walked through my door.
"This isn't going to happen," I lie.
"Because you don't want it? Or because of my brother?" she asks, chin tilted in that stubborn way that tells me she already knows the answer.
I say nothing because the truth is written all over my face.
She nods like that's all the answer she needs. She knows I want her, but this is just a week and her brother is like family to me.
She turns and walks away, slow, hips swaying like she knows I'm watching.
And I am.
God help me, I am.
I watch until she disappears down the hallway, until I hear the soft click of her bedroom door closing. Then I drain the rest of my beer in one long pull and set the bottle down harder than necessary.
One week.
I'm never going to survive one week.
Chapter Three: Evan
Idon't sleep.
Not a damn minute.
Every time I close my eyes, all I see is her. I hear her voice and feel the heat of her breath when she leaned in and told me what she wanted.
Me.
Fuck.
I've been staring at the ceiling for hours, watching shadows shift across the wooden beams. The same ceiling I've looked at every night for most of my adult life, the one that's always brought me peace. Tonight, it feels like a prison.
My body is wound tight as a coil, every muscle tense with want and frustration. I'm thirty-two, not a teenage boy, but I'm harder than granite and every cell in my body is screaming for her. The smart part of my brain, the part that's kept me alive in these mountains, that's helped me build a life on my own terms, is telling me to pack her bags myself and drive her back to the city.
But there's another part, a darker part that's been buried under years of solitude and self-control, that wants to march down the hall and finish what we started in that kitchen.
I told myself no. I meant it.
At least, I thought I did.
But it's morning now. Dawn starts to creep in. I can hear birds calling to each other in the pines, the distant sound of the creek running behind the house. Normal sounds. Peaceful sounds.
Sounds in my kitchen.
Fuck. She's in my kitchen.
I can hear her moving around down there, the soft pad of bare feet on hardwood, the quiet clink of ceramic. She's probably wearing that damn shirt again, probably with no fucking underwear.
Fuck it. I'm about to make the biggest mistake of my goddamn life.
I sit up, running both hands through my hair, trying to find some semblance of control. Three years. Three years I've been telling myself that isolation was better than complication, that wanting someone was just another way to get hurt. Three years of convincing myself that I was better off alone.
