Page 17 of My Mountain Man Stalker
But she shifts a little closer anyway.
“Is this okay?” she whispers.
I turn my head. Her eyes are open, shining in the dark.
“Yeah,” I say, voice low. “This is okay.”
She lays her head on my shoulder.
And just like that, I stop breathing.
Her hand rests against my chest, right over my heart, and I know she can feel how fast it’s beating. How loud.
“I feel safe with you,” she murmurs.
And that breaks something in me.
Not because I doubt it.
But because it matters more than it should.
I wrap my arm around her, just once. Just to hold her.
And I don’t let go.
8
Wren
At first, I just listen to his breathing.
Slow. Heavy. Controlled—like everything about him. My head is on his chest, and every rise and fall rocks me the way the ocean used to when I was a kid and my dad took me out in the old aluminum boat. Back and forth. Safe and sure. Except nothing about this feels like a childhood memory.
It feels like teetering on the edge of a cliff and loving the drop.
His T-shirt smells like smoke and pine and something darker, something that belongs only to him. My palm is splayed over his sternum, and beneath my fingers his heart pounds, steady but a little too fast. For a second I wonder if he knows how loud it is. How loudIam. How everything inside me is thundering toward a decision I can’t walk back.
“You’re not sleeping,” I whisper.
“No.”
The word rumbles through his chest.
“Because of the noise?” I ask. “Because you heard something?”
A beat. “Because you’re in my bed.”
Heat unfurls low in my stomach. I don’t move, but I feel every inch of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the dense weight of his arm draped around me like a band of iron. He’s not squeezing, he’s justthere, an unspoken promise across my waist.
“What was it like?” I ask softly. “Growing up.”
He doesn’t answer at first. Normally, this is where he would go quiet, change the subject, get up and find something to fix that isn’t broken. But he breathes out, slow, and lets the truth leak past his guard.
“Loud,” he says. “Small house. Too many tempers. Not enough money.”
“Brothers? Sisters?”
“Older brother. Left when I was fifteen. Haven’t seen him since.” A pause. “Should’ve left with him.”
