Page 90 of Major Love

A mountain bear documentary? While we’re in the mountains?!

I sit bolt upright as he chuckles, his gorgeous eyes crinkling at the sides.

“Jason!” I exclaim, giving him a rough shove against his pecs.

He grunts and chuckles harder, reaching up to gently cup one of my wrists in his hand.

“Kidding, baby,” he murmurs, those dark pupils glinting playfully.

“Not funny!” I tell him, although I can’t help but laugh a little.

My eyes flick toward the end of the truck bed, half-tempted to bolt back into Jason’s house so that I’m not out here in the open – you know, with themountain bears. But Jason immediately reads my mind, lifting his large torso higher up and dropping his heavy forearm over my shoulders.

“I’ve never had a mountain bear come anywhere near here,” he reassures me, angling his laptop in my direction so that I can type in whatever I want to watch.

I look up at him warily for a moment before turning my attention to the keyboard.

“Never?” I ask.

“Never,” he repeats, and that arm around my shoulders draws me closer to his warm chest. Then he clears his throat and mumbles quietly, “May have had a wolf come around every now and then, but–”

“What?!” I exclaim.

“But it’s just the one,” he continues. “And we’ve got a mutual understanding of each other.”

“Jason!” I laugh. “How on earth can you know that it understands you? Oh my God, what if it comes tonight?” I ask, starting to panic.

I peek over the truck’s side-panel and Jason chuckles, his big palm caressing my shoulder.

“What if it’s here right now?”

“Yeah, I’m sure that it wants to watch a movie with us,” he drawls teasingly, flicking a glance at the series that I’ve pulled up on the screen.

It’s my favourite cowboy drama and it’s one of the only things that I watch in my downtime, because the Western vibes of the show remind me of the bar I owned in Nashville.

Between managing the finances, keeping on top of the staff, organising weekly country singers, and making sure that the bar was the perfect hideaway, I had virtually no time off back in Tennessee.

But this was the one show that I would sometimes treat myself to.

“It’s a good show,” I tell him quickly, and he offers me a comforting rub at the nape of my neck.

“Never said it wasn’t,” he rumbles, his deep voice turning gentle, that thing he sometimes does when he’s trying to show me how tender he can be. “If you love it, I’ll love it.”

“What if the wolf loves it, too?”

Jason throws a hand over his eyes, groaning with laughter as his large chest shakes, and his warm body shudders against mine, making my stomach flutter because we’re so close.

It makes me bite back a smile of my own, and I move a tiny bit closer against him, wanting to stay in the warm embrace of his biceps for the whole time that we’re out here.

He drops the hand from his eyes, smirking down at me before hitting play, and then the projector illuminates the sheet in front of us, stalling slightly as his internet connection takes a moment to strengthen. But then it starts playing the first scene and it’s the perfect match for where we are.

Jason grunts as the opening scene ends, leaning a millimetre closer to my cheek so that he can murmur, “Shit’s kinda dark.”

I laugh quietly at that, snuggling more comfortably against his chest, and his arm tightens around my shoulders, his fingers playing absentmindedly with my fluffy ponytail.

“Just wait,” I whisper back to him, although I’m not entirely sure why I’m whispering, seeing as it’s just the two of us out here. Unless the wolf is out here too, in which case it’s the three of us.

Jason makes a gruff sound as he stretches out against the pillows behind us, using his free hand to grab one of the quilts under his jeans and drape it over my chest.

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