Page 16 of The Mountain Man's Prize

"What happened to your face?" she asks suddenly, fingers reaching up to trace the scar that bisects my eyebrow, then the one at the corner of my mouth. "These are old."

The question catches me off guard, opens a door I've kept firmly closed. But her hands on me, her care for my wounds, her earnest eyes—they disarm me in a way I never expected.

"My father," I say, the words falling from my lips before I can stop them. "He had a thing for belt buckles. And rings. Anything that would leave a mark, really."

Her eyes widen, fingers stilling against my cheek. "Beau..."

"He was a mean drunk," I continue, unable to stop now that I've started. "And a meaner sober man. My earliest memory is hiding under the bed while he threw my mother against the wall for burning dinner."

"I'm so sorry," she whispers, and I see tears gathering in her eyes—tears for me, for a child who learned to fear his own father's footsteps.

I shrug, an attempt at nonchalance that doesn't fool either of us. "Ancient history. He's been dead fifteen years."

"How did he die?" she asks, voice soft but steady.

I meet her gaze, unflinching. "Prison. Shanked in the yard during a fight. He killed a man in a bar brawl, got twenty years. Served three before someone put a sharpened toothbrush through his eye."

She doesn't recoil from the brutality of it. Doesn't offer platitudes about how awful it must have been, or how I must have felt. Instead, she asks the question that matters.

"Is that why you're here? Why you left the world behind?"

A bitter laugh escapes me. "Partly. But no, that came later." I take a deep breath, feeling the weight of secrets long carried alone. "I was in the military after high school. Special forces. They liked that I could take a beating and keep going. That pain didn't register the same way for me."

Her hand tightens on my knee, an anchor as I drift through memories I've tried to bury.

"I was good at it. Too good. They sent me places... had me do things..." I shake my head, unwilling to burden her with those particular horrors. "When I got out, I couldn't adjust. Couldn't sleep. Couldn't be around people without seeing threats everywhere. One night, I almost killed a man for bumping into me at a bar. Just... snapped. Saw my father in the mirror afterward, blood on my knuckles, that same look in my eyes."

"So you ran," she says softly. Not an accusation. A understanding.

"I disappeared. Bought this land with my military pay. Built this place with my hands. Taught myself to live off the grid, away from people I might hurt." I look around the cabin—the home I've created, the sanctuary that's kept me sane. "Out here, there's no one to trigger those instincts. No crowds, no sudden movements, no threats. Just silence and survival."

"Until me," she says, a question in her voice.

"Until you," I agree, reaching out to touch her cheek. "I don't know why it's different with you. Why I can bear to be touched. Why I crave your closeness instead of fearing it. But from the moment you fell into my arms, something...changed."

Tears spill over, tracking down her cheeks. She turns her face into my palm, pressing a kiss to the center. "You're not your father, Beau. You're not a weapon, either. You're a man who survived. Who built something beautiful out of a lifetime of pain."

Her words crack something open inside me—something I've kept sealed and buried since I first set foot on this mountain. Before I can stop them, tears blur my vision, the first I've shed since I was a boy too small to defend himself.

She rises from her knees, moving to sit in my lap, careful of my injured leg. Her arms go around me, pulling my head to her chest, cradling me like something precious as the dam breaks, years of solitary pain flowing out in silent, shuddering waves.

Her lips press against my forehead, my temples, the scars that map the violence of my past. Each kiss feels like absolution, like acceptance of every broken, jagged piece of me.

"You beautiful, broken man," she murmurs into my hair. "Thank you for letting me see you. All of you."

I clutch her to me, face buried in the curve of her neck, breathing in her scent like it's the only oxygen that can fill my lungs. In this moment of raw vulnerability, of exposed wounds deeper than the ones she just bandaged, a truth crystallizes with perfect clarity.

She holds my heart now. This woman who fell out of a storm and into my life, who sees the monster I could become and the man I'm trying to be, and chooses to stay anyway. Who kisses my scars like they're badges of honor instead of marks of shame. Who cries for the boy I was and holds the man I've become.

"Lila," I breathe her name like a prayer, like salvation. "My little dove."

"I'm here," she says, fingers combing through my hair, soothing away decades of loneliness with simple touch. "I'm right here, Beau."

And for the first time since I can remember, the silence in my head is peaceful. The demons quiet. The past, if not forgotten, at least temporarily irrelevant in the face of her presence, her acceptance, her care.

I lift my face to hers, needing to see her eyes, to make sure she's real and not some hallucination born of pain and blood loss. What I find there—compassion without pity, strength without hardness, and something else, something warm and growing and profound—steals what little breath I have left.

"Stay with me," I whisper, the words both plea and promise. "Not because I'll keep you here. Not because I need you. But because you choose me, knowing everything."

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