Page 7 of Bone to Pick
“Porter!” I grabbed his hood and hauled him back toward the safety of the house. “Porter,come on.Move!”
I’d only managed to pull him a few stumbling feet before he lost his balance and fell on his ass, knocking me backward. Both of us hit the snow-covered driveway with jarring force. Before I was able to process more than stunned surprise, a shower of snow fell from a nearby tree, and anothercrackrent the air, this one followed by a horrific series ofpopsas a giant tree halfway down my driveway fell toward us in slow motion.
We sat there frozen, watching in horror as the thick branches of the falling tree landed against the smaller tree beside it. For a second, it felt like the whole world went motionless, as if someone had pressed pause on a video. Porter and I each held our breath, waiting. Then the branches of the second tree gave way with a shower of white snow pellets. The tree landed with a dramatic crash lengthwise up the driveway, its heavy branches scattered atop and beside it so that it almost looked like the forest had reclaimed the land. The tips of the closest branches landed maybe six feet away… exactly where Porter had been before I grabbed him.
Porter’s breath came in soft pants, and he turned his head so his wide eyes met mine. “This… was not on my disaster bingo card.”
“No,” I agreed, probably looking just as wide-eyed and panicky as he did. “Mine either.” And fuck had that been close. Even just a few feet nearer and someone would have been injured. “Come on,” I growled. “Back inside, immediately. The cabin was built with a reinforced roof.” And now I understood why my grandfather had insisted on that.
But it occurred to me as soon as Porter pushed open the door to the house and we stood shivering on the braided rug in my tiny living area that while we had possibly avoided death-by-tree, we had not fully avoided disaster.
Not by any means.
My grandfather and I had designed this cabin to be his retirement escape. The place he’d called his “hermitage.” I hadn’t changed much when I inherited the place because as far as I was concerned, the small, square, single-story cabin had everything a person required in a dwelling—a kitchen area in the front right corner with a small table, an area in front of the fireplace just big enough for a comfortable reading chair and hassock, an updated bathroom supplied by an enormous hot water tank, and a sleeping area with a queen-sized bed and armoire. Best of all, the entire wall around the fireplace and all the way back to the sleeping area was lined with bookshelves—enough to hold my grandfather’s entire collection of scientific tomes and some of my precious first editions.
But, I was realizing way too late, what the cabin didnothave was a convenient guest bed.
Or a sofa.
Or any fucking privacy whatsoever.
“S-sorry,” Porter offered. “I’m r-really,reallysorry.”
“Me too,” I gritted out.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.” He looked at me with those big, green eyes, now shiny with shock instead of tequila, and his huge frame shook.
I was freezing myself, and I wasn’t the one who’d drunk enough alcohol to float a barge. Didn’t alcohol make it harder to regulate body temperature? I sighed. “Look, go take a hot shower, and I’ll make some tea to warm us up while we figure out a way to get you home. Unless… do you even drink tea?”
Of course he doesn’t drink tea, Theo. He’s built like the offspring of Paul Bunyan and the Rock. He probably drinks raw eggs and hot sauce—
“Fuck, yeah, I love tea!” he said earnestly. “My uncle Drew makes a blend with star anise and organic dried apples that…” He cleared his throat and hunched his shoulders. “You, ah… you probably don’t care about that right now, I’m guessing?”
I snorted. “Look who’s sobering up.”
I grabbed my largest pair of sweatpants and an oversized sweatshirt from the armoire and turned to hand them to him, only to find that he’d followed me to the back of the house and was standing way too close, right between me and the rumpled bed I’d been sleeping in just a little while before.
I stared at him. There was no doubt Porter Sunday was a beautiful man. Even when he’d been arguing with me in class last semester, that big, capable body, shiny brown hair, cherry-red lips, and ridiculously green eyes sparking with challenge had been temptation incarnate. And now, all damp and uncertain, he was…
Ugh.
“Shower, Sunday,” I croaked. “And throw your clothes out of the bathroom so I can put them in the dryer. Show me you can follow simple directions.”
Before I lose control entirely.
Porter’s eyes met mine. “I follow directions really well, Dr. Hancock,” the man said softly. “You just have to tell me what you want.”
I was sure he didn’t mean to throw around that fucking sexy voice, to have his words come out in a breathy rumble that vibrated directly through my bones and down to my cock…
But like so many things with Porter Sunday, what he intended didn’t matter when the result was so unavoidably, cataclysmically terrible.
I clenched my hands behind my back and tilted my head expectantly. He gave me a sweet, almost sheepish smile, then turned and went into the bathroom. A second later, his clothes—including my jacket—hit the bedroom floor with a dampplop, and then the bathroom door closed again.
As soon as I heard the water running, I sank onto the edge of the bed and let out a shaky breath.Right. Okay.I had dealt with lots of unexpected and difficult situations before—my grandfather’s death, the slow implosion of my last relationship, my parents’ perpetual disappointment over my career choice—and I’d managed to handle all of them deftly and responsibly, without losing control.
I would handle this, too.
First things first, I stripped out of my own wet pants and, darting a look at the bathroom door to make sure it stayed closed, quickly changed. I collected the wet clothes and brought them to the small laundry machine in the kitchen area, then set the kettle on to heat and grabbed my phone to quickly google my options.
