Page 19 of My Mountain Man Stalker
“I can’t sleep.” I let my hand slide higher, over the steady drum of his heart, up along the strong column of his neck until my thumb finds the edge of his jaw. His stubble is grit and heat beneath my skin. “I keep thinking about how close your mouth is.”
He closes his eyes. Just for a second. When he opens them, they look like rain over dark water. “You’re younger than me.”
“I know.”
“I promised him.”
“I know that too.”
He swallows, and I watch his throat work. It steals my breath.
“What would you do,” I whisper, “if you hadn’t promised?”
His fingers tighten at my waist, enough to send a spark racing up my spine. His restraint feels like a physical thing in the room, hot and bright and coiled tight between us.
“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to,” he says.
“I want to hear you say it.”
He holds my gaze for a long, breathless moment, and then the truth breaks out of him, low and molten. “I’d put you on your back and take my time.”
The words set me on fire. I feel them everywhere—skin, blood, the tender place just behind my ribs. My hips shift without permission, a slow, seeking roll that drags soft heat across the line of his thigh. The sound he makes is barely there and still manages to light me up like a match.
“Wren.” This time, my name is a promise.
“I’m not asking you to break anything,” I say, breath shaky. “Just—be here. With me. Let me feel you.”
His palm slides from my waist to the small of my back. He doesn’t pull me in; heanchorsme, hand warm and heavy,holding me exactly where I am. The permission is all I need. I hover a heartbeat above his mouth, and when I finally brush my lips over his, it’s so soft, so careful, it almost hurts.
He doesn’t move.
I kiss him again, a little firmer, tasting the ghost of coffee and the heat of his breath. Another pass, slow, patient, like learning the shape of a word I’ve wanted to say for years.
“Please,” I whisper into his mouth.
That breaks him.
His hand spreads against my back and draws me in, and then he’s kissing me like he’s been starving under his own skin. It’s not gentle, not after the first beat—his mouth opens over mine and the sound I make is shameless. He swallows it, consumes it, answers it with a hunger that matches the worst of mine. His tongue slides against mine and control shatters in the most beautiful way.
I’m straddling his hip without remembering how I got there, knees sinking into the mattress on either side of him, the thin barrier of cotton useless against what’s happening under my skin. His other hand comes up, fingers threading into my hair, tipping my head so he can take more, deeper, until the edges of the room blur and there’s only heat and pressure and the clean, dizzying taste of him.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my mouth, and the way he says it tells me how close he is to not being able to.
“I won’t.” My answer is breath and want.
His chest pushes into my palm with every hard beat. I slide my hand down, over muscle and heat, over the flat plane of hisstomach where his shirt has rucked up, skin against skin. He sucks in a breath that punches straight through me.
He rolls, a controlled shift that puts me beneath him without pinning me. He braces on his forearm so his weight doesn’t crush me, the other hand still cradling the back of my head. He kisses me slower then, like he’s tasting a sunrise he didn’t think he’d live to see, like patience is the only way this can end without burning the whole mountain down.
“Wren,” he murmurs, as if my name belongs in the space between every kiss. “You don’t know what you do to me.”
“I’m learning.” I arch into him, not shy about what I want him to know. “Teach me.”
He huffs out a laugh that sounds like surrender and restraint braided together. His mouth leaves mine to trace a line along my jaw, down the side of my throat. Each press of his lips is deliberate, reverent. When he reaches the hollow at the base of my throat, he lingers, breathing me in like I’m oxygen after a long dive.
My fingers curl in his shirt. I don’t want distance. I don’t want daylight. I wantthis, the heavy, honest weight of him, the way his self-control shakes and still somehow holds.
He lifts his head, eyes searching mine. “If we keep going, I won’t be the man I said I’d be.”
