Page 37 of Naughty With The Mountain Man
I blink. “So it’s over.”
“It’s over,” he confirms. His gaze slips to Micah, then back to me. “We’ll keep eyes on the center while the dust settles. You won’t walk into that building without a shadow for a while. You good with that?”
“Good with overkill.”
“Overkill’s my love language,” he deadpans.
Greta smothers a smile behind her cup.
They talk logistics. I half listen. The rest of me is occupied with cataloging the small, useless details: the way sunlight hits the dusty windows, the scuff on Nate’s boot, the exact weight of Micah’s presence next to me, steady as gravity.
A deputy brings my bag from the van—my bag—and I swallow hard. There’s glass in the fabric and someone else’s footprints on the strap, and I want to set it on fire and buy my life new.
“Ready?” Micah asks.
I realize he’s talking to me. “Yeah,” I say. “I think so.”
We drive back to the cabin in a convoy—Dixon’s Tahoe in front, Nate behind. The roads are clearer now, sky a pale winter blue that looks breakable if you stare long enough. Micah doesn’t talk. He keeps one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the console between us. Close enough I could reach it if I wanted to hold on.
I want to hold on.
Instead, I tuck my hands under my thighs like a child who doesn’t trust herself near cookies.
The cabin looks the same and not—the broken window is boarded, the generator hums a little louder, the garland I hung over the mantle droops at one end like it’s as tired as I am. Ranger greets me with a full-body wag and a woof that sounds suspiciously likenever do that again, tiny human.
“Hey, buddy,” I whisper, burying my face in his ruff. “I missed you too.”
We do the aftermath shuffle: statements by the fire, a promise from Dixon to swing by later, Nate’s reminder to call if I so muchasthinkI saw a shadow I didn’t like. Then the door shuts, and it’s just… us.
Me.
Micah.
Silence.
I turn the cocoa cup slowly in my hands until the cardboard feels flimsy. A hundred things crowd my throat. Thank you. I’m sorry. I was scared. I’m in love with you and I don’t know what happens now.
What comes out is: “I guess I can go home.”
Micah’s posture doesn’t change, but something in his eyes does. He nods once. “You can.”
I laugh, and it sounds wrong, brittle. “Wow. Try to contain your excitement.”
His mouth tightens. “That’s not what I—Ellie.”
“Look, I know I’ve been an imposition.” The words tumble, fast and clumsy, a hand-me-down speech I didn’t know I’d rehearsed. “I mean, I’ve been camped out here for days, disrupting your routine and your quiet and your sacred couch-floor rotation, and I—” I wave a useless hand. “You can have your house back. Your life back. I’ll get out of your hair.”
There’s a beat of pure, stunned silence.
Then he says, very carefully, “Out of my hair.”
“I mean—yeah.” I stare hard at the cocoa cup. “You like being alone. You said so. And this was… we were… I don’t know what we were. I don’t want to assume.” My chest pinches, stupid andsoft. “I don’t want to be the girl who mistakes adrenaline for… something else.”
“Ellie.” My name in his mouth is a low warning and a prayer. He takes a step closer, then another, until I have to tip my head back to meet his eyes. “Look at me.”
I do.
He looks like a storm built a man and then taught it how to be gentle.
