Page 5 of Marrying the Mountain Man

That soldier’s betrayal had hit hard, though. I had nowhere to turn, no one to trust. I got the hell out of the military at the first opportunity and never looked back.

“A military job placement recruiter sent me here,” I said. “I didn’t think about it being a town full of soldiers, all thinking we have some sort of brotherhood. I don’t want that kind of brotherhood.”

“You need me to be the social butterfly between the two of us.” She smiled. “Befriend the other wives, change your reputation around town.”

I turned and walked toward the living room. Hopefully, she’d follow, and we could get comfortable on the couch. That might lead to us gettinghorizontalon the couch, but I wanted to take things at her pace.

If they went at my pace, I’d have taken her right here on the living room floor almost as soon as the front door closed.

Smack-smack-smack. That was the sound of her flip-flops, bouncing against her heels and getting louder behind me. She was following. I smiled and plunked down on one end of my three-cushion couch. She could take the other end, but I’d sure like it if she chose the center cushion. Maybe one thing would lead to another…

“It’s not like we’re on base with a bunch of military wives,” I said. “You know as well as anyone that there’s a shortage of women around here.”

“And a ton of hot, desperate men,” she said.

She walked around the side of the couch and sat firmly on the far-right cushion. Damn it. Too far away from me. She crossed her legs and stared forward, holding the bottled water close to her chest. After hesitating a few seconds, she touched the skin just above her right breast with the bottom rim of the bottle, like she was trying to cool down. All it did was heat me up.

“I’d hardly call us desperate.” I forced my stare to the pitch-dark big-screen TV in front of us. “I just moved up here six months ago, and nobody seems all that desperate to me. Sure, we all need to get laid every now and then.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to stuff them right back in. Crap. The last thing I wanted to do was scare her off.

“Sorry,” I rushed to say before she could get offended.

But when I looked over at her, she was staring at me with a big smile, her head tilted to the right slightly. “I might be a virgin, but I’m not a child. So, what do you do when you need to…get laid?”

The words seemed classy coming out of her mouth. My cock stirred, pressing against the fly of my jeans. I shifted a little, hoping to free up a little more room in there.

“Some of the men on my logging crew drive to Boone,” I said. “There are some bars where they can sometimes score. I’ve heard them talking about it.”

I’d never actually been part of those conversations. It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about making that drive myself, but I didn’t want some meaningless fuck. I wanted a woman I could make a life with— one who wanted to make a life with me.

I wanted the woman seated two cushions away from me. She was exactly what I’d been missing my entire life.

“I went to an all-girls school,” Cherry said, staring down at her water bottle. She now held it in her lap and was poking the seam of the label with her thumbnail. “We hardly ever saw boys except at the occasional mixer.”

That explained why a beautiful woman like her was still a virgin. I assumed it was some sort of religious thing. She just never had the opportunity.

“Any time I did meet a boy, my parents interfered.” She sighed and lifted her head, staring straight ahead. “And now they want to control who I marry.”

I frowned. “An arranged marriage?”

“Yeah, it seemed a little archaic to me. But that’s what we’re doing, right?”

As she looked over at me, I couldn’t help but smile. In our case, it was arranged by a matchmaker, but wasn’t it the same?

Suddenly, I shook my head. “This isn’t an arranged marriage. I thought I wanted a wife in name only, but then I met you. I don’t want it to be just that.”

I was taking a risk by being so honest. But the truth was if she didn’t want more than an on-paper arrangement, it was better to know now.

She looked up at me, a smile slowly spreading across her face. “I was hoping you’d say that. I wouldn’t go back on our original deal, but I want this to be more than a contract. I’ve wanted it since that first phone call.”

I laughed. “The one that lasted four hours?”

She nodded. “I scrambled to find a cord long enough to charge my phone and keep talking from bed.”

We’d both been in bed, miles apart, connected only by a cell phone tower. I closed my eyes and pictured her under the sheets. In my imagination, she wore a T-shirt and panties, bikini style, the crotch slightly damp as she confessed her biggest secret—that she’d never been with a man.

“I want something else,” she said.

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