Page 6 of Pucked Mountain Man (Cold Mountain Nights #6)
SIX
GRADY
The storm breaks two days later. Not gone—Alaska doesn’t do gone—but softer. Gray sky instead of whiteout, a thin ribbon of road visible when I risk the back porch. The cabin sighs like it’s remembering there’s a world outside its walls.
I should be relieved. I’m not.
Because in here, with her, the world shrank to something better. Easier. Dangerous.
She’s in the kitchen now, humming Fleetwood Mac under her breath, bare feet planted on the tile, hair in a messy braid that still manages to look like something from a dream I didn’t know I had.
She’s slicing tomatoes like they offended her, lips pursed, freckles vivid in the light from the big window.
I watch from the doorway longer than is polite. My chest tightens. I’ve been hit in the ribs enough to know what it feels like when something cracks. This is worse. Better. Falling.
I tell myself not to touch her. Then I do.
I cross the kitchen, slide my hands around her waist, and bury my mouth against the slope of her neck. She squeaks, knife clattering, then melts back into me with a laugh.
“Hungry?” she teases.
“Starving,” I murmur, teeth grazing her shoulder. “Not for lunch.”
She’s warm and soft under my palms, the world narrowing again to this kitchen, this girl, this fire under my skin. I spin her gently, lift her onto the counter like she weighs nothing, and step between her knees. Her hands go to my jaw. Mine slide lower, greedy, finding curves I already crave.
“You’re insatiable,” she says, but her smile wrecks me.
“You love it,” I say, and I kiss her until she stops laughing.
It’s heat and want and more than that—too much more—her humming caught between our mouths, my knee forgotten for once, her thighs tightening around my hips like I’m something worth holding.
And then her phone rings.
We both freeze. The sound is loud, cruel, pulling us out of the bubble and back into a world where consequences live.
She pulls back, breathless. “It’s—” she glances at the screen “—Thatch.”
Cold water dumps over my head.
She slides off the counter fast, smoothing her shirt, tugging her braid like she can re-braid time. I step back, trying to school my face, trying not to look like a man who was just about to sin against every friendship he’s ever valued.
“Hey, big brother,” she answers, voice too bright.
I lean against the fridge, jaw locked. Her laugh is nervous. She paces, talks about the storm, the generator, the woodpile. I don’t hear all of it because guilt is loud, drowning everything else.
Then I catch it—her laugh falters when he must ask something about her.
She says, “What do you mean?”
And because I’m an idiot, because my brain is scrambled eggs when she’s in the room, I mutter, “Tell him it’s the notes. ‘Landslide.’ On your ribs.”
She goes still.
On the other end of the line, Thatcher says something I can’t hear. Stevie’s face drains of color.
She covers the mic, hissing, “What the hell, Grady?”
It takes a second for me to realize what I’ve just done—what it sounds like, what it means. My stomach drops through the floor.
She forces a laugh back into her voice. “No, Thatch, you’re hearing things. He’s just—grumpy. Cabin fever. I’ll call you later.” She hangs up before he can push.
The silence after is brutal. The fire in the stove cracks. Snow taps the window.
“Why would you say that?” she asks finally, voice tight.
“I—” My throat locks. “It slipped.”
“Slipped?” Her eyes are sharp, hurt under the anger. “You just happened to let my brother know you’ve seen me naked?”
I rake a hand through my hair. “It wasn’t—Christ, Stevie, it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t thinking.”
“No kidding,” she snaps. She crosses her arms, defensive, vulnerable. “You think this is easy for me? That I don’t know how he’ll react if he finds out? That I don’t know what it’ll look like when I’m just—just?—”
“His little sister,” I finish, bitter.
Her jaw clenches.
The guilt curdles. I back up, pace, trying to outrun it. “This shouldn’t be happening.”
Her eyes widen. “Excuse me?”
“This—” I gesture between us, wild, too sharp. “You and me. Thatchers’s sister. My best friend’s baby sister. In the middle of nowhere, storm-drunk, playing house?—”
“Stop,” she says, voice cracking.
I do. Only because I see what I’ve done: put that look on her face, the one that says I just confirmed every fear she carries about being invisible, secondary, a fling in secret.
I hate myself for it. I hate that I don’t have the words to fix it.
Instead, I do the cowardly thing. I turn. I limp down the hall. The knee throbs with each step, a punishment. Her silence follows me, heavier than the storm ever was.
In the bedroom I shut the door too hard and brace my hands on the dresser, breathing like I just played overtime. My reflection stares back in the dark window—ink, scars, shadows. A man who just kissed the only girl who’s ever made him feel whole and then told her it was nothing.
I don’t recognize him. I don’t want to.
But I don’t know how to be anyone else.