Page 18 of Snowbound with the Vineyard Owner (Angel’s Peak #6)

Dominic leans back on one hand, cradling his glass in the other, his body sprawled and loose, but his gaze pinned to mine with unnerving precision.

“You gave me something today,” he says quietly, the words roughened like they cost him something to admit.

I blink, thrown off guard.

“What do you mean?”

A small smile curves his mouth, not mocking. Sad.

“We forget how to play,” he says, echoing his earlier sentiment. “The older we get, the more we lose it. The silliness. The freedom.” His thumb brushes the rim of his glass idly. “We get careful. Controlled. Until we don’t know how to let go anymore.”

The words catch at something inside me. Something too tender to touch.

“Life beats it out of you,” I murmur, leaning closer to the fire, needing the warmth, needing him. “Deadlines. Expectations. Responsibilities."

“I needed that today,” he says, his voice a low scrape in the quiet. “More than I realized.”

Emotion wells hot and fast behind my ribs. I don’t know what to say to that — how to thank him for trusting me with something so vulnerable.

I take a sip of wine, forcing my throat to work, but it’s not the wine making my hands shake. It’s the quiet truth in his voice.

It reflects my life staring back at me across the fire. He leans a shoulder against the stone of the fireplace, watching me with those unreadable eyes. The silence stretches, heavy, aching, until I can’t bear it.

“I miss it,” I say softly, the admission dragging up from someplace raw. “That wildness. That… abandon.”

For a long moment, Dominic says nothing.

Just looks at me.

“When you’re not hurling snowballs at innocent women and losing terribly at snowman building? How do you find that freedom?” I ask, voice thinner than I mean it to be.

His mouth curves into a darker smile. A more dangerous one.

“There’s still one place,” he says, voice like rough velvet, “where adults remember how to play.”

“Where?” I blink, feeling the air tighten between us.

Then he murmurs, almost to himself, “You’re closer to it than you think.”

The words sink into my skin, hot and undeniable. They terrify me more than any storm.

"When you’re ready, I’ll show you." His eyes never leave mine. "Just cross the line."

The words land like a match on dry kindling. Flare straight through me.

Dominic shifts, slow and deliberate, setting his glass aside, leaning in enough that his heat brushes against my skin. Not touching. Waiting.

“In the right hands,” he murmurs, voice a low rumble, “sex isn’t release.

It’s abandon. It’s raw, honest play. A place where nothing matters but sensation and trust.” His gaze drops to my mouth, then drags back up, scorching.

“No lies. No pretending. Just two people stripped bare of everything the world taught them to hide.”

I suck in a breath, dizzy from the force of him and the image he paints. From the brutal ache blooming low and deep inside me .

“That kind of freedom…” Dominic continues, voice softer now, almost reverent. “It demands something most people are too afraid to give.”

“I’ve never…” The words stumble out before I can stop them. “I’ve never done that before. What you’re describing.”

“What have you done?” A muscle ticks in his jaw.

“Just… normal sex." Heat scalds my face. “Safe. Vanilla.” My voice breaks on the word.

Dominic’s whole body tightens, like he’s holding himself still with sheer willpower.

"You’ll always be safe with me, but that’s not the word you mean." Dominic’s whole body tightens, like he’s holding himself still with sheer willpower.

"What word do you think I mean?"

"Trust. I don’t think you’ve been with a man you trusted enough to let go and enjoy the moment. A trust so deep that all your inhibitions fall away. Where feeling safe is exactly the opposite of what you need."

“I don’t know how to surrender,” I whisper.

“You do,” Dominic says, voice soft but certain. “You’re just scared of what falling will feel like.”

I close my eyes, the fire spinning behind my lids.

“Dominic—” My voice is a wreck.

“I’m not pushing. I’m just trying to understand you better."

The aching gentleness of that undoes me worse than anything else.

“Anyway, I promised not to push you, and I’m dangerously close to stepping over that line." He stands slowly, towering over me, a shadow carved out of gold and flame. "It’s late. Time for bed."

I take his hand, and he leads me upstairs. In his room, he pulls back the covers.

“Get under the covers,” he says, voice rough velvet. “Close your eyes and sleep.”

He turns toward the stairs without another word, leaving me burning in his bed, the taste of wine and wildfire on my tongue.

The clock ticks loudly in the silence, each second hammering inside my skull like a slow, relentless drumbeat. The sound fills the dark, fills the cavernous space he left inside me when he walked away, when he ordered me to bed like a child he didn’t trust himself around.

I lie still beneath Dominic’s heavy quilts, the lingering heat of his body bleeding into mine.

It seeps under my skin, into my blood, sinking into places too deep to claw him out.

Every inhale drags the scent of him—pine soap, woodsmoke, the darker, wilder thing I can’t name—deeper into my lungs until even breathing feels dangerous.

Sleep won’t come. It never had a chance.

Not after the way he looked at me downstairs—like he could see every locked door inside me and knew exactly how to break them open.

Not after the truths he gave me—quiet, devastating truths about trust, freedom, and the kind of surrender that terrifies me even as it calls to something deep and desperate inside my soul.

Not after the way he left me here…burning. Alone. Wanting.

I turn onto my side, fists clenching tight into the borrowed flannel, the fabric rough against my palms. My body aches—thighs pressed against the slow, merciless pulse pounding between them, muscles quivering with tension that has nowhere to go.

I breathe him in with every shallow gasp, but it only makes the ache worse, sharper, more unbearable.

This isn’t desire. It’s starvation.

A hollowing need that scrapes me raw from the inside out, that leaves me aching for something real enough, fierce enough, to finally fill the empty spaces I’ve spent a lifetime pretending didn’t exist. It’s every craving I’ve ever buried breaking free, roaring to life in the darkness.

Unafraid and unstoppable.

He’s right. I don’t want safe. I don’t want walls and careful distances and the polite detachment that keeps people untouched but hollow. Not with him. Not anymore.

I want the man who showed me what it means to be free.

I want the fire that burns downstairs—steady, waiting, alive.

I want to fall, reckless and breathless, into the space he’s holding wide open for me, no shields, no second-guessing.

The decision isn’t something I make. It’s already made, etched into my bones, written in the frantic beat of my heart.

I push the quilt aside, rising on legs that barely feel solid beneath me.

The cold air bites against my bare skin, prickling across my thighs and up the vulnerable strip of flesh left exposed by the hem of the oversized flannel.

The floorboards are icy against my feet, but I barely feel them through the trembling rush of blood in my veins.

I move without thinking, guided only by instinct, by the low flicker of firelight spilling from under the door at the bottom of the stairs. The scent of him threads through the air—smoke and heat and wildness—and it pulls me like a tether, dragging me forward into the night.

The house creaks softly around me, old wood settling in the cold, but the sound barely registers.

Every step I take feels weightless and perilous, like walking a tightrope across an abyss.

By the time I reach the living room, my whole body is shaking—not from fear, not from the cold, but from the unbearable intensity of wanting him.

And there he is.