“This place.”
One of his coppery brows arches. “McBride Mountain?”
I shake my head. “No. Your cabin. How much I love it. How absolutely perfect it is.”
He grins at me. “You know we can change anything you don’t like.”
The offer returns tears to my eyes, but I pull his hand to my mouth fully, pressing my lips to the calloused palm. “There isn’t anything I don’t like. I love everything about this place…and about you.”
It’s the first time I’ve said those words to him—to anyone—and his gaze flashes, as if he hadn’t expected them despite what we’ve shared.
“I love you too, Bluebell.” His hand slides to my lower back, drawing me even closer, and he uses the other to take my cheek and draw my mouth to his for a sweet brush of his lips. “Welcome home.”
Those two words…
Ones I have longed for my entire life.
No one ever said them to me.
And nowhere else felt like one.
They were places I stayed with people who were sometimes good to me and oftentimes indifferent. They were physical roofs over my head that offered me shelter but no warmth. They were temporary stopping-off points that moved me forward in time but not in life.
But it now means something here with him, in this place.
Because after twenty-two years without one, I’ve finally found a home in Liam McBride.
19
LUCKY
Something wakes me from the warm, safe place I’ve been floating in.
Liam’s scent fills my breaths—pine, warm spices, mixed with the rain that soaked us and the mountain.
The soft crackling of what’s left of the fire fills the otherwise silent room, and I groggily blink my eyes open, listening, trying to figure out what dragged me from my blissful sleep.
A few seconds later, it comes again.
The low growl…
Goosebumps immediately break out across my skin, my body tensing in Liam’s arms. Those last lingering vestiges of the dream world I could have stayed in forever evaporate because I know that sound all too well.
I had hoped to never hear it again.
It’s usually a precursor to Giz completely losing his shit, and it isn’t one I’ve heard often—or at all, really—since I’ve been up here on McBride Mountain.
He isn’t the biggest fan of Killian or Connor and gives them a wide berth and dirty looks when they cross paths, but as long as they leave him alone and don’t piss me off, he lets them exist in peace.
This is different.
Something isn’t right.
I push myself up and scan the room. Nothing seems amiss inside the warm cabin, and darkness still looms outside the windows, the only light coming from the remaining embers of the fire.
It crackles low behind me, the soft pop of a log making me jump, already on guard.
Given the wildlife on the mountain that Liam has repeatedly warned me about and the evidence I’ve seen of its presence on the homestead over the past several weeks, I know better than to believe we’re ever truly alone up here.
