"I mean it, Sadie. This isn't negotiable."
"I said I can do it." She's smiling now, just slightly, and the sight of it makes my chest ache. "See? I'm very agreeable when people treat me like an adult."
"You're a pain in the ass."
"I've been called worse." Her smile widens. "Usually by you, in the past three days."
I should step back to maintain some semblance of professionalism. But I can't make myself move. She's too close, too warm, too alive in a way that makes everything else feel like a shadow.
"Wolfe." Her voice drops, soft and serious. "Why are you doing this? You don't know me. You could have dropped me at a hospital and walked away. Instead you're running traces and coordinating with your team and looking at me like..."
"Like what?"
"Like I matter."
The words land somewhere deep. I think about the last three years. The silence. The isolation. The careful construction of a life where nothing could touch me because there was nothing left to touch.
And then this woman fell out of a snowbank and shattered all of it.
"You do matter." I don't recognize my own voice. "I don't know why. I don't know how. But you walked into my cabin and now I can't imagine it without you, and that scares the hell out of me."
Her breath catches. "Wolfe."
"I'm not good at this. Words. Feelings. Any of it. I've spent sixteen years learning how to shut everything down, and you undid all of it in three days."
"Is that a bad thing?"
"I don't know yet." I lift my hand, hesitate, then let it curve around her jaw. Her skin is warm against my palm. "But I know I don't want you to leave. And I know if Derek Whitmore touches you, I'll kill him. Not as a figure of speech. Literally. I will end his life."
She should be afraid. Any sane person would be afraid, hearing a man talk about murder in such a calm, certain voice.
Instead, she leans into my touch.
"I believe you." No fear in her eyes. Just heat. Just want. "And I don't know if that makes me crazy, but I don't care."
"Sadie."
"Stop saying my name like a warning." She rises on her toes, flinching slightly while bringing her mouth closer to mine. "I'm a grown woman. I know what I'm doing."
"I'm not sure I do."
"Then let me show you."
She kisses me.
Soft at first, tentative. Testing. Her lips brush mine like a question, giving me every chance to pull away.
I don't pull away.
I haul her against me and take over the kiss, one hand fisted in her hair, the other splayed across her lower back. She gasps into my mouth and I swallow the sound, tilting her head back to deepen the angle. She tastes like the tea I made her earlier, sweet and warm, and I want to drown in her.
Three years of nothing. Three years of convincing myself I didn't need this, didn't deserve this, couldn't survive losing this again.
All of it burns away in the heat of her mouth.
She's gripping my shirt, pulling me closer, making sounds that go straight to my cock. I'm hard against her belly and I know she can feel it, know she knows exactly what she's doing to me.
"Wolfe." My name is a moan on her lips. "God."
