When the old landline rang that night, she assumed it was the usual spam callers.She liked to answer those and pretend to be a variety of different people for her own amusement, so she swiped up the old handheld—
And was not at all prepared to hear Tennessee’s voice on the other end.
“Come over,” he said, his voice low, and impossible, andurgent.
And every single thing she might possibly want to hear.
“Okay,” she managed to say.
She might even have giggled.Giggled.A sound she was sure she had otherwise never uttered in all her life.
He hadn’t told her to pull in around back, behind the General Store so her truck couldn’t be seen from the street, but she did.No one needed to know where she was.No one needed to know anything about this.
Whatever this was, it was theirs alone.
When she walked onto his porch, he was already opening the front door to let her in.And they didn’t make it much farther.
And it turned out that when she was in his arms, Matilda didn’t really care if the whole world knew.She thought that maybe she might shout it out the windows, as a matter of fact, though she restrained herself.
They lay in front of the fire for a long while.He made her a very late dinner, or maybe it was more of a snack, and then he carried her upstairs into his bedroom and laid her on the bed there.
“This is not as monastic as I expected,” Matilda said, looking around at the quiet, comfortable furnishings.The leather chair in one corner with another bookshelf and a reading lamp.The color scheme that was tame by her standards, but also wasn’t neutral white, suggesting he’d painted this all himself.The overall effect was soothing and kind of brainy at once.
He just kept getting hotter.
“Why would it be monastic at all?”Tennessee asked, frowning down at her—but now when he frowned at her, he usually smiled.It was a whole different kind of exchange.She usually felt it sizzle its way through her, and now was no exception.
“You know.Your whole…” She waved a hand at him.“Thing.”
“My thing is that I’m neat and orderly, like a fully grown adult who likes and takes care of what he owns,” Tennessee said in what sounded to Matilda like repressive tones.
She grinned at him.“Of course.You in no way have control issues.”
“Only people who lack control think others have too much of it,” he retorted.
Matilda laughed.And when she insisted that it was her turn to mess him up until he lost a little of that control he was so proud of, he laughed right back at her.Then he crawled on top of her and had her forgetting her own damn name.
March continued to storm and stamp its way toward spring, and Matilda expected every day that this would end.But they kept going.
It had been a few weeks, maybe even a month, when Matilda stopped pretending and started asking herself if she was really in some kind ofrelationshipwith Tennessee.
Though she never used that word.
Not even in her own head.
But they saw each other almost every night.One of them would go to the other’s house late and leave early.They both had pretty early mornings, though Tennessee’s was always the earliest, so there was no need to discuss it.She would drive home from work, feeling shivery—and not in the way she normally did when going over Copper Mountain in the winter.
In fact, she was far more impatient than normal, when she knew how careful she had to be in her little truck.
Driving through town to get to her cottage was torturous.She just wanted to go to Tennessee, but she couldn’t.Her life involved a great many animals, by choice, and there was no getting around that.She didn’t reallywantto get around it, though sometimes she had to remind herself of that in these heady, wild Tennessee days.
She went home and spent time with her pets.She cared for all her rescues.And sometimes, she had to deal with her own family, too.
Those nights were the hardest, because family dinners almost always meant she’d be sleeping alone.Matilda loved her family, and she loved the dinners that Jack liked to have up in his caretaker’s cottage at the Lodge.But she was only really happy again when Tennessee was coming to her front door the next night, or when she slipped down the hill to see him.
She wasn’t sleeping much, but Matilda thought it was worth it.After all, she didn’t expect this little fever of theirs to last.
They’d been sneaking around for a full month and change when Tennessee told her that, unbeknownst to her, he’d been working on her rescue idea all along.When she would have bet money on him never mentioning her name in public, in case someone read the truth on him.
