Even when I stood bare, Teddy stayed on his knees, forehead resting against the curve of my belly, shoulders rising with ragged breaths. My fingers slipped into his hair, threading through damp strands at the crown of his head before he jerked back, blinking up at me as though waking from a dream.
He cleared his throat and grabbed a navy flannel shirt off the couch, wrapping it around my shoulders.
The fabric fell to mid-thigh and was saturated in his scent—wood and leather and something I’d never been able to identify but had long associated with him. I had to fight the urge to bury my nose in the collar like some lovesick teenager.
After working my arms through the sleeves, he buttoned me in, one by one, eyes never quite meeting mine. I lost track of my breathing somewhere around the third button. His hands lingered at my collarbone, thumbs resting in the hollow of my throat where my pulse hammered as fast as a hummingbird’s wings.
I caught his wrist without thinking, and his eyes flashed to mine, our faces frozen inches apart. His breath ghosted across my lips. All I had to do was lean forward. Close that insignificant distance and feel his lips against mine again.
“You need to rest.”
The abrupt withdrawal stung. I dipped my chin in a nod and let him lead me to the couch, my cheeks warm with embarrassment. What had I expected? That he’d pull me into his arms and tell me he’d never stopped loving me? That we’d fall into bed like the last two years hadn’t happened.
Teddy tucked me beneath a pile of heavy quilts that smelled likethe cedar closet back home before stripping off his shirt. He tossed it next to mine on the floor before undoing his belt, and I tried to look away.
Really, I did.
Once upon a time, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other—in the backseat of the Bronco, at the clubhouse, in every motel we ever stayed in. But toward the end, even sex had become a rarity, another item on the endless list of things we couldn’t get right.
Looking at him now as he slipped on a pair of sweatpants—his body harder and leaner than I remembered—I ached with memories of the wildness as much as the loss of it.
There were tattoos I’d never seen before—roman numerals lining his rib cage, a black feather on his thigh, and swirling script over his heart. My eyes snagged on the first letter, trying to make it out in the shifting shadows from the fire—an H?
My heart dropped. Hannah? Heather? Some Colorado mountain woman who didn’t come with three decades of baggage and a dead son between them?
Something that felt suspiciously like jealousy snared in my chest, which was ridiculous for a man I once told I hoped never to see again.
“Move forward,” Teddy said, voice rougher than gravel.
“I’m fine where I am.”
He stared down at me, hands on his hips, every inch the frustrated father who could stop the kids’ bickering with a single look.
“What? I’m comfortable.” I wasn’t. The angle was wrong, the heat from the fire only reaching one side of me while the other stayed stubbornly cold. But sharing a couch with him, pressed together under blankets while the storm raged outside? That was a special kind of torture I wasn’t sure I could survive.
“I’ll be fine. Just need a few more?—”
“Your teeth are chattering loud enough to wake the dead,” he grumbled, all six-foot-two inches of him squeezing in behind me on a couch that suddenly felt doll-sized.
My breath hitched as his bare chest pressed against my back, solid and warm through the flannel. Every muscle in my body wentrigid. “Teddy, no.”
“It’s not—Christ, Kels. Just trying to get your body temp back up. This is the fastest way.” Something in his voice suggested he was trying to convince himself as much as me. “Stop squirming.”
“I’m trying not to fall off,” I bit out, hugging the edge of the cushion to keep our bodies from touching.
A low sound escaped his throat when I shifted again, too far this time. The couch edge disappeared beneath me, and I started to slide.
In an instant, Teddy’s arm shot out, hauling me back before I could introduce my face to the hardwood floor. Thirty-plus years of reflex took over—protective, automatic. He flipped me over and tugged me back until we were breathing the same air, every inch of me touching every inch of him.
The eleven minutes and forty-three seconds our daughters had calculated between our cabins collapsed into the span of a breath.
We were as close as two people could be without actually becoming one. My breasts crushed to his chest; my hips aligned with his in a way that made it painfully clear this was affecting him as much as me.
It was a standoff, a strange game of chicken neither of us wanted to lose. Who would pull away first? Who would admit this was more than survival?
My thighs parted instinctively to accommodate him. Teddy released a rough exhale, dropping his hand to my thigh beneath the blankets and hitching it higher. His hips rolled forward in response, the hard press of him leaving no room for misinterpretation.
His eyes darkened at the sound it drew out of me, and for a wild second, I thought he was about to shove his sweatpants down and erase the last sliver of space between us.God help me, I wanted him to.
