“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “It’s about forty minutes. The road gets rough about halfway—you’ll need to take it slow.”
“Okay.”
We stood there another moment, and I caught him looking at my hair again. At my mouth.
“Maddie.”
“Yeah?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Shook his head. “Nothing. Just... drive safe.”
He walked to his truck—a beat-up Ford that looked like it had seen better decades—and I walked to my sedan, my legs still shaky.
I’d just married a stranger.
I’d just kissed a stranger who’d made my entire body light up like a Christmas tree.
A stranger who’d ordered me to leave my hair down and then fisted his hands in it and held me still for his kiss.
I got in my car and watched him pull out of the parking lot, his truck idling for a moment like he was collecting himself.
Forty minutes to the cabin.
Forty minutes to figure out what the hell I’d just gotten myself into.
CHAPTER THREE
Thorne
She drove too slow.
I watched her sedan crawl up the mountain road in my rearview mirror, taking every pothole and washout like it might swallow her car whole. Which, to be fair, some of them could. My truck handled the terrain like it was born for it, but Maddie’s little city car was bottoming out, its suspension groaning in a way that made me wince.
But her slow pace was a curse. It gave me too much time to think.
About the kiss.
It shouldn’t have been that good. It was supposed to be a legal formality, a press of lips to satisfy a judge and a witness. Instead, it had felt like a fuse being lit.
I could still feel the small sound she’d made—that little hitch in her throat—when I’d slid my hand into her hair. My palm had brushed the back of her neck, her skin like silk, and for a second, the courthouse had vanished. Wall Street, the land, the contract—it all went dark, replaced by the scent of her and the heat of her mouth.
Now, my wife was following me home, and I had no idea what happened next.
The road narrowed, pine trees closing in on both sides like a green tunnel. I’d been seeking solace on this mountain for six months, burning out the last of my corporate soul in the silence. I’d wanted peace. I’d wanted to be left until I figured out how to be a person again.
Instead, I was bringing a hurricane back to my sanctuary. A hurricane with brown eyes and a smart mouth.
Twenty more minutes of this. Twenty more minutes before we got to the cabin and had to figure out how to exist in the same space after that kiss.
I’d been thinking about kissing her since she’d stumbled into Kate’s office with that smart mouth and those curves and that complete lack of fear at my silence. Brooding, she’d called it.
And now I had.
And now I couldn’t stop thinking about doing it again.
This was exactly the kind of complication I didn’t need.
Because she was going to live in my cabin. Sleep in my bed—well, the bed I used to sleep in. I’d given her my bedroom and moved into my grandfather’s.
