She’s not wearing a bra.
I could just reach both my arms around and cup those delicious weights in my own hands. Persuade her to let the dress puddle at her feet. Let her feel what she’s doing to me.
“I like that, mountain man. Feels very symbolic, cutting the dress off of me.” She jiggles her shoulders in a sort of half-dance. “I’m ready to bloom into my new self.”
My hands come down on top of her of their own volition. As if by arresting her movements, I can arrest what she can do to me. “Aren’t you scared of me, Princess?”
She looks over my shoulder, her silky hair running over my knuckles. “You won’t believe this, mountain man. But I’m a good judge of character. And no, I’m not scared of you.”
“You don’t know what I’m capable of. What I’ve done before,” I say, jaw tight.
“No, I don’t. But I have a feeling it’s never far from your own mind. And how much you hate it.”
My chest lifts and falls as if some crushing weight has been moved off it. An unbearable weight that I’ve been carrying around for years.
I struggle to hide my shock and shy my gaze away from her, like a coward.
My vision is blurry as I hand her the folded army sweater and sweatpants I pulled from the shelf above the first aid kit while she wasn't looking.
She snatches them from my hands without a word, gathers the ruins of her dress around her and disappears into the bathroom. I don’t breathe, I think, until I hear the door click shut.
I stand in the middle of my cabin.
It smells like jasmine. Echoes with the benediction she dropped in my lap without even knowing.
It’s one thing for my cock to salute her every chance it gets. The woman’s goddamned beautiful.
It’s a whole other for my heart to start panting after her, craving her words, longing for her touch.
Because she’s a mafia princess who belongs to a different world. And I decided, long ago, that I couldn’t have anyone in mine.
I'm so completely and utterly screwed.
5
IRIS
The shower in his bathroom is simple and functional—rough stone walls, a single wide shower head, no frills. Just like the man himself, I’m beginning to see.
The hot water hits my shoulders and I gasp—partly from the sting as it finds my scraped knee and elbow, the wounds pinching and burning under the pressure—and partly from something else entirely. Something that has nothing to do with pain.
My skin, my flesh, my entire being is alive in a way it's never been before. That of course could still be the adrenaline from the eventful day I have had. But it’s not.
It’s more.
It’s…him.
My mountain man and what he’s doing to me.
I stand under the spray and let it work through my hair, watch the day sluice off me in rivulets—the dust and the chaos and the dirty remnants of a wedding I never wanted—and try to think clearly. It isn't working. Every nerve ending I own seems to have rerouted itself, converging somewhere low and insistent, throbbing with a pulse of its own.
I've been watched my whole life. Monitored, managed, traded like a chess piece my stepmother moved around a board I never got to see. Men had looked at me before—I wasn't blind to it—leaving me with an oily, sticky feeling. As if I was cattle they were cataloging.
Because not a single one of them actually saw me.
Me, Iris.
But the mountain man’s gaze on me is something else entirely. It makes my skin too tight for my body, sends my pulse haywire and makes me feel more alive than I have ever felt before.
