"So green. Retire the color chart. Frame it." She laughs, wrung out. "Your dog watched the whole thing."
"He's seen worse."
"Charming." She leans back, looks at me, and her hand comes up to my jaw, thumb brushing my cheekbone, careful again. "Thank you. For the gate code." A pause. "And for not making a thing out of what I said."
That's the moment I stop pretending this is heat and proximity. She's leaving in twenty six days. I know the math. I lift her off the bench anyway, set her on her feet, and hold her up while her legs come back.
"Stay tonight," I hear myself say.
It's the wrong thing to want. I want it anyway.
She studies me, and whatever she finds makes her go soft around the eyes.
"Okay," she says. "Tonight."
CHAPTER FOUR
BIANCA
Two weeks in, and I've stopped pretending I'm staying at the cabin.
My toothbrush lives in his bathroom. There's a drawer that's mine without either of us deciding it. This morning I made shakshuka in his kitchen while he split wood out back with his shirt off, and Bear sat at my feet hoping I'm clumsy, and the whole scene was so domestic I almost laughed out loud at myself.
Renata caught me mid-spiral last night.
You sound different. Happy different. Report.
Bianca. You're cooking for him aren't you. You're FEEDING the mountain man.
Babe. One month. Say it.
I didn't say it back this time. Texted her a photo of the sunrise off his deck and let her draw her own conclusions, which she did, in seven increasingly alarmed messages.
The thing is, I know what she's afraid of. I'm the woman who builds a whole life around being needed and then wonders why she's empty. But this doesn't feel like that. Kieran doesn't need me to fix anything. He's the most self-contained man I've ever met. When I cook for him it's because I want to watch him eat something I made and go quiet in that satisfied way, not because I'm earning my place at his table.
That should comfort me. It does the opposite. If I'm not feeding him to be useful, then I'm feeding him because I want to. And wanting is the part that gets me hurt.
Tonight he sets a coil of soft black rope on the bed and looks at me.
"You said you do rope," he says. "Show me your wrists. I want to see how you mark."
We negotiate it in five minutes, easy now, our shorthand built. He starts at my wrists, then works the rope across my shoulders and down, patient, checking the tension with two fingers under every wrap, eyes on my face the whole time. The pattern grows over my skin slow and deliberate. By the time he's done, my arms are bound behind me and a harness of black cord frames my breasts, and I'm already floating, that loose warm place opening up in my chest where I don't have to hold anything.
"There you go," he murmurs, palming my jaw. "Found it fast tonight."
"You're good at this."
"I'm good at you." He says it plain, no flirt, and it lands somewhere I keep trying to wall off.
He lays me back across the bed, arms pinned beneath me, and parts my thighs with his knees. His mouth starts at my collarbone and travels down, over the rope, around each nipple until I'm arching into the cord, the bite of it sharpening every place his tongue touches. He takes one nipple between his teeth,gentle pressure, and rolls the other with his thumb, and the helplessness of being tied undoes me faster than any touch.
"Kieran."
"I know. Be patient." He drags his mouth lower, down my belly, and settles between my legs. "You don't have to do anything tonight. Can't, even. Just take it."
That's the part that gets me. Not the rope. The permission. He licks into me slow, two fingers sliding deep, and I can't grab him, can't steer, can't do a single thing but lie here bound and let this man take me apart on his own schedule. He builds it layer over layer, until I'm begging into the dark and he finally lets the pressure tip me over. I come hard, shaking inside the rope, and he works me through it with his mouth until I'm boneless.
He's inside me before I've finished trembling, one hand fisted in the cord at my shoulder for leverage, the other gripping my hip. The angle is deep. Every thrust drags against the spot that makes me see stars, and I'm pinned beneath him with nowhere to go, nothing to do but feel.
