Page 105 of Forbidden Protector

I'm watching.

"Coming?" she asks, already down to nothing, already at the water's edge, and I'm only two steps behind her, naked and completely, utterly happy.

The pool takes my breath the second I'm under, cold enough to shock and clean enough to feel like absolution. She comes up laughing under the falls with her hair slicked dark gold down her spine, water running off her collarbone in a way that has me forgetting the cold entirely.

"You look like something out of a myth," I tell her, wading closer.

"I look like a woman who just jumped into snowmelt. Romanticize it less."

"Can't help it." My hands find her waist under the water, and she doesn't pull away, just leans in, water sluicing warm where our bodies meet despite everything the creek's doing to cool it. "Told you once I wanted you like this. Out in the open air. Told you I wouldn't care who walked up on us."

"You remember that?"

"I remember every word I've ever said to you sober. It's the drugged confessions I've got gaps in." My thumb traces the line of her jaw, water dripping off both of us into the pool. "You told me your fantasy once. Whispered it right in my ear like a secret you weren't sure you were allowed to have."

Her breath catches. "You remember that too."

"Whiskey and cheese and apples. A creek under a waterfall. Drying off naked in the sun." I press my mouth to her temple, to the shell of her ear, quiet enough that only she and the dragonflies get to hear it. "Making love until you'd worn me out twice, not just yourself. Falling asleep under the stars in my arms."

"Holt."

"I built the whole thing for you, Mac. Every piece." I pull back far enough to watch her face take that in, watch her eyes go bright and unguarded in a way she still isn't fully used to letting me see. "This is your fantasy. I've been sitting on it for months, waiting for the right sky."

She doesn't say anything for a long moment. The falls keep running behind her, dragonflies stitching light across the water, and when she finally speaks her voice has gone rough at the edges.

"I love you."

It comes out before I've said it first, which isn't how I planned this, and I don't care one bit that the plan just broke.

"I love you too." I get both hands in her wet hair, tilt her face up to mine. "Have for longer than I let myself admit. Kept telling myself it was temporary. A case. A season. Something that would burn off with the weather." My thumb drags along her cheekbone, water and something warmer both running down it now. "It didn't burn off. It just got bigger every single day you stayed under my roof, until one morning I woke up and understood you weren't visiting anymore. You'd moved in. Not just the house, Mackenzie. All of it. Every part of my heart too."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"Good." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. "Because I already told you. I don't threaten. That includes myself. You're not leaving this ranch unless you drag me with you."

She kisses me then, both of us dripping, cold-warm, and entirely undone. I carry her out of the pool with her legs locked around my waist and lay her down on the blanket in a patch of sun that's been waiting all afternoon for exactly this.

I take my time drying her with my mouth instead of a towel, every inch of her lit gold, wildflowers crushed sweet beneath the blanket, dragonflies working lazy circles overhead like they've got nowhere better to be either. She arches into every place my mouth lands, a moan breaking loose from her that the whole clearing gets to keep.

"More," she says, the same word she's said to me since a line shack in February, except there's nothing left guarding it now.

I give her more. I give her all of it.

Slow at first, patient the way I promised her patient could be, until slow isn't enough for either of us and she's pulling me down with both hands fisted in my hair, my wet hair dripping onto her breasts with every thrust, taking everything I've got and asking for what's underneath it too.

I take her like that, deep, watching her whole body arch off the blanket under me. When she comes apart, it drags me right over with her, my release pulsing into her in long, spent waves, her name gone rough and half-formed in my throat while I finish inside her.

We come down slow. I roll onto my back and pull her into my shoulder, her leg thrown over my thigh, both of us breathing like we ran the whole trail up here.

Neither of us is in any hurry to stop touching. Her hand wanders the length of my chest, over the scroll, down the ridge of every rib to the flat of my stomach, no destination in it at all. Mine goes the other direction, up the outside of her thigh, over her hip, into the dip of her waist, learning her again in daylight.

She's warm and relaxed and most of the way to asleep, and neither hand stops, and somewhere in the middle of it I go hard against her hip.

She feels it and laughs low and wicked against my collarbone.

"Already?"

"Blame the mountain air."