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He shifted them until she was against him properly, and she felt the full reality of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the heat radiating off him through the flannel, the solid undeniable weight of him against her. She could feel how much he wanted her and it made her breath catch, made her press closer, her hips moving against his instinctively.

His mouth moved from hers to her jaw, her neck. She tipped her head back. He took his time, lips at the curve of her neck, his stubble dragging against her sensitive skin, and she gasped his name into the candlelit room and felt him groan in response against her throat.

His hands moved to the hem of her sweater. Warm fingers against the skin of her waist, a question, barely, and she answered it by pulling the sweater over her head herself.

He went still.

The candlelight moved over her, soft and gold. Over her bare shoulders. Over the full curve of her breasts in a plain bra she had not known that morning she would wish was nicer. Over the soft round of her stomach, and the wide curve of her hips where they met the waist of her jeans. And his dark eyes moved over her the same way. Unhurried. The way he looked at everything that mattered to him, taking all of it in before he did anything about it.

She didn’t cover a single inch of herself.

She had thought, in the careful not thinking way she had thought about this moment for months, that she might want to. That she might reach for a blanket, or turn a little, or hold her breath and her stomach in at the same time. She didn’t do any of it. The way he was looking at her made it impossible. There was nothing in his face but want. Plain, open, almost stunned want, like he had been handed something he had never let himself imagine he would get to hold.

Her skin felt warm everywhere he looked.

“God,” he said. Just that, low and quiet. Like she had taken something from him.

She reached for the buttons of his flannel.

He let her.

She spread the shirt open and put her hands on his chest. The warmth of his skin. The solid reality of him. He wasn’t built like a man on a magazine cover, all sharp edges and nothing underneath. He was built like exactly what he was. A man who had been carrying lumber and hauling pipe and lifting other people’s broken things for twenty years. Broad and thick through the chest, heavy through the shoulders, strong in the plain, deep, useful way that came from work and never from a mirror. She felt his stomach tighten when she dragged her fingertips down, and something deeply satisfied moved through her.

He laid her back against the cushions and looked at her in the candlelight, unhurried, the way he looked at everything that mattered, and she felt that look like a physical thing, warm everywhere it landed.

He reached for her then. Slow. His large hands learning her the way he learned everything, with complete attention, starting at her jaw and moving down, the curve of her neck, her collarbone, the soft skin of her stomach, taking his time about each place like she was something worth doing properly and he intended to do it properly.

She was already breathless before he’d done anything she’d call significant.

His mouth followed his hands. The curve of her neck. Her collarbone. The soft skin below her ear that made her gasp the first time he found it and made her dig her fingers into his shoulders the second. He learned that too. He filed it away and came back to it with the thoroughness of a man who paid attention and remembered what mattered.

“Shane.” His name in her voice, lower than usual, a little desperate.

He lifted his head and looked at her, dark eyes, jaw tight, his breathing not quite even, and the expression on his face was one she was going to carry with her for the rest of her life. Like she was the only thing in the room. Like she was the answer to something he’d been asking for a long time.

He said her name back. Allison. Low and rough and certain.

He reached behind her for the clasp of her bra, and it took him two tries.

She started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. “You can fix anything in this whole valley,” she said.

“I’m out of practice,” he said, low, with color along his cheekbones. The second try worked, and then he wasn’t laughing, and neither was she.

He drew the straps down her arms like he had all the time in the world, and looked at her, and his breath went out of him slow and unsteady.

“I thought about this,” he said. Rough. Almost an apology. “More than I should have. Every night since the bonfire.”

“Tell me,” she said, before she could lose her nerve.

So he did. Low, against her skin, between kisses. What he had thought about. Her hair down around her shoulders. Her mouth. The sound she might make if he touched her here, and here. Every single thing he told her, he did, slowly, until she was arching up off the cushions and his words had turned into her name.

Then his mouth was on her breast and she stopped being able to think in complete sentences.

He was thorough. He was patient. He took his time with every part of her like there was no hurry and nowhere else to be, and she was warm everywhere, the kind of warm that started somewhere central and radiated out to the ends of her fingers and the backs of her knees and every place his hands and his mouth had been.

His hand drifted down to the button of her jeans and stopped there. He looked up at her. A question.