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“Let them.”

She laughed against my mouth, and I kissed the laugh right off her lips. She melted into me. Her hands were shaking.

When I finally lifted my head, her lips were swollen and her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes had gone dark. She looked up at me with the lantern light all over her face, and I didn’t care who saw how I looked back.

“I love you,” she said. “I’ve loved you since the overlook. Maybe before.”

I rested my forehead against hers. “I love you too.”

She curled her fingers into my jacket and pulled me down one more time. This kiss was slower, deeper, and promised everything. When it ended, she leaned in close, her lips brushing my ear.

“Take me home,” she whispered.

I didn’t need to be asked twice.

Chapter Thirteen

Hazel

“Your place or mine?” I asked.

He didn’t take his eyes off the road. “Mine. Your bed’s too small.”

“You didn’t seem to mind last time.”

“I was too busy to care.”

I laughed, and it came out shaky. We were halfway up the mountain with the heater going full blast, and I couldn’t sit still. My lips still tingled. My whole body felt like it was humming. I kept looking at his hands on the steering wheel, at his jaw in the glow of the dashboard, and every time I looked, my heart did that enormous, silly thing it did.

He loved me. He’d said it in front of the whole town. It had practically been a public declaration.

I reached over and put my hand on his thigh.

His hands tightened on the wheel. “Hazel.”

“What?”

“I’d like to get us up this mountain alive.”

“I’m not doing anything.” I slid my hand an inch higher. The muscle under my palm went hard as stone. “I’m just sitting here.”

He made a low sound in his throat and pressed down on the gas.

He didn’t stop at the barn. He drove straight past it, all the way up the hill to the cabin, and parked so close to the porch the truck bumper almost touched the steps. He was out of the truck and around to my side before I’d even gotten my seat belt off. He opened my door, reached in, and pulled me out. I slid down the whole front of him until my boots touched the ground.

We didn’t make it inside right away.

He backed me against the side of the truck. I grabbed his jacket. His mouth came down on mine, hot and hungry, nothing like the kiss on the lawn. He kissed me like he’d been holding back and couldn’t do it for another second. His hands went under my jacket, under my sweater, rough and warm on my bare back, and I gasped into his mouth.

“Inside,” I managed. “It’s freezing.”

“Is it?”

“Shepherd.”

He laughed against my lips. Then he bent and picked me up. This grumpy mountain man just scooped me right off the ground. I shrieked and wrapped my legs around his waist and held on while he carried me up the porch steps.

He got the door open somehow. He kicked it shut behind us. The cabin was dark and warm, smelling like woodsmoke and cedar and coffee, and the woodstove glowed orange in the corner where he’d banked it that morning.