"Fair," he said, scoffing a little as he lowered his gaze to the floor for a long moment. "You're going through the most unfair thing you possibly could be, and you're worried about what is fair to me."
"Well, it isn't your fault that I am going through what I am going through. You're trying to help."
"You're paying me to."
Right.
That was right.
I was a job.
It was easy to maybe confuse this in my head, to think he was doing this because he was simply a giving human being, because he liked helping those in need.
But that wasn't true.
I was a paycheck.
I was something he had to handle so he could get back to his real life.
Nothing less.
But certainly nothing more.
"Okay. If you don't want the couch, I will keep it."
He had nothing to say to that, simply moved to rest on his back, yanking the blanket up over his body, and closing his eyes.
Sometimes, it wasn't the big things you forgot about being around men. The sex. The chest to sleep on. It was things like this that always seemed to fascinate me, watching a man - big, strong, meant to be in motion - at rest, his powerful body still, his hard features softened a bit.
"Quit staring, and get to sleep."
His eyes were closed!
His eyes were closed, but he somehow knew I was looking at him.
He was a very interesting man.
I closed my eyes, lulled to sleep by the soft crackling of the logs on the fire.
The next thing I knew, I felt hands touching me.
Waking up in a panic, I shoved against them, a scream rising in my throat.
"Shh, duchess," Gunner's voice said, soft, almost sleepy-sounding.
"What are you doing?" I whisper-yelled at him as his arms kept trying to slide under me.
"The fire died out. Your chattering teeth woke me up."
As the panic rushed away, so did the adrenaline, leaving me to feel the full force of the coldness in the room that must have been without a heating source for hours.
"Relax," he said again in that sleepy, sweet voice as he curled me onto my side, then lowered down. "I'm just going to warm you up," he explained, yanking up the blanket, the cold air prickling over my skin for a moment before his body moved under, and the blankets fell again, trapping both our body heat together.
One small couch.
Two not-exactly-petite people.
There wasn't even a sliver of space between us as we faced each other on the cushions.
It didn't occur to me that my nipples were hardened until I felt his solid chest brush over them.
And judging by the way his body stiffened, I knew he felt it the same as I did.
"How did it get so cold so fast?" I asked, trying to hold still even if every inch of me was begging to move closer to the man who seemed to be radiating heat somehow.
"The wind," he said, shaking his head. "This place isn't insulated that well. The wind is still crazy out there. I'll stay up," he added. "To make sure the fire doesn't go out again."
"No, that's not necessary."
"Says the woman whose entire fucking body feels like an ice cube," he said, giving me a brow lift as though he was daring me to contradict him as his hand moved out to touch the bare skin on my arm, making a shiver course through me at the heat of the contact on admittedly cold skin.
"I'm warmer now," I tried. "No teeth chattering."
"Yeah, 'cause I'm here." When I had no argument to rebut that, his eyes seemed to maybe do that soft thing they did occasionally. "You want me to stay here?"
Oddly, I did.
Me, Miss Personal Space, did want that.
Him right where he was.
For as long as possible.
But I couldn't let him know how much I wanted it.
"If it means you can get some sleep too, then yes," I offered, shrugging under the blankets.
"Alright," he agreed, voice sounding off. Not cocky or frustrated or even that sweet tone he used once in a while. It was something else. Something I didn't know him well enough to interpret, but found myself wanting to.
"Alright," I said as well, giving him a small nod that he snorted at.
"Go to sleep, duchess," he commanded, and this time, just this one time, his pet name didn't bother me.
And with his warmth enveloping me like a warm hug, I did.
I slept.
And woke up, well, on top of him.
My head was pressed into the center of his chest, my hand cupping his strong shoulder, my hip cocked over his pelvis, knee wedged between both of his thighs.
Intimate.
It took a long couple of seconds for me to realize that one of his arms was around my back, holding me tight, his fingers holding onto my hip. The other was resting heavily on my thigh.
And everything, from the feel of his solid chest against me, to his personal scent, to the way his arms were holding me... it all felt good. Way, way too good.
"Once you're out, you're really out, huh?" he asked, seeming to know I was up.
"Did you try to wake me?" I asked, immediately self-conscious, even though I knew I had to set my alarm clock clear across the room at foghorn level for it to wake me up in the morning. I always figured I was such a deep sleeper because I slept so little; my body wanted to milk what it got for all it was worth. I had more sleep in the forty-eight hours I had been away from my life than I had likely had in half a week in it.
"Called your name a few times," he informed me.
"Sorry. You could have just... pushed me off," I offered, though I had yet to move, to put some healthy distance between us again.
"The fire just banked out. But you were warm enough."
Of course I was.
I was like a clinging vine all over him.
"Thanks for letting me sleep," I offered, feeling something I hadn't felt in more years than I could remember - rested. I woke up tired every morning. I counteracted that with too much coffee, and a packed schedule that didn't let me slow down enough to even feel the effects of it, but it was always there, a constant thing.
"Yep. Now how about you hop-to making my breakfast, so I can go out and do the manly shoveling thing."
"The manly shoveling thing?" I asked, pushing up to smile down at him, finding his lips quirked up, but his eyes thoughtful.
"That's a good look," he said oddly.
"Is my hair a mess?" I asked, wanting to reach up to flatten it, but I was using both my hands to hold my body up from his.
"Well, yeah," he told me with a smirk. "But I meant the smile. For a second there, you didn't seem so tense."
Tense.
I hated that word.
Mainly because I got called that word a lot.
Along with the phrases You need to loosen up and You need to find a work/life balance.
Like I was some robotic, boring, stick-up-my-butt person.
But, then again, who knows. Maybe that was how others saw me. You never really knew, did you? How you came off to others? If they saw you the way you saw yourself? Better? Worse? It wasn't something I generally had much time to devote to worrying about. But for some reason, it was on my mind now.
"And there it is," Gunner said, suddenly starting to fold up, making me have to press back onto my heels so he could slide out from under me.
"There what is?"
"That Miss Blythe-Meuller thing."
"I don't know what that is supposed to mean." But I did pick up on the tone that suggested it was an insult.
"Of course you don't," he agreed, standing, and moving off toward the bathroom. I was still tidying the couch, piling all the blankets and pillows onto the cot I had already made when he came back out. "Toilet should be fine for this morning," he said, making me straighten. "It's gonna stop working eventually. I'll drag a bucket in full of snow to melt. You can pour it in to flush it."
"That is... handy knowledge," I said caref
ully, realizing how screwed I would be in a situation like this. What would I have done if the toilet stopped working and I was alone? I guess I would have had to, well, start using the outdoors - as unpleasant as that sounded.
"Want to be really impressed, I can build a composting toilet from scratch." At what had to have been a curious look on my face, his lips curved up at one side. "One of our coworkers, Miller, she has this one rule. She has to have a working toilet. Sometimes, a real one isn't an option. We learned to get crafty."
"That's very interesting," I said, meaning it, as I moved to the kitchen to fetch the eggs, cheese, onions, and peppers out, intent on making him an omelet. He was right; if he was going to be doing something as labor-intensive as shoveling the giant drive, he needed real fuel.
"As for the bathing thing... we're gonna have to get used to whore's baths for a while."
"I'm sorry, what?" I asked, turning my head to look at him peeking out the back window, the blinding white of the sun on the snow hurting my eyes.
"Whore's bath," he said, looking over at me with a smirk. "Meaning soap and water and a washcloth. Clean the necessary places. Not overly ideal, but what we have to do."
That sounded about just as unpleasant as an outdoor bathroom situation. I liked a good shower every day. Sometimes, even two. One in the morning so I could look my best; one at night so I could unwind after work, wash the day away.
But, well, what was there to wash away here? All I would be doing was cooking and straightening up. I wouldn't break a sweat.
"Smells good," Gunner said, coming out of the bathroom again, this time in heavier layers than his usual jeans and tee, big, insulated boots on his feet. He looked a bit like a lumberjack. And while I already knew he had a tan Carhartt heavy-duty jacket, I couldn't help but picture him in a red, white, and black flannel jacket instead. "What?" he asked, making me realize I had been staring, and likely doing so somewhat goofily.
"I think all that outfit needs is a flannel jacket," I admitted.
"Having thoughts about me out there chopping wood, huh?" he asked, grabbing a piece of pepper and popping it into his mouth raw. "Getting you all hot and bothered?" he went on, lips twitching, green eyes dancing.
The crazy thing was, as he popped that idea into my head, the exact reaction he mentioned started in my body, making me flushed, my heart pound, my skin feel over-sensitive, and - as if all that wasn't enough - made my sex clench hard.
A whole body reaction.
To a simple idea of a simple action with a man who was most decidedly not my type.
What was going on with me?
"Not to backseat cook here," he said, literally from over my shoulder, looking down at the skillet as I added in the ingredients to the eggs, "but that doesn't seem like enough for two."
"It's not meant for two," I agreed.
"What are you having then?"
"There's some yogurt in there," I said, shrugging.
"That why there's no fat to pinch on you?" he asked oddly, going into the fridge, pulling out the yogurt... and two pears. "You don't eat?"
"I eat," I objected, not wanting anyone to think I was starving myself. I didn't do that. Sure, when I was stressed, I had a tendency not to eat much, but I always ate something.
"You ate your salad, and poked at the rest of your food. This morning, you're making me eggs, but eating yogurt," he recalled as he sliced up the pears, putting them pointedly on two different plates.
"I don't like big breakfasts. It makes me feel slow all day. Besides, you don't have any fat to pinch either."
"Yeah, 'cause I'm all muscle," he supplied, daring me to rebut him. And there simply was no way to do that. He was very solidly built.
"Yes, and you need to maintain that muscle with all this protein," I agreed, folding the omelet over, then sliding it onto the plate he was holding out. "I don't. What?" I asked when he took his plate and sighed out his breath.
"Arguing over fucking diets," he said, looking down at his plate, his voice making it sound like it was the most absurd conversation two people could have.
Feeling awkward, I silently ate my yogurt and the pear he forced on me. I drank my water, wishing it was coffee, wondering if there was a way I could make that without electricity.
"Alright," he declared, the scrape of his chair across the floor making me jerk upright. "I am heading out. If you're looking for something to do, you can start moving the food out into the snow."
"No problem," I agreed, feeling like it was the least I could do. "Will you be in for lunch?"
"If you're making something."
"Then you'll be in for lunch," I agreed, taking his plate, and going to the sink, piling it in. "Oh, water," I remembered, looking over at him.
"I'll bring in some buckets. Got a dozen of them laying around."
"Okay, thanks," I agreed, giving him a small smile.
"And if the fire starts to look low," he added, moving over toward where it seemed to be crackling happily still, "just throw a log on it. But layered. Don't smother the flame."
"Got it," I agreed, but I wasn't as confident as I sounded. I would figure it out.
"Be back in a couple hours," he told me, then grabbed his tan jacket, and was out the door. He came back ten minutes later with three giant buckets of snow which he dragged near the fire to melt.
I washed the dishes with the snow water, doing so more carefully than I had ever washed something before, conserving as much of it as possible, before I located a pitcher in a cabinet, filling it, then bringing it into the bathroom with me, intent on attempting a 'whore's bath,' and brushing my teeth.
It was strange how easily things like this could come to you, this ability to adapt, to be able to live without comforts. By the time I came out of the bathroom, I was clean everywhere but my hair because that seemed to require some ability to be a gymnast to pull it off, and dressed in a pair of thin off-white linen pants and a heavy knit gray sweater.
After digging around in my bags for about ten minutes, I realized something that had my belly sinking a bit.
My contacts must have been in one of my other bags.
And I couldn't leave the ones in my eyes anymore.
No one, save for my eye doctor himself, ever saw me with my glasses on. My giant black-framed glasses that swallowed up a big part of my face.
On a sigh, I did what needed to be done, reaching up to pile my hair on the top of my head, thinking it would distract from the fact that I could swear the roots were looking a little greasy.
With that, and nothing else to do with my time, I grabbed my sketchpad and colored pencils, going back to the living room to lose myself in some drawing in front of the fire.
"What happened to you?" Gunner's voice boomed into the space that had been silent except for the cracking of the logs that I had successfully managed to keep going despite my doubts, making me jolt, my head whipping over to where he was standing inside the door, looking at me like I had sprouted another head.
"I'm sorry?" I asked, brows furrowing.
"Couple hours ago, I left Miss Blythe-Meuller. Who is this?" he asked, waving a glove-clad hand at me.
"Oh," I said, having been so lost in my own world that I had forgotten. My hand moved up, touching the side of my glasses. "Yeah. My supply of contacts must have been in one of my other bags," I told him, trying to feel as dismissive about it as the shrug I gave him implied.
A strange look still in his eye, he stripped off his layers, carrying them all over to the fire to dry them more quickly.
"You did good with the fire," he told me, poking at it a little to make the flames lap higher, warming his hands in front of it for a long minute. "Doesn't look like purses," he said oddly as he turned to face me.
"I'm sorry?"
"Your file," he told me, waving toward where he left it on the counter. I hadn't looked at it. I knew what it would say. Right down to my credit score and weight. "It said you were some big shot purse designer. I didn't know such a thin
g existed."
"Such a thing?"
"A 'big shot purse designer.'"
"You've never heard of Birkin bags? Coach? Gucci?"
"Didn't figure there was a way to have a name alongside them."
"You have to work for it, like anything else," I said, shrugging, though there was nothing to shrug about. I put my lifeblood into making my name. I went sleepless nights to do it. I sacrificed relationships and friends to it. I survived on bread and cheese sandwiches for it. It was nothing to shrug off.
"You care that much about bags?" he asked, looking dubious.
"I'm very good at it."
"So, that's a no," he guessed. His hand reached out so suddenly that I couldn't react quickly enough to pull back when he snagged my sketchpad and pulled it away from me. "Duchess, what the fuck?" he asked after a long, nerve-racking moment of staring down at my sketchpad, flipping back and forth between the two most recent pages.
The one I had been working on was a drawing of the cabin we were currently staying in. The one directly before was the common room of the upstairs in his office, complete with my pile of pink and gold luggage on the floor.
"It's just a... doodle," I defended, hating the word, but not liking the weird thickness in the air around us, made that way with his undefinable reaction and my own insecurity.
"It's something you could frame and throw on the wall," he countered as he dropped down next to me on the couch, flipping back another couple of pages, finding an old sketch of my apartment building in Manhattan. Seeing it now, it felt like it was lightyears away instead of just a few days, a few hundred miles. "This your old place?" he asked, looking over at me, searching for something. "Think I get it."
"Get what?" I asked, shaking my head.
"Why you have been so tense," he explained. "You're giving up a fuckuva lot."
The words made my belly drop a bit, a sensation I didn't have a name for, didn't know how to handle.
It was right about then that I felt his hand - wide, firm, strong - close around my knee, giving it what could only be called a reassuring squeeze.
"Fucking sucks, duchess," he said, shaking his head. "But no one can take this," he added, gesturing with his free hand to my sketchpad. "You can't do bags anymore, but you can draw, paint, do something else with this. It'd be a waste not to. You clearly love it." I must have stiffened or jerked back or something because he added, "It's the most peaceful I've seen you look. You didn't even hear me when I stomped up the path and opened the door."
The Ghost Page 6
