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  I roll my eyes at Jude’s advice before my gaze settles on the roof of the barn. The sawhorse, that swing, will never look the same to me.

  “I feel wild things for her, Jude.”

  “Then figure it out, Nico.”

  Chapter 12

  Skyler

  Evan allowed me to escape into the quiet house alone. I mumbled a thank-you and sprinted to the bedroom, locking the door behind me. I survived a cancer diagnosis, surgery, and treatments, but the thing that could have killed me had four paws and huge teeth.

  Uncontrollable sobs fell from my body. I could have died. He protected me. I didn’t know what to do. He is so angry. Evan was too close, which made him even angrier. But Nick saved me from being mauled to death by a bear.

  Venturing out of the bedroom took forty minutes of preparation. Fifteen minutes to shower, ten minutes to dry off and get dressed, another ten minutes to figure out what I might say, and a five-minute freak-out.

  I cannot stand myself anymore, so I’m going to face my demon. My gorgeous, rock-hard mountain demon who would have shot a bear for me.

  Nick lounges on the couch, his arm slung over the back, watching the snow fall. The large fireplace that takes up the majority of the far wall is crackling and pumping warmth. He looks so masculine, so rugged, even when completely still. He belongs here.

  “Are you going to stare at me all afternoon, or are you going to join me?”

  He never moved, never glanced my way, but he knew I was there. My heart surges with hope. Nick feels our connection.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was going out,” I squeak. “I didn’t think.”

  “I’m not used to running. I should have gotten to you faster.” His voice is flat, resigned.

  “Next time I’ll take the bear spray.”

  His gaze passes over me with tight regard. “Next time you’ll tell me where you’re going. You have no clue where you are. This place can be dangerous.” Nick looks back at the fire. “Let’s see how deep the snow gets. I can plow a trail for you around the backyard.”

  “You could run with me.”

  At the invitation, his eyes snap to mine. Nick seems to consider the possibility before softly shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry,” I say into the silence.

  “You don’t have to apologize. I should have”—he wrestles with the words—“done something.”

  He looks exhausted, wrung out. Achy sadness creeps into my chest. I made him look that way.

  I need to do this. I need to say the words. Just say the words.

  Nick, I need to tell you something . . .

  I pray I can choke out the words as I move toward the couch. When I sit next to him, he shifts and points to the large coffee table, which is a section of wood cut from a large tree that has been left in its natural shape.

  “Did you make this?” I ask as my fingers run across the rough edges of bark, preserved under a thin layer of lacquer.

  He clears his throat. “Yes.” He looks out the window. “We are going to be holed up here for a few days.” Nick glances at me with uncertainty in his eyes.

  “That’s new information,” I reply. His mouth curves with a soft smile. We’ve heard the weather reports from every news station within earshot. There is snow coming, and everyone needs to talk about it.

  “Want to play?”

  My irritation flares. “I thought you said what we did last night can’t happen again, Nick?” The ability to restrain my pissed-off voice is gone. “You can’t fuck me and dump me, got that?”

  His face hardens, and I know why he’s mad. He cannot stand when I use foul language, unless we’re sceneing, and even that is debatable. I received quite the punishment for asking him to fuck my cunt. I learned that lesson very well.

  Nick also can’t handle when I get sharp with him. He’ll take my sass all day long, but when he knows I’m mad at him, all bets are off. I get the beast. He is the king of fighting fire with fire.

  “No.” The word is pushed between gritted teeth. He jabs a finger toward the table, to a stack of board games.

  The boxes are worn, obviously well used during his childhood, and appear to have been untouched since. “You want to play Chinese checkers?” I lean in to look at the boxes. “And Scrabble?”

  “Y-yes,” he says with enough hesitation that it makes me think he is being put up to this.

  “Why?”

  He looks out the window, his brow furrowed. “I want to spend time with you,” he says with his gaze firmly focused on the snow. “I missed you.”

  Nick is the only man I have ever encountered who could evoke loving feelings mere hours after he has destroyed my heart. His admission is strange but honest. Caleb told me he was fine. As far as I know, Nick was status quo the entire time I was gone. But he missed me?

  “I thought about you every day I was gone.” I cannot allow my truth to be skewed.

  “Where were you?”

  “With Amanda in Newburyport.” I can’t help the irritation in my voice. I’ve told him this already. It’s like he’s trying to catch me in a lie.

  Nick looks back at the fire. “Why?”

  I inhale and hope to calm the jangling nerves climbing my body. “I needed to take care of a few things. I had some health issues I needed to take care of.”

  He looks at me, alert concern bursting from his body. “What was wrong? Is that why you are thin?”

  I knew he would notice the weight loss. I’m still a little bony in some spots. “Yes, but I started jogging to keep my heart healthy and build muscle.”

  He nods. “Are you okay now?”

  “Yes.” It’s the truth. I have been closely monitored, and per my latest screenings, I have a clean bill of health.

  “Are you going back to Reign?” I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard Nick refer to Reign as a place. He has always called it home. A sinking sensation hollows my stomach at the meaning; his home and my home are separate places.

  “I can’t live with Amanda anymore.” For as much as I love her, the insecurities she’s dealing with have been sticking. I don’t think I would be as nervous for Nick to see my body if I hadn’t heard her heartbreak over the past year. The stories of her ex-husband’s response to her reconstruction scars poisoned the hope that Nick would easily accept me.

  “Was there someone else?”

  “Never.” I’ve told him this, but clearly he needs reassurance. “There has never been anyone but you.”

  Disbelief flashes across his face for a split second. “Did you call Caleb this morning?”

  “Yes.” I’m not sure why he needs to know, but I’m not going to lie.

  “Did you tell him about what we did last night?”

  “Does it matter? We are adults. If we choose to have sex, then we choose to have sex. No one is going to look at us differently if we decide to have a sexual relationship.”

  “I know he’s protective of you. We’ve talked about last night.”

  “No one is more protective of me than you, Nicholas.” I sigh, uncertainty holding me hostage. I cannot spill my guts when he seems so unsure. “And, no, we haven’t talked about last night. You talked. I disagreed.” His high-handed decree echoes in my mind, sparking my irritation. “You’re willing to run after me with a gun in hand to make sure I’m safe, but a conversation about a consensual sexual relationship is off the table?” I breathe through the pounding in my chest, waiting, hoping he will say something. “Nick, why am I here? Why did you need to beat Blake to a pulp? I was gone for a year, and nothing has changed. You could have come here like you do every winter, and I would have been at Reign in the spring when you got back. Why should I be here right now?”

  His jaw ticks, and his body vibrates for a moment, but he remains mute.

  “Whatever,” I grumble, slapping my legs in frustration. “Let’s just continue to fuck each other like wildcats at random times and then avoid each other like the plague.”

  When I stand
abruptly, he jumps up. “Where are you going?” he demands, his chest heaving with a pace I didn’t notice before.

  I glare at him. “To the other side of the table, to set up the game so I can kick your ass at Chinese checkers.”

  Chapter 13

  Nick

  We fuck each other like wildcats.

  It has only been twice, but her assessment is accurate.

  She didn’t have to try to beat me at Chinese checkers. Those little fucking marbles are hard to pick up. She laughed every time I fumbled them.

  I laughed because she laughed.

  The snow piled up, encasing us in a frozen world as she showed off her overly competitive alter ego. My angel is ruthless when it comes to board games. When we had enough of Chinese checkers, she unleashed her fury on the Scrabble board. The look on Skyler’s smug face at every triple-word score with the letter Z filled me with a sick balance of infatuation and irritation.

  When I conceded to her vocabulary mastery, I taught her how to tend to the fire. Skyler shifted the burning logs and added more wood, the heat rolling through the living room and kitchen. She giggled about hosting an indoor cookout and sparked a favorite childhood memory.

  “If you want, we can make that happen.” Her eager nod was all I needed. Skyler moved around the kitchen with me, pulling food from the freezer to thaw while I gathered everything from the fridge.

  Her quiet gasp stopped me in the middle of gathering side dishes from the fridge. The curve of her beautiful waist hugging the wide edge of the farmhouse sink. Her perfect lips bowed in awe.

  “Look at the sky,” she whispers, her eyes trained on the dull glow of the moon hidden behind the clouds. The world is still, robed in darkness and glowing white with the exception of the falling snow. Her eyes scan the backyard and along the tree line. “It’s so beautiful.”

  “Come with me.” I hear myself say the words, my mind fixed on her innocent face seeing the world I have loved since childhood. She follows me up to the second floor, where I point out the three additional bedrooms before walking her through my office to a hidden stairwell.

  Six steps curve up and into the peak, a glass-enclosed room designed to provide uninterrupted views of the Harris homestead. At the center of the room, Skyler turns, her jaw slack with disbelief.

  “Nick, did you design this . . . this entire house?”

  “I did.” Every aspect of my home was planned to every specification I could imagine. Comfort. Career. Family. “Do you like it?”

  Sky looks shocked at the question. “It’s beautiful. It’s so”—she looks out the window—“you.” In the shadowed moonlight, Skyler turns to me. “How can you stand to live at Reign when you have this?”

  The walls of my room at Reign are painfully close. They have been for years. But they have kept me close to Skyler, so I deal with the discomfort. I don’t have an answer that doesn’t involve her. I stay for you . . . with you bounces in my head, seeking an exit. Before I can offer the sentiment, her gaze drops to the floor, and she stoops to look at the contrasting inlay design on the floor.

  “Is that a compass?” She drops to her knees, to the dark wooden arrows embedded in the blond floorboards.

  “Yeah, I was learning inlay design. I thought it would be a cool addition to the room.”

  Slender fingers trace the lines of my work. “Nick,” Skyler says, looking up at me, “I am so impressed with all of this.”

  I nod. Praise, even for work I know is quality, is hard to accept. “When Evan texted us about the bear, I wanted to bring you up here to look for it.”

  She wobbles a bit. Though it’s not a distant memory, we put it behind us enough to move forward. “I’m sorry about all of that.” Skyler steps closer, her hand resting on my chest.

  “You didn’t realize.” My hands curl around her upper arms, pulling her close to me. Holding her has never been this easy. “I lost it out there, and I should have kept a cooler head. The whole thing scared the shit out of me.”

  Against me, Skyler inhales. “It won’t happen again.”

  I shove horrible flashes of her mauled body, then her limbs tangled with my brother’s, aside. “Okay. Let me show you where everyone lives from up here.”

  Skyler stands in silence, tucked under my arm as she looks over the dense woods and snow-covered trees. From our vantage point, the evergreen trees look small. At their base, they are one of Mother Nature’s monoliths. They have held my brothers and me during hunting season for years. The world was ours, six boys living the dream of every outdoorsman. When she looks up at me, pushing up on her toes to kiss my neck, the compliment in genuine.

  “This place is perfect.”

  The words to tell her this place is better with her gather and bind together. We have never shared intimacies like this before. I couldn’t. Every season starts and ends here. Every season, I leave her there. If I have to leave her again, this beautiful place will be tainted with the loss of her.

  Her head drops to my shoulder. She sighs as she hugs me a little tighter. “I could stand here all night.”

  “I’ve done that already.” I laugh at my own absurd traditions. Meteor showers, full moons, and new moons are all reasons to stay up and stare at the sky in the middle of the night. “The stars are unreal out here. We don’t have any light pollution like in Boston.”

  “There are also no fireplaces or caches of snow toys. I’m not sure how you survive.” She laughs. “Come on.” She pulls away, the steady warmth of her body leeching away from my side. “Let me watch another miracle of the Harris homestead—you making me food.”

  Our indoor picnic results in hot dogs roasted in the living room fireplace. All the fixings, including Huffaker’s homemade potato salad, spread across the coffee table. I coach her on how to grill over the open flame, but it isn’t necessary. Her patience and mindfulness give her key advantages in almost any situation. Including roasting the perfect hot dog. Dessert is an easy pick—graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate. She would kill me if we didn’t.

  “Mmm.” Her eyes flare wide at the taste of the gooey treat. I forgot how much Skyler likes food. I’ve always liked that she likes food. She looks at me, her face beaming delight. “Don’t lie to me; you must do this every day, right? How could you not?”

  “No,” I laugh. “Never by myself.” I look into the fire, the memory crackling to the surface. “When we were younger, we had a lot of our meals like this. Adam and Jude would get everything set up, and they would cook for the rest of us.”

  Her face scrunches up. “You didn’t do this with your parents? They let six boys just play with an open fire?”

  “Well,” I say and sit back, hoping it will help me get comfortable with the words, “yeah.” I look at Skyler, the flames casting dancing shadows across her face. “My dad worked a lot. When he wasn’t working, he was hunting. He collected game from the woods, which he butchered.”

  “Do I get to meet your dad while I’m here?”

  Her question is innocent, asked as she is loading up more marshmallows to brown. I’m glad she’s focused on her task when I flinch, unable to restrain the pain. I inhale and state the facts.

  “He died seven years ago.”

  Skyler freezes. “Oh my gosh . . . I’m so sorry.” She puts the roasting fork down and turns to me. “I-I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay. It’s not something I shared with anyone.” Her empathy is a killer. Compassion blooms from every pore of her body, seeking a place to soothe. It makes the sick fuck in me want to bleed if only to feel her care for a moment. I clear my throat to distract myself from the sensation of her hand on my thigh.

  “He had a massive heart attack in a tree stand. My dad, Adam, and Jude went out for the day. Adam and Jude opted to post at a different location and left my dad at his favorite spot. When they came back that evening, he was gone. There was nothing anyone could have done.”

  “Your brothers found him?” Her voice catches. “That’s awful. It must have
been terrible for your mother,” she says absently.

  “He died where he lived. I don’t know that you could ask for more.” I can’t look at her, but I can see her gaze is firmly on me. “As for my mother, I’m not even sure she knows.”

  “What?” Skyler folds her legs under her, sitting on her knees.

  I hear Jude’s words fall from my mouth. “My mother decided that this life, six boys and a husband, was outside of her comfort zone. She had other plans for her life.”

  Her jaw drops. “She left? Like, she packed her bags and was gone?”

  I nod, reliving the day in my mind. I thought the day would be calm because she went on a tirade the night before. Mom would unleash her hell beast on one of us by finding something wrong with the chosen offender. She would terrorize him until the day was over, denying meals and attention and making statements no child should ever hear. The day after her fit, she was generally nice. She would make the victim’s favorite meal as an apology dinner—I don’t think anyone caught onto this trick except for me and Wyatt—and all would be right with the world.

  “We came home from school, and the house was ransacked—furniture overturned, kitchen cabinets dumped. Our clothing was thrown around the house. Some of it had been cut apart.”

  Skyler’s hand covers her mouth for a moment before tucking her hair behind her ear. “How old were you?”

  “I was six when she left.”

  “And your dad?”

  A weary ache throbs deep in my chest. “Would work and hunt.”

  “It was just you and your brothers?” She sits back, her eyes shifting back and forth as if she’s thinking. “No wonder Adam is so protective of you.”

  The sympathy in her voice makes me uneasy. “He was sixteen at the time, but we had each other and my grandfather. I wasn’t alone. As for Adam, he’s a sexless control freak.”

  “Still, you must have had so many questions and feelings about her leaving.”

  I can see her ticking through scenarios in her head. “Don’t analyze it, Skyler. It’s over.”