Quite the sap run. It kicked in during the night as a southwest wind kept the temp up. Then today, a chilly northwest wind with intermittent sun and snow kept the sap gushing clear as a glacial lake.
—Colton Abbott’s sugaring journal, April 5
“Sorry if they were a bit much,” he finally said when he couldn’t take the silence any longer.
“They were wonderful. I can see why Cameron loves them all so much.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Yes. Did you think I wasn’t enjoying myself?”
“I couldn’t tell if you were charmed or appalled.”
“Definitely charmed. Who wouldn’t be, Colton? They’re amazing and funny and beautiful—every one of your siblings is beautiful. You know that, don’t you?”
“Ew, gross. They are not. I’ll give you Hannah and Ella maybe, but the rest of them . . . Yuck. My stomach just turned.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. By the standards of anyone with a heartbeat, your brothers are hot and your sisters are gorgeous.”
He curled his lip in mock horror. “Lucas and Landon are not hot.”
Lucy laughed at his reaction. “You’ve been spending far too much time alone on your mountain. While you weren’t looking, your baby brothers turned into gorgeous men who are firefighters. Do you understand the significance of that?”
“I guess they’ve saved a life or two. So what?”
“Now you’re just being obtuse.”
“That’s a big word.”
“Dense. Is that better?”
He bit his lip to keep from laughing out loud. She was so damned funny.
“Firefighters are the sexiest men in the universe. Not only do they save lives, they run into burning buildings, they get cats down from trees, they pry people out of mangled cars, and they do it all in those suits. What’re they called?”
“Turnout suits?”
“Yes! Those.”
“You think turnout suits are sexy?”
“Turnout suits are a huge turn-on.”
“You’re not right in the head, Lucy Mulvaney. That’s all there is to it.”
“You’re the one with the vision problems. Not me.”
“Well, even though you’re not right in the head, you were a good sport back there, and I appreciate it. Especially the boost you gave to my flagging manhood. Up until that point, it hadn’t been a very good day for my boys and me. Lots of ups and downs—and not the good kind. You turned things around rather nicely.”
“I still can’t believe I said that in front of your mother.”
“With the ten of us underfoot, there’s nothing she hasn’t already heard. Don’t sweat it. She was probably impressed that you stood up for me. She’s big on loyalty. That goes a long way with her. And with me. You were very, very loyal to me. And my boys. We intend to show our appreciation as soon as we get back to the mountain.”
Laughing, she shook her head. “You’re incorrigible.”
“You love me.”
A pervasive silence occupied the rest of the ride home, and Colton berated himself the whole way for being flippant about something as important as love. Did he love Lucy? Probably. Was he in love with Lucy? He was well on his way to being in love with her, or so he thought. Having never been in love before, he wasn’t really sure what it felt like.
All he knew was he wanted to be with her as often as possible. He had no interest in any other woman, which was unusual in and of itself. Under normal circumstances, he preferred variety and had several women who enjoyed hanging out with him on occasion with no strings attached. That had worked for him for a long time. But not anymore. After what he’d shared with Lucy, he couldn’t imagine going back to meaningless encounters with women who were nothing more than friends with benefits.
He’d always been up front with them before he got involved. He wasn’t looking for serious and he didn’t want anyone’s feelings to be hurt. If a woman seemed to be getting overly serious about their arrangement, he ended it.
So how was he supposed to know if he was in love with Lucy? When Will got back from the lake, Colton was going to talk to his older brother about this situation. He needed a reality check, and he needed it soon before he did something stupid to mess up the best thing that’d ever happened to him.
Lucy felt like she was floating through a weird dream state as they returned to Colton’s cabin. Twice in the last few hours he’d used the word love to refer to what was happening between them. In just a few days’ time, what had been easy and noncommittal had taken a sharp turn toward serious.
And though she kept reminding herself that none of the obstacles that stood between them and any kind of future together had been addressed, that didn’t stop her from wanting more of him.
Even though it was July, the temperature on the mountain had dropped with the sun, so Colton lit the huge castiron woodstove in the cabin.
“Do you normally light the stove in the summer?”
“Not very often. When you spend winters up here, this doesn’t count as cold. But I know it does for you, so I don’t mind heating the place up.”
“I want to know everything about how you manage up here without electricity. What do you do for light, for example?” It wasn’t totally dark yet, but it was getting there quickly.
“Kerosene lamps.” He lit two of them, and they cast a cozy glow over the small space.
“How about refrigeration?”
“I rely on an old-fashioned icebox and get blocks of ice delivered every other day in the summer. I make my own in the winter.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s over in the sugarhouse. It stays cooler there year-round, so that’s the best place for it.”
“Will you show me the sugarhouse and tell me how it all works?”
“Sure, I’d be happy to show you tomorrow.”
“How about cooking? I’m trying to picture life without a microwave.”
“I have my very own microwave right here,” he said, gesturing to the iron woodstove. “I can cook both inside and on top, and the heat of the fire gets things done pretty quickly.”
“Very impressive.”
“It’s not fancy, but it gets the job done. I don’t want for much up here, except lately.”
“What do you want for lately?”
“A phone, for one thing, and an Internet connection. Two things I’ve lived perfectly fine without until I had someone I wanted to talk to every day.”
Smiling, Lucy picked up her bag. “I’m going out to the bathhouse. Will you check to make sure there are no ‘visitors’ named Fred or anything else out there waiting to scare the crap out of me?”
Chuckling, he said, “I’d be happy to.”
Once he’d declared the yard critter free and lit yet another kerosene lamp in the bathhouse for her, he left her to get changed.
As she brushed her teeth and changed into yoga pants and a tank top, Lucy had to admit that she’d been skeptical about what it would be like to live without electricity and all the modern conveniences. But Colton made it look easy—and comfortable. Sure it was different than what she was used to, but different wasn’t necessarily bad.
Until she realized she had no way to manage one other nightly task: charging her cell phone. Suddenly different seemed very, very bad.
“Colton,” she said when she returned to the cabin. “What do I do about my phone?”
“What about it?”
“I can’t charge it here.”
“No, you can’t. Is that a huge problem?”
She didn’t want to overreact, but the thought of her family and employees not being able to reach her made her twitchy. “Not a huge problem . . . It’s just . . . I’m not used to being out of touch. What if there’s an emergency?”
“I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow I’ll take you down to town and you can charge up at the office, okay?”
“Yes,” she said, relieved. “That’d be great.”
“Good.” He held up the bedcovers for her. “Jump in so you don’t get cold.”
She slid between soft flannel sheets and he tucked the comforter in around her.
“Be right back.”
Lucy watched him cross the room and leave the cabin, closing the door behind him. She loved looking at him and watching him move. He had a confident way about him, like he was comfortable in his own skin and didn’t feel the need to explain himself or his choices to anyone. It was an admirable quality and one she wished she could more fully embrace. At the end of the day, she was a pleaser. She wanted the people who mattered to her to be happy, even if that meant giving up things that might’ve made her happy.
She’d definitely made sacrifices for her family and had been more like a second mother than an aunt to Simone. As a single mom, Emma relied heavily on her, and Lucy was happy to do whatever she could for both of them. But had that been at the expense of her own life and happiness? These weekends with Colton had shown her what she’d been missing by frantically tending to the needs of others for so many years that she’d forgotten how to tend to her own needs.
Speaking of her own needs . . . He came back inside, bringing the dogs in with him this time and getting them settled on their beds. Then he stripped off his shirt and dropped his shorts, leaving both in a pile on the floor as he headed for the bed with a look on his face that left no doubt about what he had in mind.
Lucy’s entire body tingled with interest as he slid into bed next to her. She propped herself up on a bent arm so she could look down at him. “Kind of early for bed, isn’t it?”
He played with one of her curls. “This isn’t the city that never sleeps. This is the mountain that goes to work—and bed—early.”
“What do you do for fun on the rare nights when you have to entertain yourself up here?”
“I’m sensing a bit of sarcasm in that question.”
“Just a bit?”
Smiling, he said, “I read a lot, books and sugaring periodicals and other nature stuff. I love to draw.” He reached for the bedside table and picked up a book that he handed to her.
“What’s this?”
“My living history of the most recent sugar season.”
Lucy opened the book and was instantly captivated by his drawings as well as the vivid words he used to describe the season. She wasn’t sure what interested her more—the images or the words that went with them. “This is so cool. You’re incredibly talented.”
“It’s just a hobby. I also play with the dogs and fix stuff around here. There’s always something to do. I don’t get distracted when there’s a lot to do, so this life works really well for me.”
She put down the book but intended to study it in far more detail when she got a chance. “Don’t you feel cut off from your family and friends when you’re up here with no way to communicate with them?”
“Not really. I see a lot of my family. They come up. I go down. We keep in touch. People come up to the store, so I hear the latest news from town.”
“And of course there’s your harem. How does that work? Do you have a scheduler in town who assigns nights to each of the women?”
“Stop it!” he said with a laugh. “There aren’t that many of them.”
“Still . . . How do they know who is on duty on any given night?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never asked them.”
“I bet there’s an elaborate system that you have no knowledge of. Maybe Sunday is A Day, thus Angie.”
He curled his hand around her neck and tugged her close enough to kiss. “Jealous Lucy is sexy Lucy.”
“I’m not jealous of Angie or the rest of your harem, and I’m certainly not threatened by them.”
“Particularly since you dispatched them by telling Angie I lopped off my package with an axe.”
“I never said those words. If she jumped to that conclusion, that’s on her. Not me.”
He rose up and had her pinned under him before she knew what hit her. “You are an evil minx, and you knew exactly what you were doing when you told her that.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you don’t,” he said as he kissed her.
“Who’s the Monday girl? Mona? Monica? Mary?”
“Shut up, Lucy,” he said laughing as he kissed her again.
“Tuesday is Tawny or Tish or Trashy Tina?”
“You know, there are other things you can do with your mouth besides torment me.”
“Like what?”
“Seems to me that before you maligned my boy parts, you were thinking about getting to know them better.”
“I don’t remember that. Maybe you should refresh my memory.”
Rather than do that though, he captured her face in those big callused hands of his and looked down at her.
“What?” she asked, unnerved by the intensity she saw in his gaze.
“I’ve never had more fun with any woman than I do with you, Lucy Mulvaney.”
Far more moved by his words than she probably should’ve been, she said, “Really?”
“Really.”
“Not even Trashy Tina?”
He shook his head. “She can’t hold a candle to you.”
“She’s probably a lot better at the trashy stuff than I am. She’s certainly got more experience than I do.”
“Are you honestly comparing your skills in bed to that of a fictional woman who you totally made up five minutes ago?”
When he put it like that, she sounded like an insecure nitwit. “Maybe.”
“You don’t need to worry about comparing yourself to anyone else, Lucy. You’re one of a kind. Trust me on that.”
She ran her hands up and over his bulging biceps. “Did you mean it when you said you wanted us to be exclusive? No more Angie, Mona or Trashy Tina? And we haven’t even gotten to Wednesday yet . . .”
He kissed her. Hard.
When she moaned and opened her mouth to his tongue, he took full advantage of the opportunity to demonstrate the other things she could do with her mouth beside obsess about the other women in his life. He wrapped his arms around her and settled into the kiss as his muscular body pressed against hers.
Lucy curled her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips. She’d never been kissed the way Colton Abbott kissed her, as if kissing her was the only thing keeping him alive. He didn’t kiss so much as consume. She felt consumed by him, and it was the sweetest feeling she’d ever known.
As she lay surrounded by his strength and his appealing scent, none of the issues standing between them mattered. She didn’t care that he lived six hours from her or that his lifestyle was so different from hers they might be from opposing universes rather than the same country. She didn’t care that they’d blown all their plans to not get too serious. She didn’t care that she was setting herself up for major heartbreak when this whole thing blew up in her face.
No, all she cared about right now was how magical it felt to be held and kissed and loved by him. Yes, she felt loved, and treasured and strangely safe with him despite all the peril that surrounded this relationship.
He broke the kiss and turned his attention to her neck, licking and nibbling and setting her on fire. “Yes, Lucy,” he whispered as his whiskers rubbed against her sensitive skin. “I meant it when I said I want us to be exclusive. The thought of another guy touching you the way I do . . .” He cupped her breast and toyed with her nipple until it tightened. “I’d want to kill anyone who touched you like this.”
“So you understand how I felt when Angie came sniffing around earlier.”
“You don’t need to worry about her or anyone else.” He kissed a path to her throat and chest before tugging impatiently at her tank top until her nipple popped free. “I don’t want her. I don’t want anyone but you.”