Garrison sat in the armchair by the fire, shirtless and wearing jeans. His sock-covered feet were stretched out toward the fireplace. The heat from the flames flickered over his bare chest, warming and sweet.
At four in the morning, the snow was coming down outside, whirling in pale flurries against the dark sky. The fire burned hot and high behind the grate. The heater was on. It was nearly eighty degrees in the cabin, just how he liked it. The book he had started to read lay turned down on his thigh, but his mind was far from immersed in its chapters. Instead, his thoughts were full of Reyna.
Garrison had been surprised to see her on the trail earlier that day. It was as if he had been given a gift when he saw her sitting on that rock, removed from the chaos and rabble around her, a queen surveying her lands. He saw her as he came down the mountain then whipped past her on his board. A bubble of exquisite feeling popped to life inside him. It had overtaken the euphoria and freedom he usually felt from being on the mountain with the board under his feet. And he had damn near broken his neck to quickly get down the mountain then back up again to reintroduce himself.
And now, more than twelve hours later, he was still thinking about her. Reyna Allen. The artist. The woman.
Although he wasn’t one for commitments—his career as a divorce attorney forced him to see the futility of those sorts of arrangements—there was something about Reyna that made him want her. Want her badly.
On the mountain, he had only just restrained himself from kissing her. Her lips, glistening and red from the ChapStick or lipstick or whatever she’d applied, distracted and tangled his thoughts. In her presence, all clarity disappeared. All he wanted to do was kiss her and sink his fingers into her hair and make her sigh his name. Even now, the thought of her mouth made the muscles in his belly tighten.
Garrison had never had a vacation hookup before, but the fire in Reyna’s eyes made him want to try something new. A flicker of movement outside the window drew him from his thoughts. The brief flash of a woman’s face under a yellow hooded jacket. Reyna.
Without giving himself a chance to think, Garrison quickly pulled on his cold-weather clothes and rushed out the door after her. His heart raced as the primitive side of him, long buried by an exacting and regimented life, rose up to follow Reyna as if she were his female, scented temptingly on the wind.
The door clicked shut behind him, and snow crunched under his boots. Pale flurries swirled around him in the brisk breeze, melting against his face. The cold night groaned with its particular noises.
Reyna walked slowly up ahead, hands in the pockets of her yellow jacket while the furred hood obscured most of her face and covered her head. He didn’t try to be quiet. But he didn’t call out to her, either. He quickly caught up with her, using his slightly longer legs to his advantage.
“Ms. Allen.”
She turned, startled, her large black eyes widening even more. Dark curls tumbled into her face, and she took a step back.
“Are you following me?”
“Yes.”
She looked surprised again. Then turned away from him to continue walking. Garrison took that as an invitation to fall in step with her. Reyna glanced at him.
“I don’t want you following or stalking me,” she said. “I had enough ruin from you to last a lifetime.”
“Ruin?” He frowned. This wasn’t the almost welcoming woman he’d talked with on the slopes earlier that afternoon. Reyna was acting as if that conversation between them never happened.
“Yes. Ruin.” Her face grew harder, a beautiful mahogany mask under the falling snow. “Ian was not smart enough to think of all those conditions in the divorce papers by himself. It had to be you.” Reyna’s black eyes crackled with anger. There seemed to be some sort of fever burning inside her. She walked faster. “You helped him to leave me on the edge of desperation. After the divorce I had to start over completely.”
Garrison nodded silently, feeling again the weight of the blame for how the Barbieri divorce had been settled. In hindsight, he should have never allowed Ian Barbieri to do the things he’d done to the woman he’d supposedly loved since high school. Reyna hadn’t known what she was getting into. She hadn’t even retained a lawyer of her own, for heaven’s sake! But despite his attraction to her then, Garrison had been too caught up in his job, in the pure facts of the case, to do what was right.
“The divorce left me vulnerable and more alone than I’d ever been.” She slowed her steps, and her harsh breaths steamed the air. Then she looked annoyed with herself that she’d told him that much.
Because of Reyna and her divorce, he’d become more human, more aware of the larger picture where both parties in the separation were concerned. Garrison was almost ashamed to admit that it had been because of his attraction to her that he’d even begun to second-guess the methods that had worked so well for him in the past. Shallow, but true. After Reyna, it was no longer about simply allowing his client to escape a previous romantic entanglement with the most money possible. It was about being fair.
“It wasn’t my finest hour,” he said finally. Inadequately. “And although it means nothing now, please allow me to apologize.”
He’d spent untold weeks and months torturing himself with what he could have done to be fair to her five years ago. Then he dreamed about being the man to come to her rescue and save her from her marriage. Now he simply wanted to be the man in her bed.
He swallowed and fisted a gloved hand in his jacket pocket. The fierceness of his desire for her was almost frightening. Before he saw her on the train that morning, she had existed at the back of his mind as a sort of angel, inspiring him to be a better man. Now he wanted to pull her down in the dirt with him and kiss the innocence from her lips.
Reyna walked quietly by his side, thankfully oblivious to his yearning. She pushed the hood back from her face, and the snow fell on her hair, the white settling in her beautiful black curls. She tilted her face briefly up at the sky. Garrison watched a lucky snowflake melting against her lips. He watched, burning in his thirst, as those lips parted, and her tongue licked away the wet.
“Why apologize now?” she asked. “It’s been five years.”
“Because I didn’t mean to hurt you then, and I don’t want you to hold the past against me now.” He paused. “And I want you to know that I’m not that man anymore.”
“Why do you care what I think?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I want to...woo you.”
She made a disbelieving noise, the corner of her mouth tilting up. “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”
Embarrassed heat rushed through him. Was it possible that she knew his thoughts? Did she know how badly he wanted to pull her down into the snow with him and beneath him? Beyond the pounding of his lustful heart, he could almost hear the sounds she would make, her sighs and moans and gasps of pleasure, while he lost himself in the heated clasp of her.
Garrison cleared his throat. “Yes, that’s what I’d like to call it for now. Wooing is not such a bad word, is it?”
She looked at him again, and it was as if she could see into him, through him. “Wooing? Really?”
“Yes. Definitely,” he said. “At least at first.” Garrison allowed the humor to surface in his voice. And a hint of his desire.
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