“Thank you,” he says quietly as he squeezes my hand.
I bite my lip and squeeze back. When he lets go, I cup my coffee to warm myself. Heat comes quickly enough, though. It shoots up my spine as I watch Ryder drink from his mug, and take in his whole adorable morning appearance. He has great bedhead and a distracting line of skin peeking between his shirt and his pajama bottoms.
“So.” Ryder sips his coffee, then sets it down. “This kind of thing. It. What are we talking about?”
“Didn’t I use enough feeling words this morning?”
Ryder just stares at me and smiles.
I swear under my breath and gulp some coffee. “You and me, Lumberjack. What we are.”
He bends far enough to lean his elbows on the counter. He’s wearing a gray thermal shirt that’s worn and fitted in all the right places. It hugs the cut muscles of his shoulders and arms, running snug along his trim waist. I’m scared to see what’s below that point. I’m pretty sure it’s plaid flannel, and I’m not sure I’m prepared for that much lumbersexual hotness.
“What we are,” he repeats. “Which is…?”
I open my mouth, but no words come out. I want to be courageous, I want to say what Ryder means me to, what I want us to try to be, but my courage sticks somewhere between my throat and my tongue.
His phone shatters the silence as it buzzes, skittering along the quartz countertop. Ryder silences his cell without looking at it, but stupidly, my eyes travel to the screen. Emma.
Red tints my vision. Emma? Who the everloving fuck is Emma?
“No one important,” Ryder says evenly.
My eyes snap up to his. “I said that out loud?”
“You did, Willa.” Ryder smiles and gently brushes one of my curls off of my forehead. “Seriously, she’s no one to me.”
I stare at him, blinking rapidly. Very strange things are happening in my chest. It feels like someone beat it with a crowbar, cracks rapidly forming. My skin is hot, my head pounding. I think…I think I’m jealous?
Ryder slides the phone my way. “Don’t believe me, see for yourself.”
The phone screams at me to swipe it open, to deep-sea dive into Ryder’s texts. Who else has been texting him? What other chicks with pretty contemporary names instead of ones inspired by Prairie-obsessed twentieth-century authors are blowing up his phone?
I shut my eyes and exhale slowly. “I trust you.”
“You can still look through it.”
My eyes open and narrow at him. “Do you want me to?”
Ryder shrugs. “I don’t care if you do. I’d be a little curious if some guy was blowing up your phone. I trust you implicitly, but I wouldn’t mind knowing what he was saying, I think. Go ahead, Sunshine.”
Swiping his coffee off the counter, Ryder backs away. Dammit, my worst fears are confirmed. Ryder Bergman wears flannel on his fantastic ass and mountain man legs as well as he wears it over his tree-felling upper body. “I’m going to freshen up. Have at it.”
He’s gone without another word, leaving me with his phone burning in my hand.
I tap my fingers on the counter. The clock ticks. My coffee gets cold.
“Oh, what the hell.” I swipe open his phone because yes, I know his password by now.
It starts off innocuous, this perusal of Ryder’s cell. He texts his siblings a lot, and that warms my heart. I’m both jealous of and wildly happy for him that he has such close family. He texts his mom every morning. That twists my gut. I deliberately avoid texts from Sadie, Emma, Haley, and Olivia.
Until I don’t.
Fuckety fuckersons. These chicks are not subtle. Coffee invites, long-time-no-sees. Let’s grab dinner sometime. Presumably, they’re former conquests of his. One-night stands. Not girlfriends, because Ryder’s been clear he hasn’t dated since high school—why he was so emphatic about that, who knows. What I do know is all of these texts begin roughly around the time of the attack on Fort Ryder’s Face, when Becks and Tucker forced his hand by shaving the middle of his beard.
I’m not surprised. I’ve always found Ryder hot, truly handsome. There’s a quiet sexiness to a man who doesn’t flaunt all he has to offer, and while I didn’t realize it’s my catnip, it clearly is. I might have wanted to throttle him from the first moment we met, but it didn’t take me long to realize I also found him deeply attractive.
Without the beard, though, Ryder’s like…well, he’s model material. He has classically beautiful features, roughened with enough masculinity and hard edges, the wear and tear of sunshine and years outside, to make him look mature and even older than he actually is. Ryder is a man among a sea of boys. When the beard got nixed, that fact went on full display.
My heart pounds. Ryder didn’t respond to a single one of them. He left his read receipts on to make it clear he’d both seen them and was ignoring them. He sent a very clear message. But I’m still shaking with this new itchy feeling under my skin. I have the ridiculous impulse to sprint after and tackle him, to bite his warm, taut skin, head to toe, kiss him senseless, and then ride that lumberjack’s wood all morning. I want every square inch of Ryder to say Willa’s. I want everyone to know he’s mine, I’m his, and we’re the only one the other wants.
Holy shit. Hooooly shit.
Reality slaps me upside the head. If I saw him with any of those women, if he’d as much as agreed to get a cup of fucking tea, I’d have felt like my heart was ripped out of my chest.
It’s not possessiveness. This isn’t some petty female game I’m allowing myself to be sucked into. When I try to picture him with anybody else, another woman holding his hand, tugging his hair, another woman kissing or touching him, burrowing into his warm grasp, rubbing his head when a migraine hits, it feels like standing in front of one of those distorted mirrors at the funhouse. It’s the wrong image. Instinctively, positively, I know it’s not right. That’s not how it should be, ever.
Why? The answer beats louder and louder inside me until the truth is jarring my bones, rattling the cage I locked it in. Because I lo—
“Sunshine?”
His voice echoes from upstairs. The affection and familiarity in my nickname is a warm blanket of reassurance, wrapping around me. It’s the audible version of his hugs, those big arm squeezes that incite a feeling I’ve had for months. That when I’m with Ryder Bergman, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
“What?”
“Rain looks like it’s coming sooner rather than later. If I’m going to kick your ass on the field, we better get moving.”
Sureness settles with a terrifying weight in my chest. It sinks into my stomach and lands heavy, solid, unquestionable. I can’t believe what I’m about to do, and yet I’m determined to do it, now that I understand. Now that it’s singing in my ears, filling my heart, demanding to be spoken.
“Coming!”
Ryder’s quiet on the walk down the winding path. Close to the bottom, my feet catch on loose stones. His hand juts out immediately, wrapping around my elbow.
“Yeesh, do you have eyes in the back of your head? You have freakish reflexes.”
Ryder grins, his eyes ahead. “Reflexes you will soon see schooling you on the field.”