My Not-Yet Mate and the Thirty-Day Trial novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Mine

Joss's cabin sits at the end of the sawmill road, in a stand of tamarack, with a stovepipe and one window facing the creek.

I had never been inside it.

On Friday night he needed clean work shirts, and I said I would drive him, and neither of us pretended that was the reason.

The door stuck.

He put his shoulder to it, and it swung open on a single big room that smelled of cedar and woodsmoke and him.

There was a woodstove with a cold kettle on it.

There was a table with two chairs, a shelf of paperbacks with cracked spines, and a bed with a quilt in faded blue squares.

"My mother made it," he said, when he saw me looking. "Before she got sick."

I ran my hand over the stitching.

It was small, careful and neat.

"It's a good quilt."

"It's a good bed, too." He said it into his shoulder, a little shy. "Never had anyone in it."

I looked up.

"Never?"

"I always went to their place. Or I came home alone." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I didn't like people in here."

"And now?"

"Now I think I'd like it if you were."

The secret sat in my chest.

I had carried it for a day and a night.

I had pulled out the phone twice in the bathroom to read the email, and put it away twice without answering.

I did not want to talk.

I wanted to put my hands on something that was real.

I shut the cabin door behind me and leaned against it.

"Take your clothes off," I said.

He turned from the shelf.

"All of them?"

"All of them. Get on the bed."

He stripped in the lamplight, quickly and without embarrassment, boots and jeans and the grey henley.

I watched every inch of him come bare.

The bruise I had left above his knee had gone yellow-purple.

The scratches on his back were healing into thin pink lines.

My bite on his shoulder had turned a deep dusky red.

He sat on the edge of the quilt, naked, with his big hands on his thighs.

He looked at me, waiting to be told.

I took off my own clothes slowly, one piece at a time.

I left them in a pile by the stove.

Then I climbed onto the bed and pushed him onto his back and went over him on my hands and knees.

"I want you to hold still," I said.

"Again?"

"Yes."

I rubbed my cheek along his chest.

I dragged my neck across his collarbone, and I pressed my wrists to his throat, one and then the other.

I breathed against him and left my scent on every inch of skin I could reach.

He watched me do it with an expression I couldn't read.

"What are you doing?"

"Marking," I said. "So nobody mistakes it."

"Nobody will."

"Keeley might."

"Laney." His hand came up and cupped my jaw. "Keeley doesn't get a vote."

I turned my face and bit the heel of his hand.

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