Page 34 of Mountain Grump Protector

Cal

We don’t speak much on the drive down the mountain. After spending the last few days together, you’d think we’d be more comfortable with each other. And we are. Only… now I know exactly how she tastes. How she feels when her pussy clenches around my cock. How insanely hot she is when she screams out my name when she comes.

So, now, the air between us is thick with a different kind of tension. The kind that makes it hard to breathe when she looks at me. The kind that makes it almost impossible to keep my thoughts straight when she shifts in her seat next to me, drawing my eyes to her bare thigh.

But I need to focus. I need to keep my thoughts clear. The last thing I need is to be distracted in any way when the threat of Hatch is still very real. He’ll get his money, but I know I’ve pushed it by making him wait as long as I already have. Not that there’s been much choice. With the closest bank hours away in the city, it’s not like that kind of cash is easy to access.

Not that he’ll care.

It’s a miracle he’s been as patient as he has.

Going down the mountain now is a risk. But when Willow tells me she hasn’t heard from her father, I see the look in her eyes. However complicated things are between them, he’s still her dad, and she’s worried.

There’s no way I’m denying her the opportunity to check on him.

Hell, I’d be a lying asshole if I said that I’d deny her anything. I won’t. I can’t.

Because, as hard as I tried to avoid it, Willow's worked her way in. And I’m not fighting it. Not anymore.

And it’s a damn good thing she doesn’t know that…yet.

I’m already in way too much trouble when it comes to this woman and the feelings I haven’t even begun to try to sort out.

Every so often, I catch her glancing over at me quickly before looking away, like she, too, is trying to figure out what exactly is going on between us.

It’s a conversation for later.

Much later.

As we get closer to town, Willow gives me simple directions. I haven’t asked many questions about her family. I don’t need to. The bits and pieces she’s let slip, plus the fact that she’s in the situation she’s in, have been enough for me to read between the lines and paint a clear enough picture.

Still, nothing can prepare me for the place she calls home.

The yard, if you can even call it that, is overgrown with weeds. There are flower boxes on the front steps, but whatever had been blooming there is brown and shriveled from the hot sun. There’s an old truck sitting up on blocks, rusting out on the edge of the drive. And an old, stained couch sags near the porch like someone tried to remove it once and gave up when they got that far.

Beside me, Willow stiffens and sucks in a breath.

“Before you say anything,” she mutters, all the familiar sharpness she’s let slide over the last few days, clicking back into place. “I know it looks bad.”

I glance over at her. Her walls are firmly back in place. The traces of vulnerability I’d started to see over the last few days, gone.

“Don’t judge,” she says.

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

She huffs in a breath like she doesn’t believe me.

“I do my best,” she adds quietly, her eyes once more staring out the windshield at the place she calls home. “The flowers are dead.”

The small realization that Willow would have planted those flower boxes in an effort to cheer up her home, and they’d gone neglected in her short absence, makes me sad for her, and a fresh surge of protectiveness toward her washes over me.

I put the truck in park and pull the keys from the ignition.

The second I reach for the door handle, Willow frowns. “What are you doing?”

“Coming with you.”

“Cal. You don’t⁠—”