Page 24 of Devoured By the Forbidden Mountain Man

His gaze lingered on me for a moment before the road demanded his attention again. He didn’t turn the exchange into a joke or ask what I meant. The fact that he seemed perfectly willing to let me sit there knowing we were both thinking about the kisses made awareness spread warmly beneath my sweater.

By the time we reached his property, I was grateful for the cold air when I climbed out.

The rain tapped steadily against the metal roof of the field office, surrounding us with sound as soon as Rex opened the door. Inside, the workspace looked increasingly less like the room I had walked into yesterday. The second desk had a usable surface. Vendor folders stood upright instead of leaning in a collapsing row. Receipts had stopped reproducing beneath unrelated paperwork.

There was still enough left to keep me busy for weeks.

At the moment, that felt helpful.

I hung my coat and scarf, then crossed to my desk and opened the spreadsheet I had started that morning. “I have two and a half hours before Meredith wants me to call. If you allow me to spend all of them staring at Gavin’s file, you’re going to regret it.”

Rex shrugged out of his jacket. “What would you rather do?”

“Something with a definitive answer.” I pulled a stack of invoices closer. “Preferably an answer that involves arithmetic.”

He smiled as he sat down at his own desk. “Annette sent the updated vendor list.”

“See? She understands me.”

For the next hour, North Fork gave me problems I could solve.

I found a duplicate supply charge, matched a repair invoice to the correct property expense, and discovered that Rex had paid for printer toner three times in five weeks because he kept buying it while he was already in town rather than checking whether he had any.

I held up the third receipt. “You currently own enough toner to survive a minor supply-chain collapse, and it would be more useful if you remembered where you put it. There are four.”

Rex looked over the top of his laptop. “I know where two boxes are, so I’m fifty percent accurate.”

I laughed and filed the receipt rather than give him the satisfaction of a response.

The work settled into an easy rhythm after that. Rex finished the mileage reports Annette needed while I moved between invoices and email. We spoke when there was a reason to, worked quietly when there wasn’t, and occasionally reached for the same piece of paper on the narrow corner between our desks.

The first time his fingers brushed mine, I pulled the invoice toward me and kept working. The second time, neither of us moved immediately.

His hand was larger than mine by enough to make the contrast impossible to miss. The backs of his fingers were rougher, the knuckles marked by the ordinary wear of a man who used his hands for more than typing. I lifted my eyes and found Rex looking at me instead of the paper. The memory of his mouth in the kitchen arrived with no invitation whatsoever, and my pulse changed.

Then his phone rang, and whatever might have happened dissolved into Annette demanding a document he should apparently have sent before lunch.

I hid my smile behind the computer monitor.

At five fifteen, the rain had deepened into a steady drumming against the roof, and I had reached the point where the invoices no longer required enough concentration to keep Meredith out of my head.

I saved the spreadsheet. “I need to change. I’ve spent most of the day in a restaurant, and I can smell the fryer in my hair.”

Rex’s attention moved over the forest-green sweater I had been wearing since dawn. “I can’t.”

“You’re not putting your nose in my hair.”

His expression changed very slightly, which was enough to make me realize what I had just handed him.

I gathered my notebook before the conversation could become much more interesting than I was prepared to handle with Meredith’s call less than an hour away.

“I also need food,” I added. “Something small. I ate lunch, but nervous anticipation apparently burns calories.”

Rex rose with me. “There’s leftover chicken.”

We went to the house rather than turning dinner into another production. Yesterday’s chicken became quick tortillas with greens, a squeeze of lime, and some of the roasted vegetables we had saved. I ate mine at the kitchen island while Rex stood on the opposite side, and the simple meal gave me something practical to do while I counted down toward six.

The kitchen no longer looked quite as unlived-in as it had the night before. The groceries we had bought occupied real shelf space. A dish towel hung over the oven handle where I had left it. The red wine bottle from dinner stood corked on the counter, still below half.