907 For Keeps Way (Cherry Falls)

It’s in his smile. It’s in the way he touches me and the words he uses when we talk. It’s the care that he puts into every interaction and the honesty that he shares with me.

Is this the makings of a healthy relationship? Hell if I know. And I’m not going to figure it out tonight because tonight, all I want to figure out is how quickly he can go for a second round.

“What are you thinking?” he asks.

I grin. “I’m wondering if you need sustenance before you’re ready to go again.”

He laughs a loud, carefree laugh that just turns me on even more.

“Is that a yes or a no?” I ask.

He hovers over me—one hand on each side of my head. He peers down at me and smiles.

“Want to make a little wager?” he asks.

“Maybe.”

“If you can go longer than me tonight, then you can skip out on your third training session,” he says.

“Deal.”

He laughs. “I haven’t told you what will happen if you can’t.”

“I will. One hundred percent.”

He kisses me quickly. It takes everything I have not to straddle him whether he wants it or not.

“For clarification purposes,” he says, “if I go longer than you …”

He pulls a nipple between his teeth. I arch my back and sigh happily.

“If I go longer than you,” he says once he’s released my breast, “then you have to do this every night that’s humanly possible for a month straight.”

“Oh, I got this in the bag,” I say. Although, if he wants this—me—every night for a month, I’m in. But it might be fun to make a game out of it.

He smiles. “Then let me grab another condom, and let’s get this show on the road.”

I roll over and watch him sort through his clothes. The feeling of contentment, of maybe even happiness, floods my veins.

I could get used to this.

And I hate to tell him, but I’m winning this wager.

I have no intention of not letting him go longer than me. That way, we both win.

And maybe, that’s the key to it all.

Epilogue Part 1

Epilogue Part 1

Dane

One month later

“You tricked me.” Kaylee wipes a bead of sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. “Again.”

“I didn’t trick you.”

She rolls her eyes. It makes me laugh.

We’ve spent nearly every day together to some degree since the day she walked into Cherry Falls Fitness. Sometimes, it means I go to Cherry Pie Pizza and help her sweep and mop at the end of the day, and other times, it means she and Anna come to my house for dinner.

It’s been, without a doubt, the best month of my life.

Our lives blend with such ease that it shocks me sometimes to think that it hasn’t always been this way. We’re taking things slow—and by that, I mean I haven’t asked her to marry me. Yet.

They say when you know, you know, and I think I knew that Kaylee was the one for me the first day I saw her. There was always something about her, an energy that I can’t explain, that drew me to her.

That made every other woman in Cherry Falls and beyond not quite my type.

“You act like we’re going to do something fun when it’s really some masked form of exercise,” she laments as we end our hike.

“You can’t tell me that you didn’t have fun.”

A grin slips across her lips as she looks at me. It’s funny that the woman who can be so demanding in bed can still get so shy when we talk about it outside the moment.

“You didn’t like getting fucked on the picnic table back there?” I ask as if I’m shocked.

She swats me as her cheeks flush. “Stop it.”

“What?” I laugh. “Are we not allowed to talk about it now that we’re nearly at the car.”

“I just …” She shakes her head. “I was on top. That means I fucked you.”

“Oh, is that how it works?”

She refuses to look at me. “Yes. That’s how it works. Now, what do you want to do for dinner?”

I let her take the lead the rest of the way to my truck. She never ceases to entertain me with her love of food.

Kaylee Richards is my exact opposite in many ways. Yet, somehow, we fit perfectly together. The differences even go as far as our passions—hers for food and mine for working out. When we do them together, they balance each other.

Just like we do.

“I told Haley we’d come by her and Grayson’s tonight,” Kaylee tells me. “I thought we could take some pizza, and they could get some drinks, and we could play some euchre.”

“Sounds like a plan to me. Anything with you sounds like a plan to me, though.”

She smiles at me over her shoulder. And then, as I look at her, I know what I need her to know.