Page 49 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
I lie still and let it all settle.
The way I feel is not something I have a clean category for. It isn't exclusively the physical—though the physical is, without qualification, the best I've ever had, and I say that as someone who has spent five years convincing herself that fine was the same as good. This is the difference between fine and good, made undeniably, physically, and emotionally apparent.
But it's more than that.
It's the way he'd asked what I wanted and waited for the actual answer. It's the way he'd looked at me on the ridge and looked at me in this room, and both times it was the same look—full attention, no performance, purely him deciding I was worth every bit of it. It's the way he'd said someday about the scars and meant it like a promise neither of us had to say out loud.
Serious is what this is.
I have only known this man for a short while. I came to this mountain by accident in a wedding dress, running from a life that wasn't mine. And I am lying in his bed in the dark, thinking, with the quiet, steady clarity of someone recognizing something true rather than deciding something convenient —
I am in real trouble.
The good kind.
The kind I have never been in before and didn't know I was missing until this exact moment, in this exact room, with this exact man asleep beside me on a mountain that is starting to feel, with every day that passes, less like temporary and more like something else entirely.
Logan shifts and pulls me closer, automatically and unconsciously.
I close my eyes.
18
LOGAN
Iwake before she does.
That's not unusual—I wake before everyone, always have—but this morning it's different. I lie still for a moment, listen to her breathe beside me, and feel the bond with a clarity that is new, even after the short amount of time of feeling it constantly. Deeper. More settled. Like something that was already permanent has found an additional layer of permanence, a root it didn't have yesterday.
I knew this would happen.
I'd known since the first night that if this moment came, the bond would respond to it. I hadn't fully understood what responding would feel like from the inside—this particular weight, this specific certainty, a thing that was already absolute somehow becoming more so.
I watch the ceiling for a while and listen to her breathe and let myself have it, if only for a few minutes, before I start thinking practically.
She wakes slowly.
Harper surfaces from sleep the way she does most things—in stages, with awareness arriving before action. She stretches—a long, unselfconscious movement—and the sheet slips, and I let myself look because I have earned that and she is worth looking at, the morning light catching the line of her collarbone and the tumble of chestnut hair across the pillow.
She opens her eyes and finds me watching, and something touches her features—not embarrassment, something warmer than that, something that is still getting used to being seen and isn't entirely sure what to do with it yet.
"Morning," she offers, her voice rough with sleep.
"Morning," I tell her.
She looks at the window—the pale early light, the pines visible through the glass—and she is quiet and unhurried, fully awake and entirely at ease with where she's woken up.
"You okay?" I finally ask.
She turns back to look at me, and the corners of her mouth move. "That's my line," she tells me.
"Borrowed it."
She considers me for a moment with those hazel eyes. "Yeah," she decides. "Actually yeah." A pause, smaller. "You?"
"Yeah," I tell her. "I am."
She gets up and moves around the cabin with the comfortable ease of a room that no longer requires anything from her, pulling on yesterday's clothes without ceremony, running her fingers through her chestnut hair in the approximate direction of order. She makes coffee without asking whether I want some—she already knows I do—and brings both mugs to the table and sits across from me, and we drink in the morning, quietly, the way we've been doing things together since she arrived.
