Page 30 of Raven's Mark
Her breath goes shallow, barely enough to be called breathing at all. "Jesse."
Her composure fractures. Just for a moment. Just long enough for me to see the want beneath the walls she's built, the same need that's been eating me alive since she walked back into my life.
"We can't." The protest is weak and unconvincing.
"I know." I don't step back. I don't give her the distance she thinks she needs. "But I'm done pretending I don't want to."
She inches closer. "This is a bad idea."
"Probably the worst I've had all year."
"Jesse." My name on her lips is half warning and half plea, and I'm not sure which one of us she's trying to protect.
"Say the word." I keep my hands at my sides and every muscle locked down. "Tell me to back off, and I will. But don't ask me to pretend I don't see the way you look at me."
The silence between us pulls tight enough to snap. Raven's hands unclench, and for one breathless moment I think she's going to reach for me the way I've been reaching for her in every thought that's kept me awake since she arrived.
Then she takes a step back. Then another.
"I need time." The admission sounds like it costs her. "I need to think."
I nod. Every instinct I have is screaming to push, to take what we both want and deal with the consequences later. But I've waited ten years. I can wait a little longer. "You know where to find me."
Raven retreats toward the hallway that leads to the bedroom. She stops at the threshold with her hand on the doorframe and looks back at me with an expression I can't quite read.
"For the record?" Her voice is steadier now. "I've been lying to myself too."
Then she's gone, and I'm alone in the kitchen with the weight of what was almost said and almost done pressing down on me like a physical force.
I pour a glass of whiskey I don't drink and stand at the window watching the darkness settle over the hills. Somewhere out there, the cartel is watching.
Let them watch. Let them wait. By the time they figure out she's here, I'll have made damn sure they can't reach her.
And when this thing between us finally breaks, when she stops pretending we're not inevitable, I'll be right here waiting.
9
RAVEN
The bedroom ceiling has a crack running from the light fixture to the far corner, and I've been studying it for twenty minutes.
Sleep isn't coming tonight. I knew that the moment I pulled the door shut behind me, but I lay down anyway, still dressed, my mind cycling through the same loop it's been caught in since Jesse Hollister muttered five words that rearranged everything I thought I understood about my life.
I was waiting for you.
The rational part of my brain has been building its case all night. Jesse is complicated. The timing is catastrophic. We're hiding from the cartel in a cabin off the grid, and this is the worst possible moment to lose my head. I wait for that argument to land the way it should, for the cool logic of it to settle over me like a weighted blanket I can pull tight and use to stay in this bed where I belong.
It doesn't appear. What arrives instead isn't second thoughts or the careful voice that's kept me functional through every difficult situation I've survived. The wanting moves through me like something with its own pulse, and it is utterly uninterested in my rational objections.
That ceiling crack isn't getting any more interesting, and neither is the argument for staying in this room.
A huff escapes me as I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed, my feet finding the floor. The cabin is quiet around me, nothing but the distant sound of wind moving through the cedars outside. No threat, no urgency. Just the night, this need, and the thirty feet of open space between me and the kitchen where Jesse is probably still standing at that window with a glass of whiskey he isn't drinking.
Good sense had its chance, and it wasted it.
My hand finds the doorknob, and I turn it before the last sensible nerve in my body can mount a protest. The kitchen light is still on, casting a warm glow across the open living space, and Jesse is exactly where I expected him to be. He stands with his back to me, one hand braced against the window frame and the other tucked into a pocket. The whiskey glass sits on the counter behind him, untouched.
He turns before I reach him, unhurried the way he does everything, like he's been waiting without expecting anything. The expression that crosses his face when he sees me isn't quite surprise. It's something quieter than that, something closer to the look of a man watching the one thing he'd stopped letting himself hope for walk toward him in the dark.
