Page 11 of Claimed on the Ridge

That strip of skin above her collar where her pulse would be visible if I were close enough. I was close enough once today. The memory of the heat that rolled off that skin has been sitting in my bloodstream for hours doing things I can't afford.

My hand closes into a fist against my thigh, slow and deliberate, and releases the same way. The gesture is the one I use when the impulse to act is ahead of the decision about how. Tonight the impulse is focused and aimed at a door down the hallway where I did not stop. Stopping wasn't an option. Wanting to stop isn't the same as having the right.

The wall between our rooms is thick and old and does its job. From the other side, nothing.

The storm pushes against the lodge trying to find a way in. I lie in the dark thinking about the flinch when the pan droppedand the way her hand went to her wrist like it was the only thing she knew how to hold on to.

A woman whose name I don't believe. Whose fear I recognize. Whose laugh I almost earned once today and have been chasing in my head ever since.

The curve of her throat when she swallowed. The heat of her skin when I stood too close. A mouth I've been thinking about since she stood at my bar and told me she could find the end of a hallway herself.

Tomorrow she'll be in my kitchen again. Sitting at my table. Walking the long way around the island to avoid brushing against me. I'll be watching her do it.

The watching is already becoming something I don't know how to put down.

The storm hasn't even started to break. Neither have I. But the margin is getting thinner by the hour, and the woman on the other side of this wall has no idea what she's doing to it.

3

KENDALL

The kitchen smells like coffee and bacon, and I'm counting again. Not exits this time. Not cash, not miles, not hours since Anchorage. Those calculations are still running in the background, a low hum I've learned to live with. But this morning the math at the front of my mind is different.

The number of times Alex Sawyer's shoulder has brushed mine since breakfast, and why I'm keeping count.

The answer is four. The reason is a problem I'm not solving today.

Day two in Sawyer's Ridge. Days before Gary expects me to surface from Sitka and I don't: shrinking. Cash remaining after the truck and everything it took to get here: enough to make my stomach drop every time I think about it.

The storm is still screaming outside, and the lodge has settled into the rhythms of a building that expects to be sealed for a while.

Cameron has the stove going again. The smell of coffee and bacon fills the main room, and the warmth from the kitchen drifts into the corners where the central heating doesn't quite reach.

I'm at the counter drying dishes because it gives my hands something to do that isn't gripping the strap of my bag or checking the window for a change in the weather.

Cameron washes. I dry. The rhythm is easy and domestic in a way that makes my throat tight if I think about it too long, so I don't think about it too long.

"You don't have to do that," Cameron says. He says it the same way he said it yesterday, which is gently and without any expectation that I'll stop.

"I know."

"Most guests let the dishes pile up."

"Most guests didn't grow up with a mother who'd lose her mind over a water ring on a counter."

The sentence comes out before I've vetted it, and I hear the tense wrong as soon as it lands.'Didn't.'Past tense. As if my mother is already gone rather than lying in a hospital in Sitka, dying by degrees, knowing her daughter made it out because she's the one who made sure of it.

Cameron doesn't catch it.

He nods and hands me a plate, and the simplicity of the gesture, the trust of it, sits in my chest like a warmth too big for the space I've made for it.

The thing about Cameron is that he's easy to be around. Not easy in the way that means uncomplicated. Easy in the way that means he takes up exactly the right amount of space and doesn't require you to perform anything to keep the room comfortable. In one day I've already noticed: he asks questions by not asking them. He offers by doing rather than saying.

When he refilled my coffee this morning, he set the mug down near my hand without comment. The casualness of it almost broke me in half, because Gary used to pour my coffee too. The difference between those two gestures is a canyon I could fall into.

I don't fall into it. I dry the plate and put it in the rack and reach for the next one.

From the main room, Dash's voice lifts above the crackle of the fire. He's been talking for the better part of an hour, moving between topics with the restless energy of someone whose body was designed for open spaces and whose current reality is four walls and a storm that won't quit.