Page 9 of Claimed on the Ridge

She studies me for a beat that runs longer than comfortable. "I'm sorry about your father."

"Don't be. He earned what he got."

The sentence lands between us like a blade set down on a table, and I watch her register it. No recoil. No polite redirect. Recognition rather than shock, because she understands exactly what it means when a son says his father earned his death and doesn't need the statement dressed up in context.

Most people would fill the silence with something soft. She lets it breathe.

The fact that my darkness doesn't make her flinch the way a dropped pan does is something I feel in my chest, warm and dangerous.

"You don't say much, do you," she says, and a thread of humor surfaces in her voice despite what I suspect is her better judgment.

"I say what needs saying."

"That must make for riveting dinner conversation."

"Cameron does most of the talking. Dash fills in the gaps. Bryan, the one you haven't met yet, fills in the silences with judgment. I pour the drinks."

The corner of her mouth moves. The expression is small and involuntary and so different from the manufactured smile she produced after the flinch that the contrast hits me somewhere I wasn't expecting to be hit.

This is the real face. Quick, dry, alive in a way the performed version isn't.

"So you're the strong, silent type," she says. The dry edge on it pulls her mouth into a shape I track without deciding to.

"I'm the type that owns this building and keeps the generator running. The rest is negotiable."

The sound she makes is close enough to a laugh that my whole body pays attention. The humor rearranges her face, softens the structure of it, and for a half second I see the woman who exists underneath the performance. That woman is trouble in a way I'm not prepared for.

She turns back to the window, and the line of her neck catches the gray morning light. I'm staring at the place where her jaw meets her ear and I need to stop doing that immediately.

"You know," she says to the glass, "most people ask their stranded guests where they're headed. Make small talk. Pretend they're not taking notes."

"Would you rather I pretend?"

She glances back at me. The look is sharp, with the faintest current of heat running underneath it, like she's deciding whether my honesty is attractive or alarming and hasn't landed on an answer.

"No," she says. "I've had enough pretending to last me a while. I'd rather just know what the rules are."

"You're under my roof. That means you're fed, you're warm, and nobody bothers you while you're here."

The last three words land between us with more weight than I intended.'While you're here'should feel neutral. It doesn't. It feels like a line drawn around something.

She hears it. I watch her hear it, watch the way her chin lifts a fraction and her eyes narrow, and the look she gives me is the look of a woman deciding whether the man in front of her is offering shelter or staking a claim and isn't entirely sure he knows the difference either.

She reaches up to push her hair behind her ear, and the motion lifts the collar of her sweater away from her throat, and the smell reaches me before I can prepare for it. Cheap soap, thekind from a gas station dispenser. Cold air still trapped in the wool. Underneath both, something warm that belongs only to her skin, and my body responds to it before my brain gets a vote.

Heat low in my gut, a tightening across my shoulders, and then the vivid awareness that the distance between her shoulder and my chest has closed to almost nothing without my permission.

My weight shifts backward, a half step that I execute before the thought finishes forming. She registers the shift. Her head turns, and whatever she reads on my face makes her take her own step, a lateral drift toward the window that opens a gap of charged air between us.

Neither of us says a word about it. The silence holds the shape of what just happened the way a glass holds water, and I can feel the surface tension right at the rim.

"The storm," she says, and the word comes out slightly different than it should. "Is there a timeline? For the roads?"

"Few days." Honest based on what I know, though the DOT pulling their plows tells me the window is likely longer than forty-eight hours. The information sits behind my teeth, unfinished rather than withheld, and the distinction matters to me even if it wouldn't matter to her.

"A few days," she repeats, and the studied neutrality of her tone is its own kind of tell.

"You're welcome to stay as long as the weather holds you. No charge."