Page 13 of Claimed on the Ridge

The ridge.

It rises behind the lodge in a wall of granite and snow and dark spruce, so massive that my depth perception stutters trying to place it. The scale is wrong. Not wrong like a painting, wrong like a door opened into a room that shouldn't exist. The sky above the ridge is the color of a bruise, heavy purple pressing down on gray, and the clouds move across it with a speed that makes the mountain look like it's standing still against a river of weather.

Below the ridge, the valley opens up. Sparse trees, snow-covered meadows, the suggestion of a road buried under white. The emptiness goes on until it hits another line of mountains. Those mountains go on until they dissolve into cloud. The scale of it makes my chest feel hollowed out.

This is what freedom looks like when it isn't metaphorical. Miles and miles of nothing that belongs to no one. No roads, no fences, no systems that can be leveraged by a man with the right connections. It's terrifying. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. The two feelings coexist without canceling each other out.

The cold burns the insides of my nostrils. My fingers are going numb inside borrowed gloves. I don't care. For the first time since Anchorage, the knot between my shoulder blades loosens by a fraction.

"You'll freeze out here."

Alex's voice comes from behind me, and my body does the thing it always does when a man appears where I didn't expect one. The flinch starts in my shoulders and runs halfway down my spine before I catch it and convert it into a turn that I hope looks casual.

He's standing in the doorway, shoulder braced against the frame, arms crossed. The posture is relaxed in a way that tells me he's been there longer than one sentence. Watching.

The flannel he's wearing pulls across his chest and shoulders, and the sheer width of him fills the doorframe the way a lockedgate fills an opening. It should read as a blocked exit. Instead it sends a low, unwelcome heat crawling up from my hips.

The stubble along his jaw is darker than yesterday, and I notice this because apparently I've started cataloging his jaw, which is information I'll be processing later, privately, with great hostility toward myself.

"I've been colder," I say.

"I'm sure you have." He doesn't move from the doorway. Doesn't come closer. The choice registers, and I file it in the category of things Alex does that don't match the template I keep trying to fit him into. "Storm's going to pick back up. You've got maybe an hour."

"Then I've got an hour."

The corner of his mouth moves. It isn't a smile. It's the shadow of one, barely there, just a shift in the set of his jaw that lasts half a breath. On another man it would be nothing. On him, a man who keeps his face as locked down as his front door, the crack in that composure hits me low in the stomach. Not butterflies. Heavier than that. The kind of pull that has teeth.

He comes to the railing. The porch boards don't creak under his weight, which shouldn't be possible for someone built like him, but he moves with a deliberate placement that absorbs impact.

He stands to my left, close enough that his body blocks the wind from that side. The cold on my right sharpens by contrast, and the warmth radiating off him through the borrowed coat is steady and solid, the heat of a body that runs hot and doesn't seem to notice.

His hands rest on the railing. I am looking at those hands again, at the width of his knuckles, at the rough skin across them.

The looking is becoming a habit I need to break before it becomes something worse.

The distance between us feels chosen. Close enough to share warmth. Far enough that I'd have to reach for him. The restraint in it makes my skin prickle.

"First time seeing the ridge?" he asks.

"Hard to see anything through a whiteout."

"Fair point." He looks out at it the way a person looks at something they've seen a thousand times and still haven't gotten tired of. "It's called Sawyer's Ridge. My grandfather named it after himself, which tells you everything you need to know about the family ego."

"Your grandfather named a mountain after himself."

"A ridge. Technically."

"Oh, well. If it's technically a ridge, that's very humble."

The almost-smile comes back. My body registers it like a change in atmospheric pressure, felt in the bones before the brain catches up.

"You're funny," he says. The observation sounds like it costs him something.

"You sound surprised."

"People who show up at my lodge at midnight in a blizzard aren't usually funny."

"What are they usually?"