Page 16 of Claimed on the Ridge

Five more days of this and the margin I'm working with will be gone. There won't be a margin. There'll just be her, in mylodge, moving through my rooms, smelling like soap that has no business doing what it does to me.

The question is what I tell her.

The honest answer is five days minimum. The honest answer is also the answer that would change everything about how she's moving through this lodge. Right now she's operating on'a few days,'which lets her treat the stay as temporary. Temporary lets her breathe. Breathing lets her almost laugh at my brother and almost smile at me and almost relax the grip she keeps on that bag.

Five days minimum takes'a few'and turns it into a sentence, and a woman who flinched at a dropped pan isn't going to hear five days minimum and keep breathing the way she's been breathing.

'A few more days.'That's what I'll tell her. True enough to not be a lie. Vague enough to not be a cage.

The logic is clean. The logic is also the logic of a man who is deciding what information a woman in his house gets to have about her own situation, and if I were someone else I'd call that what it is.

I close the office door and go make coffee.

Bryan is in the kitchen. He has his own mug, his own chair, his own silence that takes up more room than Dash's entire personality.

He's reading something on his phone, and he doesn't look up when I come in, which is how I know he's about to say something I don't want to hear.

The coffee takes its time brewing. I wait.

"How long?" Bryan asks without looking up.

"Five days. Maybe more."

Now he looks up. "And you're going to tell her?"

"A few more days."

Bryan sets his phone down. The gesture is deliberate, the way everything Bryan does is deliberate. He folds his hands on the table.

"Alex."

"Bryan."

"The woman is stranded. She has a right to know how long."

"She has a right to not panic."

"You're making that decision for her."

The words land with the precision Bryan brings to everything, and the precision is what makes them difficult to deflect. He isn't wrong. I know he isn't wrong.

But knowing something and acting on it are two different operations, and right now the one that keeps her breathing wins.

"She flinched at a pan," I say. "Cameron dropped a pan and she flinched like she was bracing for impact. Her hand went to her wrist. She covered it. The smile came back before Cameron finished picking up the pan."

Bryan's face doesn't change. But his hands, folded on the table, go still in a way that means he's processing.

"That doesn't give you the right to manage her information."

"It gives me context."

"Context isn't permission, Alex."

The silence that follows is the kind Bryan is best at, the kind that sits in a room and waits for you to argue with it and punishes you when you do. I don't argue with it. I pour two mugs of coffee and set one in front of him.

"Five days," I say. "I'll tell her when the timing is right."

"The timing is right now."