Page 24 of Claimed on the Ridge

He doesn't ask what happened. He doesn't ask who. He doesn't ask anything at all.

Recognition moves across his face, slow and certain. Whatever he's putting together behind his eyes, he keeps it there. His jaw works once, then stills.

"I'm fine," I say. The words are automatic, the script I've been running since the first time Gary's hand left a mark.

"Okay," he says. He lets my lie stand without contesting it.

He stands in the kitchen with his hands still—with absolutely no movement—and the gentleness of that, the absolute refusal to take what I haven't offered, breaks something loose in my throat that the kiss didn't reach.

"I'm going to go upstairs," I say.

"Okay."

I walk past him. He stays exactly where he is.

His body holds its position with a stillness that tells me he's keeping himself in place with everything he has.

At the edge of the hallway, I glance back. He's lowering himself into the chair by the fire, and his hands are still. He stares at the embers. He doesn't look up.

I reach my door. The lock clicks behind me.

I press my back against the wood and my fingers go to my mouth. The skin is raw where his stubble scraped it.

The pressure of his fist in my hair is still there, a ghost against my scalp.

His voice comes back to me, that involuntary noise against my lips, almost pained. His heat lingers on my skin, coffee still on my mouth, the phantom weight of his body pressing me against the counter as if he could hold me there and keep the world from getting in.

But the flinch comes back too, and the gasp that followed it. His hands left me so fast I felt the cold before I understood why. The trembling afterward and the not-asking held more care than any question could have.

The bruise throbs under my ribs. It was Gary's last gift, delivered days before I walked out the door because I took too long to answer a question about where I'd been that afternoon.

The shame is fading. Anger is replacing it, clean and bright, directed at Gary for putting the bruise there, at the flinch for being faster than my choice, at the years of training that followed me into a kitchen where a different man's hands were doing something I wanted.

I lie in the dark wanting something so badly it aches, and I don't know if the ache is for Alex Sawyer or for the woman I was before Gary taught my body to betray me.

6

ALEX

The perimeter takes forty minutes when I'm not stalling.

I haven't slept. The taste of her is still on my mouth and my hands haven't stopped remembering the shape of her ribs, and I've been out here since before dawn because the alternative is lying in the dark in a room that shares a wall with hers.

Dawn is a suggestion behind the ridge, gray light leaking into a sky that hasn't committed to color yet. The snow crunches under my boots in the particular way it does at this temperature, dry and compressed, squeaking when weight hits it. My breath comes in clouds that dissolve before they reach arm's length.

The storm left the world clean. Drifts have piled against the north side of the lodge. Fresh powder covers the outbuildings. The tree line stands sharp against the sky.

I check the generator shed, the fuel stores, the snowmobile shelter. I check the sight lines from the access road. I check the tree line where it runs close to the east wall.

None of this needs checking. The generator is Cameron's territory and he runs it better than I do. The fuel stores weretopped off before the storm. The sight lines haven't changed since my father cleared those trees when I was a kid.

I'm not out here because the perimeter needs walking. I'm out here because last night I kissed a woman whose body flinched away from my hands, and the violence that implies has me circling this lodge like a dog on a chain.

My right hand flexes, closes, and opens.

I knew before the kiss. I'd already seen the flinch at the pan, the wrist she covers, how she tracks hands in a room before she tracks faces. I've been reading the evidence since her first morning here, noting it the way my father taught me to read terrain: identify the feature, assess the risk, file it.

The point is I knew. I kissed her anyway.