Page 26 of Claimed on the Ridge

I marked her. The evidence is on her neck at breakfast and the possessive heat that thought sends through me is not something I'm willing to examine.

"Morning," she says. Her voice is even. Controlled. She's not looking at me.

"Morning," Cameron says.

"Coffee's on the counter," Dash says. He's helpful and oblivious, and God bless Dash Sawyer for both.

She crosses to the coffee pot. The distance she maintains is specific, not wide enough to be obvious, not close enough to risk contact. She's calculated the exact margin that reads as normal to a room full of people and abnormal only to the man who kissed her a few hours ago.

Her fingers brush mine on the counter as she reaches for the mug. The contact is brief, accidental, and the current it sends through my hand has no business being that strong from a brush of fingers. She pulls back. I don't.

The mug she takes is the one closest to my hand, and the reach that retrieves it is controlled and careful. The effort shows in her wrist. She's favoring her injured side, a tightness in the way she reaches with one arm, the other staying close to her ribs. Stacking the firewood probably didn’t help. She's protecting it the way she protects the wrist, by keeping the vulnerable place close to her body and managing the angles.

Amberly's clinic is a mile down the road. My sister would know what to do with an injury like that. But suggesting a doctor means admitting I know about it, and that admission belongs to her.

She sits at the table across from Dash, not next to me, not adjacent, but across. The table is between us like a negotiating line.

Breakfast is loud with Dash and quiet with Cameron. The room is loaded with me and Kendall occupying the same space while pretending last night exists only in the dark. She eats. She talks to Dash about his phone, which has intermittent signal at best, and the conversation is easy enough that anyone watching would think she's fine.

I'm watching. She isn't fine. The controlled voice, the calculated distances, the single accidental touch that sentvoltage through both of us are all telling the same story. Kendall Jackson is running the same containment protocol she ran the morning after she arrived: assess the threat, manage the exposure, give nothing away.

The difference is that this time, I'm the threat she's managing.

I finish my coffee and go to my office, the one room in the lodge that's entirely mine, holding the desk, the maps, the sat phone, the radio, supply logs, the gun safe. The door closes and the silence is a relief.

I sit in the chair my father sat in and think about a woman's ribs. Every instinct I own says find the man who did it. Fix the problem. Remove the threat. But the threat isn't here, and the woman in question hasn't asked me to fix anything, and the hardest part of sitting in this chair is accepting that the next move belongs to her.

The taste of her mouth keeps interrupting the waiting. Coffee and need, and underneath both, the memory of her hips moving against mine at the counter. I've had women. The memory of them doesn't ambush me at my desk and make my hands want things my head hasn't authorized.

The knock comes around mid-morning. It isn't Kendall's. The knock is heavy, spaced wide, delivered by a fist that's been knocking on this door since before I was born.

"It's open."

Walt Greer fills the doorway the way he's filled it since I was a kid running underfoot while he and my father planned hunting seasons. He's shorter than he used to be, the years compressing his spine, but the shoulders are still broad under the canvas jacket. His white beard could use a trim. His hands, wrapped around the brim of the hat he's holding, are knotted rope over bone. He walks in with the hitch in his hip that he refuses toaddress because Walt Greer was born before admitting pain was invented.

"Coffee," he says.

"Kitchen."

"Had some. Came to see you."

He lowers himself into the chair across from the desk with the careful deliberation of a man whose joints have opinions about the weather. His eyes move across my face as they've been doing since I was barely old enough to hold a funeral together and run this place at the same time.

"You look like your father when he wasn't sleeping," Walt says.

"That's not a compliment, is it?"

"No."

The silence stretches between us. Walt is comfortable with it the way most people are comfortable with breathing. He lets it fill the room. The room gets smaller around it, and eventually the silence does the work that questions would do less efficiently.

"The woman," he says.

"What about her?"

"Saw an extra coat on the hooks when I came through. Truck out front that doesn't belong to anyone I know. And Dash has never been able to keep a secret from his family, which includes me." He sets the hat on the desk. "I'm not asking who she is. I'm asking if you know what you're doing."

The question lands closer than I'd like. "I'm figuring it out."