Page 27 of Claimed on the Ridge

"Your father said that. Once. About a situation that was already past figuring."

The reference to my mother is surgical. Walt doesn't miss. He was there, watching my father's certainty build the walls that my mother died trying to escape. Walt saw my mother's bruises. He knew what was happening in this lodge. He didn't intervene. Hecarries that, and it shows in the careful way he looks at women who flinch.

"This isn't the same situation," I say.

"No." He picks up the hat. Turns it in his hands. "She's not Catherine and you're not Jack. But the look on your face this morning is the same look he got when he decided he was the only thing standing between someone and the dark."

He stands and leaves. The door closes. I sit with it… I sit with it for a long time.

The lodge is quiet. She finds me in the main room after lunch. Cameron is in the workshop. Dash went to check the road conditions. Bryan came back from wherever Bryan goes and left again. The fire is rebuilt, the flames new and loud after the morning's embers.

Kendall stands near the bar with a glass of water, watching the fire. The containment protocol has loosened into something more natural, as if she spent the morning deciding how to carry last night and found a grip that works.

The flannel has slipped off one shoulder. The strap of whatever she's wearing underneath is thin and dark against her skin, and I force my eyes to the fire because the alternative is staring at her collarbone. The collarbone leads to the throat. The throat leads to the mark I left below her ear.

My restraint has a limited fuel supply.

I should let her speak first. I should wait for her to set the terms.

I don't.

"Last night," I say.

Her eyes come to mine, steady and guarded.

"I know something happened to you before you got here. I want every detail, and I want a name. But those belong to you. You decide when I get them. Until then, my hands stay tied."

The sentence is more words than I've volunteered in sequence since she arrived. My jaw aches from holding it steady. Every part of me wants to close the distance between us instead of standing here offering her control I've never given anyone.

I've never given someone else the authority over where my hands go. I mean it, and that's new territory.

She looks at me for a long time. The guardedness shifts, but it doesn't drop. The calculation behind it adjusts.

"That's a speech," she says with the barest glimmer of a smile. "From you, that's practically a TED Talk."

The relief hits my bloodstream like whiskey. She's giving me banter. She's choosing verbal sparring ground over vulnerability, and the choice is so smart and so Kendall that my mouth almost does the thing it did last night in the kitchen.

"I have range," I say. "I just don't waste it."

"You've been averaging six words a sentence since I got here. I've been counting."

"You count my sentences?"

"There isn't a lot of entertainment up here. I take what I can get."

She's closer than she was a minute ago. A half step, maybe, angled toward the fire but oriented toward me. The approach is so gradual it could be accidental. It isn't. The flannel has shifted again, and the line of her throat catches firelight. I track the beard burn from her ear down to where it disappears beneath the collar.

"For the record," she says, "last night wasn't a mistake."

I close my fist before the rest of me can move.

"The flinch wasn't about you," she says. "It was about something that happened before you. It interrupted what was happening with you, and that makes me angry in a way I'm still sorting through. So if you were out there walking your perimeterat dawn because you think you did something wrong, you can stop."

She takes a casual sip of her water, as if she hasn't just handed me a piece of herself she could have kept. Her throat moves when she swallows, and watching her throat while she tells me about her pain is a conflict I'm going to have to live with.

"I walk the perimeter every morning," I say.

"At dawn. In the cold. For over an hour." She tilts her head. "Normal routine?"