Page 28 of Claimed on the Ridge

"Yes."

"Liar."

The word is warm. The delivery is precise. She knows I walked the perimeter because of her, and she's calling it without cruelty. The sharpness and the kindness exist in the same syllable, and the damage it does is worse than the kiss.

"What gave me away?" I say.

"Your boots were by the back door when I came down. Already soaked through, not still dripping. You'd been back long enough for them to start drying, which means you went out and came back before anyone else was up."

"You're observant."

"I'm a woman who's spent years reading a room. Reading a man's boot situation is entry-level."

The line hits and I let it. She's funny. She's been funny since the spice rack, but this is different. This is her humor pointed directly at me, calibrated to land, and the intention behind it is unmistakable. She's flirting, and she's choosing to do it the morning after her body flinched away from my hands, and the courage that takes is staggering.

I lean against the mantel. She moves to the other end of it, closer than the breakfast distance. Close enough that when she sets her water glass down, her arm crosses within inches of mine. The near-miss is deliberate. We both know it.

"You should know," I say, "that I'm going to kiss you again."

The words land. Her breath catches, a hitch in the rhythm that runs through my body like a lit fuse. Her fingers tighten on the edge of the mantel. Her chin lifts, and the pulse at the base of her throat picks up, visible in the firelight.

"That's presumptuous," she says. Her voice is steady. Her pulse isn't.

"That's a warning."

"Most men buy dinner first."

"I made you coffee at two in the morning?—”

“Actually I made it.”

“Fine. You made it in my kitchen in Alaska, that counts."

"So by Alaskan standards, we're practically engaged." She says it dry and perfectly timed, and the image of this woman with her fake name and her worn flannel talking about engagement to a man she met in a blizzard reaches somewhere I keep locked.

I laugh.

The sound surprises me. The surprise crosses her face before she can catch it. The laugh is short and real, from somewhere I don't give people access to. The unfamiliarity of it in my own ears is disorienting. I haven't laughed like that in long enough that the muscles feel rusty.

Kendall looks at me. The flirting drops away. The guardedness drops away. She's looking at me as if she's seeing someone she didn't know was there, and the surprise of it is written across her face before she can manage it away.

For a second, maybe two, Kendall Jackson looks at me as if I'm a person she hadn't planned on.

I'm in trouble. The thought arrives clean and certain.

She's smarter than me and funnier than me and she reads my boots. A woman who flinches at hands on her ribs came downstairs this morning, sat at my table, and chose to flirt withme in broad daylight. The damage and the bravery in her exist side by side, and neither one is going to let me go.

I told her my hands would stay tied. I meant it, but the rope is already fraying.

7

KENDALL

Iwake up thinking about his laugh.

The sound is still in my head, short and startled. His expression afterward is still behind my eyelids, as if I'd reached through a wall he didn't know had a window, as if I were a person he hadn't planned on. I lie in bed with the warmth of that look still on my skin, and for a few breaths the world is just a dark room and the memory of a man who laughed because of me.

Then I remember what day it is.