Page 42 of Claimed on the Ridge

I come with his name on my lips, his hand in my hair pulling me back so he can hear it. The orgasm tears through me in waves, deeper than the first, and he fucks me through every one. My body clenches around him and his grip on my hip goes bruising.

His rhythm breaks. He drives deep and holds there, as deep as he can get. He comes with a sound against my shoulder that's low, wrecked, and mine. I earned it.

Neither of us moves for a long time.

He rolls to his side and pulls me with him. His arm lies heavy across my waist. His breathing slows against the back of my neck. His hand rests flat against my stomach, palm warm, fingers spread.

There are no questions, no reassurance, no performance. He holds me with the weight of a man who is exactly where he wants to be.

The bruise aches under his forearm. I don't move his arm.

Outside the window, the ridge is white against a gray sky. The pass will open soon. The road will be clear. The bag is on the floor by my bed and my boots are pointed at the door.

I close my eyes against his shoulder and let his breathing slow mine. The exits are where they've always been. I'm choosing not to count them.

10

ALEX

Kendall sleeps on her side with one hand curled under the pillow and the other resting on my forearm. The grip is loose but present, the hold of a woman who fell asleep touching me and hasn't let go.

The bruise on her ribs is a yellow-brown shadow in the morning light, fading toward gone. My thumb traced it last night before she told me to stop being careful. The shape of it is burned into my hands now, the exact location, the ridge of bruised tissue under skin that should never have been broken.

Gary Simmons put that bruise there. I have his name now, his face from the charity gala photographs, and the missing persons report he filed to get her back. All of it sits in my head while his wife sleeps in my bed with her hand on my arm.

She doesn't know I know.

The ceiling is pine, knotted and dark with age. My father built this room. He drove every nail, planed every board, and hung the door that Kendall's back was against last night when I unbuttoned the flannel she'd borrowed from the hook by the mudroom. He built a home, filled it with a family, and broke his wife until she died on the road to Palmer. The room he built is warm, solid, and indifferent to what happened inside it.

I lie still and listen to Kendall breathe. The rhythm is slow, even, the breathing of someone not bracing for anything. She sleeps differently here than she did the first night. Back then, I could hear her moving through the floor of her room for hours. Now she sleeps with her face pressed into my shoulder and her fingers wrapped around my arm.

The flannel she wore to bed is unbuttoned, and the bare skin of her stomach is warm against my side. Her hair smells like my shampoo. The combination of her body in my bed and my soap on her skin triggers something territorial in me that I'm not interested in examining or apologizing for. She's here. She's mine. The fact that I have to blow this apart in the next hour doesn't change either of those things.

The pass will open today or tomorrow. Cameron confirmed it yesterday. When it opens, Gary Simmons gains access to the same road Kendall used to get here. The missing persons report gives him jurisdiction to ask questions, and a man with money on that scale has the resources to hire people who are good at finding answers.

I should tell her what I know. The name, the report, the fact that her husband is looking for her with resources that make her head start irrelevant. Every hour I hold this information is an hour I'm deciding what she gets to know about her own life, and Bryan already told me what that looks like.

'Context isn't permission, Alex.'

My brother is right about most things. He was right about this. The woman sleeping against me has spent years with a man who controlled her information, managed her reality, decided what she needed to know and when. I am not that man. I refuse to be that man. But refusing and acting are two different operations, and one of them requires me to open my mouth and say words that will change the way she looks at this room, this bed, and me.

The light moves across the ceiling. I lie in the dark of what I know and wait for her to wake up so I can blow it apart.

She stirs against my shoulder. The hand on my arm tightens, then relaxes, then tightens again as the waking catches up with the reaching. Her body goes through the same check I've watched in animals startled from sleep: tension, assessment, location. She knows where she is before she opens her eyes. The tension drains out of her shoulders.

"Morning," she says into my collarbone.

"Morning."

"What time is it?"

"Late enough that the coffee is cold."

She lifts her head. Her hair is wrecked and her face has the crease of the pillowcase stamped across one cheek. She looks at me with an expression I haven't seen from her before, something unguarded and sleep-softened that lasts for a breath before the sharper version of Kendall returns.

"I'll make more," I say.

"I'll come with you."