Page 54 of Claimed on the Ridge

"I don't snore."

"We'll see."

I pull the quilt up over both of us. She settles against my side, her weight pinning my arm. Her hand rests on my abdomen. The fire settles in the grate. Outside, the ridge is silent under snow.

I lie in the dark with this woman's breathing slowing against me. My arm tightens around her. The reflex is not new. The weight behind it is.

Her breathing evens out. She sleeps. I don't. Instead, I watch the embers fade and think about a man in Anchorage who doesn't know what's coming for him. Kendall Mitchell is in my bed. My hand is on her ribs. The bruise is almost gone.

What I'll build in its place will last longer.

13

KENDALL

The third morning is the one that scares me. The first morning I woke in Alex Sawyer's bed, I spent a while remembering where I was and longer remembering why. The second morning, I knew before I opened my eyes. His arm, the weight of the quilt, the smell of burning pine from the fireplace he banks before he sleeps.

This morning I don't remember waking up at all. I just surface into the warmth of his body against my back and his arm across my waist, and the transition from sleep to consciousness is so smooth that there's no seam to find. I don't jolt, don't assess, don't catalog exits.

That's the part that scares me.

Gary never felt like home. Gary felt like a performance I watched from inside my own body, smiling when the cues said smile, sleeping when the home went quiet, waking when the silence changed pitch. I spent years in a bed with a man whose breathing I tracked the way you track weather. Shifts meant danger. Pauses meant worse. I learned to sleep like a sentry.

Alex breathes like a man who has never once worried about what happens next. Deep, even, the breathing of someone whose body trusts the room it's in. The sound of it has been unwindingsomething in me for days, and the unwinding is what I can't afford.

I lie still and let myself have this. His hand is flat against my stomach, his thumb hooked over my hip bone, and the possessiveness of the hold is present even in sleep. He does not let go of things.

The warmth of his palm through the flannel I pulled on sometime around midnight is steady and specific, and the specificity is the problem. Not a man's arm. This man's arm. Not a bed. His bed. Not warmth. His warmth, offered without negotiation, without the price tag I learned to read in the fine print of every kind gesture.

His breath lands warm against the back of my neck. Each exhale moves my hair. The intimacy of the sensation is so ordinary it makes my throat tight, because ordinary is the thing I didn't know I was missing. Gary gave me extraordinary. Galas, travel, a closet full of clothes he chose, a life curated to the millimeter. What he never gave me was this. A man breathing against my neck in a warm bed because he wants to be here. No performance. No audience. No angle.

The fire has burned down to embers. The room is warm enough that the quilt is almost too heavy, and I can feel the weight of it pinning us together, which should feel like confinement and feels instead like an anchor.

The lodge is quiet around us. Downstairs, I can hear someone moving in the kitchen. Pots against the stove. Running water. The rhythm of a Sawyer morning is predictable enough now that I can identify brothers by the sounds they make before coffee. Bryan is silent. Cameron hums. Dash drops things.

Something drops. Dash is cooking.

I ease out from under Alex's arm. He shifts, makes a low sound, and his hand finds the warm spot I left on the sheet. He doesn't wake. The trust in that, how his body reaches for whereI was without his mind engaging, catches somewhere under my sternum I don't look at too closely.

I dress in the bathroom. Jeans, the flannel that started as his and has become mine through the slow physics of proximity, wool socks thick enough to make the floorboards bearable. The mirror shows me a woman I haven't seen in years. She looks rested, with color in her face and eyes that aren't scanning the room behind her reflection. I look away before I get used to it.

The stairs are loud enough that whoever is in the kitchen will hear me coming. I take them at a normal pace and walk into the smell of coffee and bacon.

Dash is standing at the stove with a towel over one shoulder, pushing bacon around a cast iron skillet with a fork. He looks up when I come in, and the grin is immediate.

"Morning, Kendall."

"Morning."

"Coffee's fresh. I made it strong enough to wake the dead, so if Alex is still sleeping, it's not my fault."

"Alex is still sleeping."

"No, he isn't," Alex says from the stairs behind me.

The voice is rough with sleep and low enough to vibrate in my back teeth. I don't turn around, but I track his footsteps across the floor. He crosses to the coffee, pours a mug, drinks standing up.

The domesticity of the movement, how he navigates his own kitchen without looking, how he sets the mug down and reaches past me for the cream without asking, should be unremarkable. It isn't.