Page 74 of Claimed on the Ridge

I stare at him across the space between us. He didn't tell his brothers either. He told me first, standing in this kitchen, because I picked up the phone and asked. The distinction between Alex Sawyer and Gary Simmons is real and I feel it in my bones. Alex isn't trying to control me. He's trying to protect me by controlling what I know, and the fact that he can't see why that's a problem is the problem.

"I have lived inside this exact conversation," I say. "I have stood in a kitchen with a man who made decisions about my life while I was in another room, and when I found out, he told me it was for my own good. The threat was real. The timeline was short. He'd do it again."

The words hit Alex like a fist he didn't see coming. His body absorbs them in sequence, each sentence landing in a different place. The recognition moves across his face like weathercrossing the ridge, slow and visible, changing everything underneath it.

"Gary controlled my information. He decided what I knew and when I knew it. He moved pieces around my life while I was sleeping, while I was showering, while I was sitting in the next room. He told himself it was protection. He told himself the threats were real and the timeline was short and the decisions were too important to involve the woman they affected."

I keep my voice level. The level is not for his benefit. The level is for mine, because if I let the volume rise, it will turn into screaming. Screaming is what Gary wanted. Screaming meant he'd won. Screaming meant emotion had replaced precision, and precision is the only weapon I have left.

"The difference between you and Gary is real." My fingers curl against the pine. "I am standing in this kitchen voluntarily. I am here because I chose to be here, because you gave me an exit and I didn't take it, because the way you touch me is nothing like the way he touched me. You are not Gary Simmons. I know that. I know it in my body and in my head and in every part of me that can still tell the difference."

His jaw loosens a fraction. He thinks I'm done.

"But you still made the call. You still waited until I couldn't hear you. And you still weren't going to tell me until you decided I was ready." I hold his gaze. "I didn't leave Gary's version of that to walk into yours."

The kitchen holds the silence the way the lodge holds cold. It gets into the walls and stays.

"You're wrong about one thing," he says. His voice is low and stripped. "I wasn't going to edit it. I was going to hand you the whole file when I had it. Every page. Every detail he dug up. You would have had it all."

"After you read it first."

He doesn't deny it.

He holds my gaze. His jaw is set. He heard every word I said, and he's not going to change his mind.

I push off the wood and walk to the main room without looking at him. The leather chair is cold when I sit down. The fire has burned low, and nobody has fed it.

Behind me, I hear Alex's boots cross the kitchen and the office door close. He's giving me space, and the fact that he knows to do it without being told is the thing I can't look at right now.

The fire needs wood. I kneel on the stone hearth and stack two logs the way I've watched Alex do it, leaning them against each other so the air can get underneath. The kindling catches.

The firelight climbs the stone and throws moving shadows across the room, across the leather couch where he had me pinned hours ago with my back against the cushions and his weight pressing me into the seams.

The cushion on the left side is still dented from his shoulder. I stare at the shape of it while the flames climb and try to remember what I was thinking when I let him push me down into that leather.

I wasn't thinking about phone calls. I wasn't thinking about Gary. I was thinking about the sound Alex makes when he stops holding back, low and raw, from somewhere below language. The way it vibrated against my collarbone while his hands did things that made thinking irrelevant.

The flannel I'm wearing smells like him. Pine, soap, and something underneath both that is just Alex, the scent that lives in the collar of every shirt he owns. I wore this to bed. I wore it while he undressed me. I'm wearing it now while I sit in his chair and try to figure out what I'm supposed to do with a man who will burn down the world to keep me safe and never think to ask if I want the world standing.

The lodge settles around me. Through the office wall, I hear Alex shift in his chair. The sound is quiet, controlled, the sound of a man who knows how to sit in a room and wait.

I go back to the kitchen. The sat phone is on the counter where I left it. My coffee is beside it, untouched since the confrontation. I pick up both and carry them back to the chair. I dial Amberly.

She picks up on the second ring. "Kendall."

"Alex made a call." I press the phone against my ear. "To a contact of your father's. About Gary. He waited until I was in the shower."

The line is quiet for a beat.

"He timed it," Amberly says. The words carry no question mark.

"He timed it."

"My mother used to check the phone after Dad left the room," she says. "Alex told me that. He remembered her picking up the handset to see if it was warm. That was how she knew he'd made a call he didn't want her to know about. The phone would be back on the hook, but the handset would still be warm."

Catherine Sawyer once stood in that kitchen. She pressed her fingertips to a warm phone and read the evidence her husband left behind. The same kitchen where her son pinned me against the counter with his hips, his hands, his mouth on my throat.

Alex told Amberly this story. He watched his mother lift a phone to check for warmth and understood what it meant. He carried that memory for years, clear enough to describe it to his sister. He knew what secret calls did to the woman who loved his father. And while I stood under the shower spray, he picked up the satellite phone and made one.