Page 76 of Claimed on the Ridge

The fire burned down to ash while I sat with that. The lodge went cold around us, and I let it.

I push back from the desk when the gray light shifts across the office windows. The room is cold enough that my breath ghosts in front of me. I pull the door open the rest of the way and step into the main room.

Kendall is in the leather chair. Curled into the corner, legs tucked beneath her, the flannel she took from my hook pulled to her chin. The chair smells like both of us—pine soap and her hair worked into leather that's been absorbing Sawyers longer thanI've been alive. The collar hangs wide on her shoulder, and the skin beneath it is pale, smooth where my mouth was yesterday. Even now, even after the worst night I've had since my mother died, I want to take her upstairs to my bed.

The line of her jaw rests against the armrest. Her hair falls across her face.

The inventory runs whether I want it to or not.

Her breathing. The shape of her knee beneath the flannel. The bare curve of her ankle where the hem catches. I've been running this count since the night she walked through my door, and it doesn't shut off because she told me I'm turning into my father.

She's not upstairs in my bed. She's downstairs, next to the front door, next to the kitchen and the mudroom where her boots are lined up and her coat hangs on the peg, zipped and ready to go.

I cross the kitchen and fill the coffeepot. The machine starts. I move through the doorway without looking at her again. If I look at her, I'm going to cross the room. If I cross the room, I'm going to touch her, and if I touch her I'll do it like I own her. That's the only way my hands know how.

So I don't look. Instead, I make my way outside.

The woodpile is low. Days of cold have burned through the reserve, and the covered stack along the south wall of the porch needs to come forward. I haul split logs by the armload, stacking the rack bark-side out. The cold bites into my forearms hard enough to take the edge off. Every part of me wants to be back inside with Kendall. The woodpile gives it somewhere else to go.

I'm several loads in when the satellite phone rings inside. It’s far sooner than I expected. I reach for the phone and a notepad and begin taking notes.

Coffee is done. I pour two mugs and set one on her side of the table.

I reach for my belt. The key ring comes off the clip. Master set. Every door in the lodge, the storage shed, the equipment barn. I've carried them since my father died. The absence against my hip registers before the metal hits the table.

I set the keys on the pine between the two mugs and take my hand away.

Bare feet on wood.

I look up.

Kendall is standing in the doorway. Her weight is on her back foot, the shirt hanging to mid-thigh, hair pressed flat on one side from the chair arm, bare feet against the floor. How long she's been standing there, I don't know.

She looks at the keys. The coffee. Me.

"There's intel."

“Tell me.”

"Just so you know,” I say, nodding to the keys, “every lock in this lodge opens with those keys."

Her eyes lock on mine. The rawness is still there, in the bruised look around her eyes and the set of her shoulders, but underneath it the edge is already working. She's reading this the way she reads everything I do. Fast, and missing nothing.

"I spoke with my father’s contact," I say. "This is it—all of it."

I push the notepad across the table.

She crosses the kitchen, pulls out the chair, and sits. The flannel rides up when she draws her legs beneath her, and the pale inside of her thigh catches the gray light before the fabric settles. My jaw locks. I shift my weight back against the counter, gripping the edge behind me because I need something solid between my body and the impulse to close the distance between us.

She reads. Her finger tracks my handwriting line by line. At the missing persons report, the muscle along her jaw flexes and holds. Silence.

Her focus goes somewhere behind her eyes. Her hand grips the edge of the notepad until the paper bends.

"I know them." Her voice is flat and professional as she scans the data, but her knuckles are white. "Gary hired them for a fundraiser at the Dena'ina Center. I sat next to one of their operations managers for most of the evening while Gary worked the room. The man talked too much. People do when they think the wife isn't smart enough to pay attention."

"Good thing they were wrong about the wife."

Her eyes come up. The sharpness cuts through the rawness for half a second, and the look she gives me is the one I've been chasing since the first night she sat at my bar and lied to my face about her name. Pointed. Alive. Dangerous in a way that has nothing to do with Gary and everything to do with the fact that this woman's mind may be the most lethal thing on the ridge.