Page 7 of Claimed on the Ridge

Dash comes through the kitchen door with snow in his hair and the expression of a man who went outside to check conditions and found them personally offensive. He grabs a mug from the rack, fills it, and drinks standing up, letting the cold roll off him in waves that smell like pine and ice.

"Roads are done," he says. "Saw a rig in the lot I don't recognize."

"Guest," Cameron says.

"What kind of guest drives a fifteen-year-old Silverado into a blizzard at midnight?"

The question is directed at me, and Dash's eyes hold the sharpness that lives underneath the charm. Of the four of us, he's the one most likely to ask the question nobody else will voice and least likely to accept the first answer he gets.

"The kind that needed a room," I say.

Dash looks at me over the rim of his mug. The look says he heard what I said and also everything I chose not to say, and he's filing both.

Footsteps on the stairs. Light, placed with deliberate weight. She sidesteps the third step entirely, which means she remembers from last night.

She comes into the kitchen and stops two steps inside the doorway.

The morning version of her is different from the midnight version, and the difference is a problem. Without the snow in her hair and the half-frozen hunch of a woman who just walked through a blizzard, Kendall Jackson has a face that lands harder than it should. Dark auburn hair cut rough to her jaw, uneven on one side in a way that looks deliberate until you look closer. Eyes that catch the gray kitchen light and do something with it.

She's thinner than she should be, collarbones too sharp above the neckline of her sweater, but the thinness doesn't hide what's underneath it. The sweater is oversized and borrowed-looking, and it doesn't matter. The curves beneath it are obvious enough that the fabric is fighting a losing battle, and my awareness of that fact is immediate, unwelcome, and not going anywhere.

She's wearing the same clothes from last night, which means either she packed light or she slept in them. The bag on her shoulder, the same bag she refused to hand over, is still strapped across her body.

She's already clocked the exits. Kitchen door behind her, window over the sink, hallway to the main room. Her eyes did the sweep before her feet finished stopping, and the speed of it would be invisible to anyone who isn't watching for it.

I am watching for it.

"Coffee's on the counter," I say. "Breakfast in ten."

"Thank you." Measured and even, a woman who's been awake for a while and has already decided what version of herself to present.

Her eyes move to Cameron at the stove, then to Dash leaning against the counter. The read is quick and thorough, and the skill behind it isn't social. It's survival.

"Kendall, this is Cameron." I gesture with my chin. "My brother. And Dash. Also my brother. My sister Amberly runsthe clinic in town. She's the one Sawyer with the sense to live somewhere other than this lodge."

Cameron turns from the stove and gives her the nod that means he's registered her existence and will form his opinion at his own pace. "Ma'am."

"Kendall," she says. The correction is gentle and automatic, and tells me she dislikes formality or dislikes distance or both.

Dash straightens from the counter and gives her the full weight of the smile that's been getting him out of trouble since he was old enough to cause it. "You picked a hell of a night to visit."

"I picked a hell of a state to drive through." Dry and quick, with the timing of someone whose wit is a reflex rather than a performance.

Dash's eyebrows go up, and the look he cuts toward me holds an entire conversation I'm going to pretend I didn't receive.

My hand finds the back of the chair nearest to me, and I shift my weight without thinking about it, settling into the space between Dash and the door. The positioning is instinct rather than decision, and the fact that it also happens to put me between Dash and Kendall is something I'm going to call coincidence and leave there.

She moves to the coffee, walking the long way around the island rather than passing between me and the counter. The route adds several steps. It also keeps a solid piece of furniture between us, and whether that was deliberate or incidental, I notice it.

She selects a mug from the middle of the rack rather than the end, pours from the pot on the counter, and wraps both hands around it. Drinks without adding anything, and the first swallow changes her posture by a degree.

Some of the tension in her shoulders releases. For a half second she closes her eyes, and the expression on her face is the closest thing to unguarded I've seen from her.

Then the eyes open and the composure locks back into place. I'm the one looking away first, which isn't a habit I have.

Cameron sets plates on the table. Eggs, biscuits, a jar of preserves from one of the women in town who keeps bringing them up to the lodge in mason jars like the kitchen would collapse without her.

Kendall takes the chair closest to the door. She eats fast, efficiently, a pattern that speaks to meals being unreliable or needing to leave a table quickly, or both.