Page 88 of Claimed on the Ridge

Her breathing goes ragged. Her nails drag down my back, long scratches that sting with sweat, and the pain sharpens everything. She's not there yet. I'm not finishing without her.

I slow even further. The room narrows until there's nothing but her beneath me.

"Stay with me," I say against her ear.

"I want to feel you come on my cock."

Her whole body tightens.

"Close," she breathes. "I'm close, Alex."

I watch her eyes because that's what I want. Not tenderness. Proximity. The kind that doesn't let either of us hide.

Her orgasm breaks in a long, rolling wave. Her body locks around mine, every muscle tight, her mouth open against my jaw. The sound she makes is raw, pulled from somewhere deep.

I let go.

The release rolls through me in waves.

The only sound in the room is both of us trying to breathe.

I don't pull away. I stay where I am while the aftershocks fade. Her fingers trace a slow line down my spine.

When I finally roll to my side, I pull her with me. She turns into my chest and I wrap an arm around her waist and hold.

The grip is possessive.

It's always possessive.

The difference is she chose it.

The keys are on the nightstand. She put them there when she led me into the room, pulling them from her pocket and setting them on the wood beside the lamp. She's had them since yesterday. The truck is in the shed with a full tank. The road is clear. She could reach the keys without waking me, and she could be at the Canadian border by morning.

"Stay," I say.

"I already did." She presses back against me. "Keep up, Sawyer."

Her breathing slows. Her body grows heavy against mine, the weight of a woman falling asleep without calculating a single exit route. My arm stays around her waist, my hand flat against her stomach.

Outside, the light slips behind the ridge. The lodge settles around us, timber and stone, the home my father held together until it killed him. The porch steps still carry Gary's blood. My knuckles are split and swollen against her skin. The woman in my arms dismantled an empire with a notepad and a satellitephone, and the man who built that empire drove away one-handed with his face rearranged.

Kendall sleeps… her hands stay open.

21

KENDALL

The sound of cabinet doors opening and closing is what brings me fully awake. The coffee pot lifted from the burner. The drawer where Alex keeps the filters pulled open with enough force that the silverware rattles in the next one over. Full-volume, unhesitating noise. The noise of a woman who isn't trying to be invisible.

I'm standing in Alex Sawyer's kitchen in his flannel and my jeans with my bare feet on the cold pine floor, and the coffee is already brewing because I got out of bed, walked downstairs, and started the morning routine without being quiet or calculating the distance to the nearest exit. The absence of the calculation stops me with my hand reaching for a mug.

I stand there with the cabinet door open and take inventory.

I did not check the lock on the front door. I did not position myself with a sightline to the exit. I did not listen for breathing, for footsteps, for the shift in air pressure that meant someone was moving through the lodge with intentions I needed to read before they reached me. I walked from the bedroom to the kitchen with my eyes on the coffee pot and my mind on nothing at all.

Gary Simmons trained my body to do those calculations the way he trained it to flinch. Reflexes built over years of mornings where the wrong cabinet at the wrong volume could set the weather for the day. My body ran that program every morning in Anchorage, every morning in Sitka, every morning in a truck pointed north. It ran it the first morning in this lodge, when I counted exits before my feet hit the floor.

This morning, the program didn't run.