Page 89 of Claimed on the Ridge

The hearth in the main room is already going, burning pine pushing warmth through the lodge, and the light through the kitchen windows is the cold gray of early morning just beginning to turn gold where the sun clears the ridge. Alex rebuilt the fire before I woke up. I didn't hear him leave the bed. I didn't hear him come back. I slept through a man moving around me in the dark, and my body didn't fire a single alarm.

I take down a mug. I pour the coffee.

My hands are steady.

They were not steady yesterday.

Alex comes through the doorway with sawdust on his forearms and a look on his face that says he's been up for hours. His knuckles are wrapped in white gauze from the first aid kit, and the wrapping job is terrible. Whoever taped those hands has never wrapped a wound in his life.

"You did that yourself," I say.

"I did."

"It shows." I pour a second mug and set it on the counter. "Your hands look worse than Cameron's after a transmission rebuild."

"Cameron's hands are a lost cause."

He picks up the mug carefully, knuckles protesting, and drinks standing up, leaning against the counter the same way he leaned the first morning I found him in this kitchen. The posture is the same. Everything behind it has changed.

"At least Cameron uses soap."

I take a sip. The look he gives me over the rim could peel paint.

"You want to criticize my hygiene or you want to drink your coffee?"

"I can do both. I'm talented."

"I noticed."

The word lands low and deliberate, and the smirk that comes with it is barely visible behind the mug. I take another drink to hide the flush climbing my throat. The man beat someone bloody on the porch yesterday and is standing in his kitchen this morning making innuendo over coffee, and I'm blushing like this is the first time his voice has done that to me.

It isn't.

It won't be the last.

He reaches past me for the coffee pot, and his hand settles on the back of my neck as he does. The touch is casual, warm, his thumb brushing the base of my neck as his arm extends past my shoulder. He refills his mug and steps back, and the contact lasts exactly as long as the reach requires. He doesn't think about touching me anymore. He just does.

I straighten the collar of his flannel where it's folded wrong. My fingers smooth the fabric against his throat, and the correction takes all of two seconds. Neither of us comments on it. The domesticity of the exchange has teeth, because the man whose collar I'm fixing still has dried blood beneath his fingernails that doesn't belong to him.

Gary has returned to an empire that's falling apart from the inside. His face is rearranged. His business relationships are done. The forensic accountant is still digging. The dead man's switch is still armed.

I built that.

I sat through years of business dinners as furniture with no ears, and I built a weapon out of every name and number Gary was too arrogant to hide from a woman he didn't consider a threat. Alex put his fists through Gary's composure on the porch steps. I put mine through his empire from the kitchen table.

We needed each other.

The thought is clean and simple.

Bryan is at the kitchen table with his laptop open, the screen angled away from the room. He's been there since before I came downstairs. His coffee is cold. Whatever he's looking at has put a weight behind his silence that's different from his usual kind. Bryan is always quiet, but this quiet is carrying something.

"You okay?" I ask.

He closes the laptop.

"Yeah."

His thumb stays on the lid a second too long, pressing down as though he's keeping something from getting out.