Page 93 of Claimed on the Ridge

The words are nice.

The proof is everything else.

After lunch, Alex takes my hand and walks me outside.

Not to the porch.

Past the equipment shed.

Past the woodpile.

Past the tree line where the trail cuts through the spruce toward the high ground.

The trail is packed from boot traffic, and the cold bites through my jacket. Alex's hand around mine is warm and rough, the gauze on his knuckles scratching against my palm.

The trail opens at the top.

The ridge.

It rises the same way it did the first morning I saw it. Granite and snow and dark spruce, the scale so massive my depth perception still stutters trying to place it. The sky above is high and pale, the clouds running fast in a wind I can feel on my face.

Below us the valley opens, sparse trees and snow-covered meadows, the suggestion of a road buried beneath white.

The emptiness stretches until it meets another line of mountains.

Those mountains disappear into cloud.

The first time I saw the ridge, the scale hollowed me out. I was counting the miles to Canada. Counting the hours since Sitka. Counting the cash in my pocket and the lies in my mouth and the distance between myself and every version of safety I thought I could reach.

Counting was the only thing keeping me alive.

I'm not counting now.

Alex stands beside me with his hand on my lower back, the bruised knuckles resting against my spine through my jacket. The weight of his hand is warm. It's possessive. It is nothing like any hand that came before.

The ridge hasn't changed. The cold still burns my nostrils on the inhale. Snow still clings to the spruce branches in heavy shelves that will hold until the wind shakes them loose. The valley stretches beyond sight, too large for human noise to matter.

I’ve changed.

I care about the man beside me whose knuckles are wrapped in tape he applied badly and whose version ofI love youis a command to make more coffee.

I care about the lodge behind us and the people inside it who went to war for a woman they barely knew.

I care about the lawyer I'll call when I'm ready, the divorce that will follow, and the life I'm building in the space left by the one I burned to the ground.

The wind picks up. Alex's hand settles more firmly against my back.

"Cold?" he asks.

"No."

I lean into him. My shoulder against his arm. My hip against his. Deliberate contact.

His arm slides from my back to my waist, the grip tightening the way it always does.

Possessive… It will always be possessive with this man.

He'll always reach for the small of my back before he reaches for a greeting. He'll always catch himself when his father's shadow falls across his choices.