“This is a bad idea,” he murmured, but his hands didn’t move from her shoulders. They tightened, pulling her an inch closer.
“I know,” she said, and then she rose onto her toes and kissed him.
It wasn't gentle or hesitant. It was a collision—a decade of loneliness, regret, and longing exploding between them. Hisstillness lasted only a heartbeat before he responded, his arms wrapping around her, crushing her to him. The kiss was all heat and dust and desperate, hungry truth. It was the argument they’d never finished, the goodbye they’d never properly said, the homecoming she’d been too afraid to hope for.
He backed her against the wall, his body a solid, anchoring weight against the chaos outside. His hands were in her hair, on her back, relearning the shape of her. She clung to him, her fingers digging into the hard muscle of his shoulders, pouring every ounce of her regret and her rediscovered love into the kiss.
When they finally broke apart, gasping for air, the storm still raged, but the silence inside was profound. They stared at each other, chests heaving, the truth laid bare between them in the lamplight.
He rested his forehead against hers, his breath warm on her lips.“Elara,” he breathed, her name a prayer, a curse, a surrender.
The storm outside was beginning to abate, its fury spent. But inside the homestead, a different tempest had just begun, and there would be no going back from it.
Chapter 6:
The Morning After
The dawn was eerily quiet, the land blanketed in a thick layer of red dust. It coated the veranda, drifted against the windowsills, and muted the world to a soft, terracotta haze. Inside the homestead, the silence was even heavier.
Elara woke in her old bed, alone. The memory of the previous night washed over her—the fury of the storm, the safety of Jax’s arms, the desperate, soul-searing kiss. It felt both like a dream and the most real thing that had happened to her in ten years.
She dressed with trembling hands and walked into the main living area. Jax was already there, standing at the stove, making coffee in the percolator. The familiar, rich smell filled the room. He didn't turn around.
"Coffee's almost done," he said, his voice flat.
The air was thick with unspoken words. The intimacy of the night had vanished, replaced by a strained, awkward distance. He was building the wall back up, brick by painful brick.
"Jax," she began, her voice small.
He finally turned, handing her a mug. His eyes were guarded, the shutters firmly back in place. "We should check the damage. See if the storm took any fences."
That was it. No mention of the kiss. No discussion of what it meant. It was as if he had already categorized it as a momentof temporary insanity, a product of the storm's heightened emotions.
A cold knot tightened in Elara's stomach. "Right. The fences."
They worked side-by-side all morning, assessing the storm's impact. They spoke only of practicalities—a damaged windmill here, a fence post down there. The professional distance was back, but it felt brittle now, a thin veneer over the raw emotion they had exposed.
At lunch, sitting on the back steps with sandwiches, the silence became unbearable.
"Are we just not going to talk about it?" Elara blurted out, unable to bear it any longer.
Jax took a slow bite of his sandwich, chewing deliberately before he answered. "What's there to talk about, Lara? It was the storm. We got caught up in it."
The dismissal was like a slap. "It wasn't just the storm, and you know it."
He set his sandwich down, his jaw tight. "What do you want me to say? That nothing's changed? It has. That changes everything? It can't." He looked out over the dust-choked yard, his profile stark. "You're still leaving in a few weeks. You have a life to get back to. A job, a boyfriend probably."
"There's no boyfriend," she said quickly. "There hasn't been… not for a long time."
He glanced at her, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes, before it was gone. "Doesn't matter. The point is, you're not staying. Last night was… a mistake. A moment out of time. Let's not make it more complicated than it was."
Mistake. The word was a physical pain. He was already rewriting their history, erasing the significance of what had happened to protect himself.
Tears threatened, but she refused to let them fall. She stood up, her appetite gone. "You're right. It was a mistake. I won't let it happen again."
She walked away, leaving him sitting on the steps. The red dust crunched under her boots, each step a punctuation mark on her heartbreak. She had dared to hope, for one glorious, storm-lit moment, that they could find their way back. But he had already decided their path led in opposite directions. The second chance hadn't been a new beginning; it had just been a more painful way to say goodbye.
Chapter 7:
