“Go to bed,” I tell her. “Get some sleep. We'll figure out the rest tomorrow.”
“There's nothing to figure out?—”
“Sierra.” I cup her face. Make her look at me. “Go,” I say gently. “Before I do something else that leaves marks.”
She laughs—watery, overwhelmed, but real—and slides off the stool.
At the doorway, she pauses. Looks back.
“The initials,” she says. “Eleanor and Jedediah. I always wondered if they ever stopped hurting.”
She's gone before I can respond.
I stand in the empty bar, the ridiculous sash still clutched in my hand, and look up at the ceiling.
E.S. and J.M.
Two halves of a whole. Separated by a mistake. Never properly reunited.
Eleanor died before she figured out how to fix it.
But I'm not Eleanor.
And I'm done waiting.
I fold the sash carefully, tuck it into my back pocket, and make a mental note to talk to John in the morning.
About the window seat.
About lift car number forty-seven.
About a renovation that's going to cost me more than money.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sierra
I haven't slept.
Every time I close my eyes, I feel the scratch of that ridiculous sash against my bare thighs. The press of his lips along my skin until they rested over my heart.
This is the secret place. The place you've never shown any of us completely. This is the part of you I want to see.
Damn him.
I drag myself out of bed at seven, shower until the hot water runs cold, and spend an unreasonable amount of time staring at the beard burn on my neck in the mirror. It's faint—barely visible unless you know what you're looking for.
Nolan knows what he's looking for.
I saw the way he studied us when he found Everett at the bar. The way his eyes tracked from my flushed cheeks to my swollen lips to the very spot on my neck I'm now covering with approximately six layers of concealer.
He didn't sayanything. Just looked. Filed it away in that terrifying mental database he's been building since childhood.
Nolan Barrett: part brother, part FBI profiler, part reason I'll never be able to relax again.
I pull on jeans and a flannel—my brothers' flannel, technically, stolen from Roman's closet approximately eight years ago and never returned—and head downstairs.
The lodge already buzzes with activity. Today's event? Lumberjack Thunder, which apparently involves competitive wood chopping, log rolling, and grown men finding increasingly ridiculous excuses to remove their shirts in December.
