He’s close. Too close. Close enough that I catch the faint scent of cedar on his shirt, the warmth of his skin, the tension lining every muscle in his jaw.
For a moment—just a breath—his gaze drops to my mouth.
And I feel it. God, I feel it. A pull like gravity, like the mountain tilting under our feet.
He leans in and my heartbeat stutters. I see his hand twitches at his side.
But then… He pulls back. Sharp. Abrupt. Like he touched a live wire.
“This was a mistake,” he says tightly.
I swallow hard. “What was?”
“Letting you stay here.”
The words hit harder than they should. “We didn’t exactly have a list of choices.”
He turns his back to me, shoulders rigid. “Stay out of my workshop.”
The dismissal is clear.
Fine. If he wants walls, he can have them. I’ve spent my whole life working around storms—literal and human. And Jax Taylor is both.
I step out of the room without another word, closing the door behind me with a calmness I don’t feel.
But as I walk back toward the guest room, my pulse still racing, one thing is impossible to ignore:
For one unguarded second—he almost kissed me.
And worse? I almost let him.
Chapter Eleven
Jax
I don’t remember falling asleep. I only remember the dark.
Not peaceful dark—the kind that swallows sound and breath and thought until all that’s left is the moment everything went wrong. I hear it before I see it: the wet screech of tires on asphalt, Emily’s sudden inhale, the bone-deep instinct to reach for her across the console. Then the crash hits me all over again, a violent shudder that rips through my ribs and snaps me awake.
I sit up in the narrow bed the cabin keeps pretending is comfortable, sweat cooling on my neck, the blanket twisted across my legs like I fought it in my sleep.
For a long moment, the silence feels wrong.
Too still. Too gentle. And I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve brought a storm into a place that wasn’t built to hold one.
I run a hand over my face and force myself to breathe through the leftover adrenaline. Inhale. Exhale. Again. The nightmares come in cycles—some weeks they’re sharp as knives, some weeks they soften into dull bruises. Lately they’ve been the sharper kind.
Maybe it’s because someone saved my life. Maybe because I didn’t want them to.
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed, tug on a T-shirt, and open the door as quietly as I can. No lights. The fire has burned down to faint embers. The whole cabin is cast in a soft gray-blue glow from the cold moonlight bleeding through the windows.
And then I see her.
Violet.
Sitting cross-legged on the living room rug, wrapped in a fuzzy blanket, a small lamp on the floor beside her. She’s drawing—pencil whispering over paper in slow, careful strokes. The kid looks half-asleep, eyelids heavy, hair a dark cloud around her face.
She doesn’t notice me right away. I take a second to steady myself, because something about her sitting there—small and quiet and so damn brave it hurts—is enough to make the lingering panic in my chest loosen.
