The mention of his mom caught me off guard. It was the second time today he’d referenced her, and I couldn’t help but feel there was something significant in that. I got the feeling hedidn’t talk about her much outside the family, so it felt like an honor in some ways.
I watched as his large hands worked with surprising gentleness, measuring cocoa and sugar into a small pan of milk warming on the stove. The domesticity of it made something flutter in my chest.
“Thank you for today,” I said softly.
He glanced up, his eyes catching mine. “For trapping you here in a snowstorm? Or leaving you in my office alone while I dealt with my assistant?”
I smiled. “For listening to me about Charlie. For taking my suggestion seriously.”
His hands stilled from stirring the pan for a moment. “It was good advice. I should have thought of it myself.”
“We all have blind spots.”
The silence between us felt different than our usual tense standoffs. This was something quieter, more intimate.
Gunner poured the hot chocolate into two mugs, then nodded toward the living room. “Fire’s still going. It’s warmer in there.”
I followed him, settling onto the plush sofa while he placed the mugs on the coffee table and then kneeled to stoke the dying embers of the fire back to life. The room was cast in flickering amber light, shadows dancing across the walls.
Gunner reached for a mug and handed it to me before settling beside me, not too close, but close enough that the heat rolling off him made my skin hum.
“You still cold?” he asked, his gaze flicking to where my hands curled around the mug.
“A little,” I said with a soft laugh. “I think I have issues with my circulation.”
He didn’t respond right away. Just reached for the throw on the armchair and, with an unexpected tenderness, draped it overmy legs. His fingers grazed my knee as he tucked the blanket in, the touch fleeting but electric. Like he knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what it would do to me.
“Better?” he asked, his voice lower, rougher.
I nodded. Words didn’t feel safe right now. Not when everything between us suddenly felt charged. Intimate. Like the space we shared had shrunk, holding only the two of us and something sharp-edged and inevitable.
The wind rattled against the windows. The fire crackled. I sank deeper into the couch and the blanket, my fingers tightening around the mug, but my eyes, traitorous things, kept drifting to him. To the strong curve of his jaw, the dusky stubble that shadowed his skin. The way his lashes fell like secrets when he looked down. He was entirely too beautiful for someone who drove me this insane.
“You’re staring,” he said without looking at me.
I didn’t even try to deny it. “Just trying to figure you out.”
He turned then; one brow cocked with amusement. “And what’s the verdict, Miss Turner?”
“That you’re not who I thought you were,” I said, letting the truth show in my smile.
A slow, almost smug curve touched his mouth. “That’s a good thing, right?”
“Undecided.”
Gunner laughed, and the sound landed somewhere deep in my chest, warm and dangerous. When he shifted, our shoulders brushed and neither of us moved away. I could feel the shape of his presence like gravity.
“You know what,” he said after a beat, his voice quieter now, “I was wrong about you, too.”
“Oh?” I tilted my head, watching him over the rim of my mug.
“I had you pegged as this uptight city teacher who thought she knew better than the rest of us country folk.” His eyes met mine, steady and unflinching. “But you care. About these kids. About this place.”
His words slipped under my skin like silk, threading into places I hadn’t even known were aching for validation.
“And now that I know you’re a farm girl,” he added with a crooked grin, “I have to come up with new reasons to find you irritating.”
I snorted. “Irritating?”
