Not yet.He wasn’t ready for that. He might never be ready for that. But perhaps he could give her something. A piece of himself, carefully offered. A small act of trust to match the enormous trust she’d shown by coming here, by staying, and by looking at him like he was something worth wanting.
Thunder cracked overhead, shaking the mountain itself. He took one last breath of rain-scented air and turned back into the den.
Time to face what he’d been running from.
He found her already awake, standing at the stove with a cup of tea cradled in her hands. Her hair was loose around her shoulders instead of braided or pinned back, and her borrowed shirt hung nearly to her knees, leaving her legs bare.
She looked soft and rumpled and devastatingly beautiful.
“Morning,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes. “Storm’s bad.”
“It will last most of the day. Perhaps longer.”
“Ah.” A pause. “Trapped inside, then.”
“Yes.”
The word hung between them, weighted with everything they weren’t saying. He watched a flush climb her cheeks and felt an answering heat stir in his own blood.
Talk to her. Tell her you’re done running.
But before he could open his mouth, a smaller voice interrupted.
“Is it raining?”
Dani appeared in the bedroom doorway, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Her dark hair stood up in wild directions, and the oversized shirt she wore as a nightgown slipped off one thin shoulder.
“Pouring,” Jessa said. “We’re stuck inside today, little mouse.”
“All day?” Dani’s eyes went wide—not with disappointment, he realized, but with excitement. “Really?”
“Really. The whole day.”
“That’s wonderful!”
Jessa laughed, the sound cutting through the tension like sunlight through clouds. “Most people don’t consider being trapped inside wonderful.”
“Most people don’t live in a den with a fireplace and games and books.” Dani padded across the room on bare feet, stopping at Tarek’s side. She tilted her head back to look up at him with those bright blue eyes. “We could have a holiday. A storm holiday. We could play games and make special food and tell stories.”
A holiday.
He hadn’t celebrated anything in five years. He hadn’t seen the point, since he had no one to celebrate with. But Dani waslooking at him with such hopeful expectation that he found himself nodding before his brain caught up to his mouth.
“A holiday,” he agreed. “What games would you like to play?”
Dani’s smile could have lit the darkest cave.
The morning passed in a blur of the kind of simple pleasures he’d long forgotten existed.
First they played a counting game that Dani knew, involving stones and strategy. He was terrible at it. His mind worked in straight lines, direct paths to objectives, while Dani’s mind darted and wove with a child’s unpredictable creativity. She beat him four times before he managed a single victory, and even that felt suspiciously like she’d let him win.
“You’re thinking too hard,” she informed him solemnly. “You have to feel where the stones want to go.”
“Stones don’t want things.”
“Everything wants things. Mama used to say that even mountains have dreams. They just dream very, very slowly.”
He looked at Jessa, who was watching the exchange with a soft smile.
