"There's a difference?"
"I'm a prosecutor. Observation is professional."
He glanced up then. Read her face the way he read everything, with that precise attention that missed nothing.
"You okay?" he asked.
She crossed the kitchen. Ranger moved with her, staying close, as if he'd decided his new assignment was never letting her out of his sight.
She stopped beside Jake at the counter. Close. Closer than professional. Close enough that he set the knife down and turned to face her.
"I'm good," she said. "I'm really good."
Jake searched her face. Whatever he found there made the corners of his eyes lose their edge.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He didn't kiss her. She didn't kiss him. They stood in his kitchen with the afternoon light coming through the windows and Ranger leaning against both of their legs at once, and it was enough. More than enough. It was the beginning of something real, and they both knew it, and neither of them needed to rush.
"So," Emily said. "What are you making me?"
"Penne arrabbiata. My mom's recipe."
"You cook Italian."
"I cook Italian, I grill everything, and I make exactly one dessert that Gator taught me and I will take to my grave."
"What's the dessert?"
"Stick around and find out."
Emily leaned against the counter, Ranger's head on her thigh, and watched Jake Walsh cook in his own kitchen. The man who showed up. The man who kept his promises. The man who'd invited her into every part of his life, one layer at a time, never pushing, always patient, until she'd walked through every door he'd opened and found herself home.
She wasn't going anywhere.
CHAPTER 9
Emily woke to the sound of a house breathing. Not silence. Houses like this didn't do silence. The refrigerator hummed from the kitchen. A branch tapped the window in a rhythm the wind kept changing. Somewhere above her, the old bones of the place settled and creaked, and she lay there on Jake's couch cataloging each sound the way she cataloged evidence, building a picture from details.
She was warm. That was the first conscious thought. Not temperature warm, though the blanket helped, a heavy knit thing that smelled faintly of cedar and felt like it had been made by someone who knew what they were doing. Comfortable in a way she couldn't locate in her body because it was everywhere at once, waking up somewhere safe.
Ranger hadn't moved all night. Seventy pounds of Belgian Malinois curled against the couch below her feet, close enough that his body heat bled through the blanket. She could feel his slow breathing, the rise and fall of a dog who'd decided his post and wouldn't abandon it. When she shifted, one of his ears rotated toward her without the rest of him following. Monitoring. Even asleep, monitoring.
She lay still and let herself have this.
Saturday had been a day she'd replay for a long time. The baseball game, Jacob's gap-toothed grin, the way Jake moved through that crowd of parents and kids like he belonged to all of them. Erika's assessment that had ended in acceptance. Then this house, this kitchen, Jake slicing tomatoes while telling her about the first time Gator made him cook, how Gator had thrown his attempt at scrambled eggs straight into the trash and saidif you can field-strip a rifle blindfolded, you can learn to crack an egg without getting shell in the pan.
They'd talked through dinner and past it, through dishes and a movie she barely watched. Not the curated, encoded conversations of the office, where everything had a second meaning and a strategic purpose. Real conversation. The kind where you say things you didn't plan to say and find out what you think by hearing yourself think it. She'd told him about Vanderbilt, about her parents' particular brand of expectation that felt like love and pressure in equal measure, about the day she'd realized the life they'd designed for her was flawless on paper and she couldn't breathe inside it.
He'd listened the way he did everything. With his whole attention.
And he'd been a gentleman. That was the word her mother would have used, and for once the word fit without irony. He'd made the couch with sheets and the cedar blanket and brought her water and said goodnight from the staircase with an expression that contained everything he wasn't pushing for.
Sleep hadn't come easy after that. She'd turned onto her side, then her back, then her side again, her body refusing to settle while her mind replayed the way he'd said goodnight like it was the hardest thing he ever did to walk up those stairs alone.
At three in the morning she'd surfaced from a half-sleep to find the house dark, Ranger's breathing, and the absolutecertainty that Jake Walsh was ten steps and one flight of stairs away, and she could go to him, and he would want her there.
