CHAPTER FOUR
RONAN
The drive to my cabin takes fourteen minutes instead of ten because the snow is coming down like the sky forgot how to do anything else. My truck handles it fine. The old F-250 has seen worse than a mountain storm, and the four wheel drive grips the road with the kind of reliability I wish I could apply to the rest of my life. Zara’s car is connected to the back of mine being towed as it was better than leaving it behind.
She sits in the passenger seat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the road. She hasn't spoken since we left the parking lot, but it's not uncomfortable. It's the silence of a woman assessing a situation, calculating risks, deciding how many exits there are and how fast she can reach them.
I recognize the posture because I've spent six years perfecting it.
"There's a guest room," I say as I turn onto the ridge road. "Clean sheets. Lock on the door. You'll have your own space."
"You know," she says without looking at me, "most men who bring a woman back to their cabin in a snowstorm don't lead with the guest room."
"Most men didn't spend two hours watching you drink whiskey and assess every exit in the building."
That gets her to turn her head. She looks at me with an expression that's half amused and half something I can't name, something that lives in the same neighborhood as surprised. "You noticed that?"
"I noticed everything."
She's quiet again. But the quality of the silence changes, gets warmer somehow, like I said something she didn't know she needed to hear.
My cabin sits at the end of a gravel road that's already invisible under six inches of fresh powder. I built the front porch with Declan the summer after I got home from my last deployment, and every time I pull up to it I remember the way my hands shook on the nail gun and how he pretended not to see. The place isn't big. Two bedrooms, an open kitchen that flows into the living room, a stone fireplace Callum helped me lay, and a back deck that overlooks a valley I've spent two years memorizing because it's easier to study landscapes than people.
I park and kill the engine and the silence of the mountain swallows us whole. Snow piles on the windshield in the thirty seconds it takes me to get out and come around to her side. She's already opening her door because of course she is. She doesn't wait for anyone to open anything for her.
"I can manage a truck door," she says when she catches my expression.
"I know you can."
"Then why are you standing there like you were going to do it for me?"
Because I wanted to. Because the ground is icy and she's wearing heels that were designed for a sex club not a mountain driveway. Because the urge to take care of this woman is soimmediate and so total that it bypasses every rational objection I've filed against it.
"Habit," I say.
She gives me a look that says she doesn't believe me. Then she steps down from the truck and her heel hits a patch of ice and she grabs the door frame with reflexes that confirm military training. Quick. Controlled. No panic, just adaptation.
"I'm going to need different shoes if this is a regular thing," she mutters.
If this is a regular thing. The words land in a place I wasn't guarding, and I have to remind myself that she thinks she's talking to a man she's been messaging for three weeks. A man she vetted. A man who earned the right to bring her home through conversation and compatibility and the slow building of digital trust.
I earned nothing. I'm here on borrowed time in a borrowed identity, and every minute I spend with her adds another brick to the wall of deception I'll have to dismantle when the snow clears.
Tell her. Right now. Before she walks through your front door and sees where you live and learns how you take your coffee and becomes any more real than she already is.
I unlock the front door and hold it open.
She walks in and I watch her do the same scan she did at the Ember Lounge. Exits, layout, terrain. Then her shoulders drop by a fraction of an inch, and the tension she's been carrying rearranges itself into something closer to curiosity.
"This is not an accountant's cabin," she says.
She's not wrong. The walls are lined with topographical maps and wildlife surveys I've marked up by hand. There's a stack of field guides on the coffee table next to a half finished sketch of a red tailed hawk I was working on last Tuesday. My hiking boots are by the door. My climbing rope is coiled on a hook bythe fireplace. The entire space smells like cedar and wood smoke and the particular kind of solitude that comes from a man who's spent two years living alone and making peace with it.
"What exactly do you think an accountant's cabin looks like?" I ask while I start the fire.
"I don't know. Tax software manuals. A framed photo of a calculator. Aggressive feng shui." She runs her fingers along the spine of a field guide on local raptors. "This looks like the cabin of a man who knows every tree on this mountain by name."
She's not wrong about that either.
