I get the fire going and pull a flannel shirt from the closet by the door. It'll be massive on her but it's warm and it's the closest thing to a peace offering I can manage. "Here. That dress wasn't designed for mountain temperatures."
She takes the shirt and holds it up against herself. It hangs past her thighs and the sleeves would swallow her hands and the image of her wearing it sets something on fire in my chest that has nothing to do with the fireplace.
"Bathroom's down the hall on the left," I tell her. "I'll make coffee."
She disappears and I stand in my kitchen gripping the counter with both hands and breathing through the kind of slow measured exhale I learned in a combat stress management class eleven years ago. The method was designed for firefights and hostage situations. I'm using it because a woman in a burgundy dress is changing clothes in my bathroom and the thought of her skin under my flannel is enough to compromise every principle I've built my life around.
I don't do this. I don't bring women home. The last person who slept in that guest room was Flynn, and that was because he'd had too much wine at Sunday dinner and Callum wouldn't let him drive. My cabin is my decompression chamber, the one place where I don't have to perform competence or stabilityor the particular brand of quiet strength that everyone expects from the youngest Ridge brother who came home from war and didn't fall apart.
Except I did fall apart. I just did it where nobody could see.
The bathroom door opens and she walks back into the living room wearing my flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and the collar sitting wide against her collarbone, and I forget every word I've ever learned in English and two other languages.
"This shirt," she says, plucking at the fabric, "smells like a lumberjack's fever dream."
"It's clean."
"I didn't say it was a bad fever dream."
She settles onto the couch near the fire and pulls her legs up underneath her, and watching Zara Montgomery make herself comfortable in my space feels like watching someone pick a lock I've been guarding for years. She fits here. She shouldn't. She doesn't know who I am. But she looks at the firelight dancing across my maps and my sketches and my solitary life and she doesn't look disappointed. She looks interested.
I hand her a coffee. Black, because she told me at dinner that milk in coffee is a betrayal of the bean, and the fact that I remember that makes me a man in serious trouble.
"Thank you." She wraps both hands around the mug and watches me over the rim. "You know, you still haven't told me anything about yourself."
She's right. I've been asking questions all night and answering hers with carefully constructed deflections that aren't technically lies but aren't anywhere close to the truth. She told me about growing up military. About being an army nurse. About losing her mother and the way the folded flag felt heavier than any body she'd ever carried.
And I sat there and I listened and I gave her almost nothing back.
"What do you want to know?" I ask, settling into the chair across from her because sitting on that couch next to her in my shirt would end whatever remains of my self control.
"Anything real." She says it simply, without challenge. Just a request from a woman who's been brave enough to give me the truth all night and is asking for the same in return.
Anything real. I look at her curled up on my couch wearing my flannel with firelight turning her skin to gold, and the truth rises in my throat like a confession.
I'm not who you think I am.
"I have three brothers," I say instead. "I'm the youngest. Our parents died when I was eighteen and Callum, the oldest, held us all together by sheer force of will. I work on the mountain. I draw when I can't sleep. And the last time I let someone close enough to matter, I hurt her without meaning to, and I've been trying to figure out how to trust myself again ever since."
Every word of that is true. Every single word. And none of it answers the question she's actually asking.
She studies me for a long time. The fire crackles. Snow taps against the windows in a rhythm that sounds like the mountain is trying to tell us something.
"That's not everything," she says quietly.
"No," I admit. "It's not."
"But it's real."
"Yeah." My voice is rough and I don't bother smoothing it out. "It's real."
She nods. Takes a sip of coffee. And the look she gives me over that mug is the same look she gave me at the bar when I told her she had limits she hadn't found yet. Like I've offered her something rare in a world that usually trades in cheap imitations.
"Okay," she says. "I can work with real."
I sit across from her in my own cabin, lying by omission to a woman who just told me she can work with what I'm giving her, and I think this is the moment I should stop. This is the edge of the cliff. One more step and I'm falling.
I don't stop.
