Hayes Donovan is not my peer. He's not my equal on paper. He's seven years younger, lives in a cabin in the Nevada mountains, and spends his days shooting things and jumping out of helicopters.
He also stood six inches from me, smelled like the outdoors, and told me I was going to be glad he's here. And some traitorous part of my brain, the part I've kept under lock and key since the divorce, whispered:maybe he's right.
No.
I close the mirror, close the thought, and open my laptop. I have a conference call in nine minutes with my CFO about quarterly projections, a board meeting to prep for, and a corporate spy to catch. I don't have time for dimples or hazel eyes or the way a younger man's forearms look when he rolls his sleeves up.
I have work.
That's always been enough.
Dinnerat the lodge is an experience.
Hayes collects me at precisely seventeen-forty-five, because of course he does. He's changed into dark jeans and a gray thermal that does absolutely nothing to disguise the breadth of his shoulders. His beard is neat, his hair is still carelessly pushed back, and he greets me with a "ready?" that's warm without being familiar.
I grab my jacket. March evenings in the mountains drop twenty degrees in an hour, and the walk to the lodge is short but cold. Hayes walks beside me, close enough to respond to a threat, far enough to respect my space. He adjusts his stride to match mine without being asked. Another small thing I don't want to notice and can't stop cataloguing.
The lodge is warm and loud. Not what I expected from a military compound. A fire roars in the massive stone hearth. The long oak table is set for dinner, and there are people. Several of them.
A huge man with sandy hair and a beard stands at the stove with an apron over his flannel, stirring something that smells extraordinary. A petite brunette sits on the counter beside him, bare feet swinging, reading aloud from a book while he cooks. She's visibly pregnant. His hand drifts to her knee between stirs, and she leans into the touch without interrupting her sentence.
"Cade and Natalie," Hayes says quietly, close to my ear. "He's our medic. She's his wife. Don't try the green sauce. It's medicinal herbs, not salsa. He gets offended if you don't love it."
A dark-haired woman with sharp brown eyes crosses the room carrying a toddler on her hip. The child has green eyes, dark hair, and a fist wrapped around a wooden spoon she's waving like a weapon. Behind them, a man built like a fortress moves with the quiet authority of someone who owns everything his gaze touches. His arm comes around the woman's waist and he presses a kiss to the toddler's head without breaking stride toward the table.
"Deck and Vivian," Hayes murmurs. "That's Elena. She'll try to recruit you for her army. Don't accept the wooden spoon. It's a trap."
I almost smile. I catch it, hold it behind my teeth, and turn it into a controlled exhale.
"Donovan." A lean man with messy blonde hair and black-rimmed glasses looks up from a laptop at the end of the table. "The encrypted relay is showing latency on cabin four. I need to reroute through the secondary satellite after dinner."
"This is Sully," Hayes says. "If it has a wire, he built it. If it doesn't have a wire, he's figuring out how to add one."
Sully pushes his glasses up his nose and looks at me. "Ms. Morrison. Your connection should be fully optimized by twenty-one hundred. I also took the liberty of layering a VPN over your existing corporate security protocols. Whoever's been accessingyour systems won't be able to ping your location through any digital footprint."
I blink. "You assessed my corporate network security?"
"Briefly." He has the good grace to look slightly sheepish. "You have two vulnerabilities in your firewall I should probably tell you about."
"After dinner, Sully," Hayes says. But he's watching my face, and I can see him filing away my reaction. The way my shoulders dropped a fraction. The way I looked at Sully with something approaching respect.
These people are not what I expected.
Dinner is loud, warm, and utterly foreign to me. Cade's stew is spectacular. Natalie asks me about pharmaceutical research with genuine curiosity, not the glazed politeness I usually get from non-scientists. Vivian, who turns out to be a federal prosecutor, asks sharp questions about corporate espionage case law that suggest she's already thinking about my situation strategically. Elena drops a piece of bread in my lap and says "share" with the iron command of a future CEO.
Hayes sits beside me. Not across from me, where a bodyguard typically positions himself for sight lines. Beside me, where his shoulder is three inches from mine and I can feel the warmth radiating off him like a woodstove. He passes dishes, refills my water glass without being asked, and enters the conversation naturally. Quick. Funny. Self-deprecating in a way that makes the others laugh but never crosses into insecurity.
He tells a story about a training exercise where Ryder rigged a practice charge wrong and blew up Deck's favorite coffee mug. The table erupts. Deck points a fork at Hayes and says, "That was a custom mug," and Hayes grins, full dimples, and says, "It was a terrible mug and you know it."
I watch him. The way he moves inside this family, because that's what they are. A family built from shared damage andmutual trust and the daily choice to show up for each other. He's the youngest. The one who has to be louder, funnier, faster to keep up. And he does it with a grace that never once looks like effort.
My chest aches.
I excuse myself at twenty hundred, claiming work. Hayes walks me back to my cabin in comfortable silence, the mountain dark and star-thick above us in a way San Francisco never allows. At my door, he waits while I press my thumb to the biometric lock.
"Goodnight, Ms. Morrison."
"Goodnight, Mr. Donovan."
