I step inside. Close the door. Lean my back against it.
The cabin is dark. Quiet. My laptop glows on the kitchen counter where I left it, and beyond the window, I can see the faint warm light of his cabin forty yards through the trees.
Forty yards. He'll hear my door open. He'll be on my porch in thirty seconds.
I press my palm flat against the wood behind me and close my eyes.
I don't get flustered by younger men with easy smiles and capable hands. I don't wonder what it would feel like to have those hands on me, steady and sure the way they were when he stepped close enough for me to feel his body heat. I don't replay the way he saidI'm the best you're going to getwith the quiet certainty of a man who means every word.
I don't.
I push off the door, pour myself a glass of water, and sit down at my laptop. Quarterly projections. Board prep. Corporate espionage.
Work has always been enough.
The light in his cabin glows through my window until well past midnight.
I notice.
3
HAYES
Day four, and I've learned three things about Alexandra Morrison.
One: she works like oxygen is optional. I've watched her light go on at five in the morning and stay on past midnight. She takes calls while pacing her porch, runs video conferences from her kitchen table, and types emails during the walks I make her take around the compound perimeter for fresh air and movement. The woman treats rest like a personal failing.
Two: she's funnier than she wants anyone to know. It slips out in small moments. A dry observation about Sully's energy drink consumption. A perfectly timed eyebrow raise when Cade tried to convince her his medicinal herb tea was "basically the same as coffee." A comment to Vivian about corporate law that made the former prosecutor choke on her wine at dinner last night. She catches herself every time, pulls the humor back behind her walls, but I see it.
Three: she's lonely. Not the kind of lonely you announce. The kind that lives in the way she watches Deck tuck Elena into herhigh chair, or how her eyes track the casual way Cade's hand finds Natalie's back when they're standing in the kitchen. The kind of lonely that settles into a person who's spent years being impressive and very rarely being touched.
I'm thinking about all of this as I lace up my hiking boots on my porch at oh-six-hundred, watching the sunrise paint the ridge line orange and gold. Her cabin is dark. She's already awake, though. The kitchen light was on when I checked the perimeter camera at oh-five-thirty, which means she's been at her laptop for at least thirty minutes.
Today's agenda says wilderness awareness training. I built the curriculum myself. Basic threat recognition in mountain terrain, navigation fundamentals, what to do if she's ever separated from her protective detail. Deck approved it, Mace reviewed it, and when I showed the schedule to Lex yesterday afternoon, she looked at me over her reading glasses and said, "I performed a triple bypass on a ninety-year-old man, Mr. Donovan. I think I can handle a walk in the woods."
I didn't tell her the woods are the point. Out here, away from her laptop and her phone and the constant noise of running a Fortune 500 company, she might actually have to exist in the same space as another human being without an agenda item between them.
I knock on her door at oh-six-forty-five. She opens it wearing hiking pants that fit her like she had them tailored, because she probably did, a fitted moisture-wicking base layer in charcoal, and hiking boots that are expensive, barely broken in, and completely wrong for the terrain I have planned.
Her platinum hair is pulled back in a low ponytail. No makeup. Without the corporate armor, she looks younger. Softer. The morning light catches the fine bones of her face and the pale freckles across her nose that she normally covers with foundation.
My mouth goes dry.
"Good morning, Mr. Donovan."
"Morning." I hand her a travel mug. "Coffee. Black, two sugars."
She takes it. Her fingers brush mine on the handoff. She's warm. "How do you know how I take my coffee?"
"Day one, dinner. You added two sugars to your after-dinner coffee but no cream. Day two, same. Day three, you frowned at the sugar bowl because Cade moved it to the other end of the table, which means it's a habit, not a preference. Habits are harder to break."
She stares at me over the rim of the mug.
"Observation is literally my job," I add. "Don't overthink it."
"I don't overthink things."
"You overthink everything. Ready?"
