He stepped inside, snowflakes melting in his dark hair, his expression carefully blank. He didn’t look at her as he crossed to the fire and began adding wood, but she saw the tension in his shoulders, the deliberate care with which he moved.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I should be asking you that.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re awake.” He finally met her eyes, and she saw the guilt there, sharp as broken glass. “You should be sleeping.”
“So should you.”
Something flickered across his face—not quite a smile, but close. “Sleep is difficult to find at the moment.”
She rose from her bedding and crossed to where he knelt by the fire. He stiffened as she approached but didn’t pull away when she settled beside him.
“I’m not going to apologize for what happened,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to ask you to.”
“Good. Because I wanted it. I still want it. I want your hands on my body and your mouth and…”
She didn’t quite have the nerve to continue and his jaw clenched.
“Ember—”
“But I also want to do this right.” She placed her hand over his, feeling the tension coiled beneath his skin. “Whatever ‘right’ means for us.”
He was silent for a long moment, staring at their joined hands. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough with emotion.
“You will leave this mountain eventually.”
It wasn’t a question, but she heard the question beneath it.
“Yes.”
“And then?”
She didn’t have an answer. She didn’t know how to reconcile the life waiting for her in Port Cantor with the life she was building here. She didn’t know how to bridge the gap between who she had been and who she was becoming.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I know I don’t want to think about leaving you behind.”
His hand turned beneath hers, carefully surrounding hers. The touch was gentle, achingly so—nothing like the desperate passion from earlier, but somehow more intimate.
“That is a conversation for another day,” he said. “For now, you should sleep.”
“Will you stay?”
He looked at her then—really looked at her—and she saw the war still raging behind his eyes. The beast that wanted to claim her. The male who was terrified of losing her. The exile who had lived alone for so long that he’d forgotten how to hope for anything different.
“I’ll stay,” he said finally. “But on my side of the bed.”
She nodded, accepting the boundary even as part of her longed to argue.One step at a time,she reminded herself. They had taken many steps tonight. Perhaps tomorrow there would be more.
She returned to her bedding and closed her eyes, listening to the sound of his breathing next to her. The distance between them felt vast and insignificant all at once—a space that could be crossed in a heartbeat, if only they were ready. But she couldn’t shake the weight of the questions she’d been avoiding. Port Cantor. The company. Her father’s legacy. All of it waited at the bottom of the mountains, patient and inevitable.
And she still had no idea how to fit him into that future—or how to imagine that future without him.
CHAPTER 12
