I sat up. Swung my legs off the bunk. Sully raised his head, watching me with those brown eyes that saw too much for a dog.
"Don't judge me, Sul."
His tail swept the floor once. Not judgment. Permission.
I pulled on my boots and stepped out onto the porch. The ranch was quiet—that deep, total quiet you only get in the country, where the silence has texture, and the sky is so full of stars it looks like someone kicked over a bucket of light.
"Come on."
Sully dropped off the porch and matched my stride as I walked into the dark.
I told myself I was checking the property.
I was a goddamn liar.
Maggie's cabin sat apart from the main house, separate and deliberate. She'd chosen that distance—carved out a space that was hers alone, away from the family she loved and the demands they placed on her without meaning to.
The light was on in her window.
I stopped at the tree line. I could turn around. Should turn around. Walking up to her cabin after dark—after six days of professional distance, after the storm, after the truck, after all of it—was the kind of thing that couldn't be taken back.
But I'd watched this woman fight for a dream everyone else kept putting last. I'd shared pieces of Montana I hadn't told anyone in four years. I'd watched my dog rest his head on her shoulder like he'd found something he'd been looking for, and I'd sat two inches from her mouth in a dark truck and done the noble thing.
I was done doing the noble thing.
I crossed the distance to her porch and knocked.
The door opened faster than I expected.
Maggie stood in the doorway, backlit by the warm glow of her cabin, wearing sleep shorts and an oversized t-shirt that did absolutely nothing to help my self-control. Her hair was down—six days of braids and ponytails, and I'd been wondering the whole time when I’d get lucky enough to see it down again. Turns out the answer was now, and the sight of her was just as devastating as I remembered. Waves fell around her shoulders, catching the light like liquid gold, making my fingers itch to touch it.
She looked soft. Unguarded. Real. The version of her I knew first.
Then she registered who was standing on her porch, and all that softness slammed behind walls so fast I could almost hear them lock into place.
She glanced past me, probably making sure no one could see me on her porch, and took a step towards me. “What are you doing here?"
"Evening, Maggie."
She crossed her arms over her chest. "It's ten o'clock at night."
"I know what time it is."
Her eyes flicked past me to Sully, who was sitting at the bottom of the porch steps with his ears up. "You brought the dog."
"He goes where I go."
"Jack." Her voice was tight, controlled, threaded with something that might have been panic. "We've been doing so well, and you're going to blow it up by showing up at my door in the?—"
"I'm not here to cause problems." I kept my voice low. Even. "I'm not going to pretend the truck didn't happen tonight. I'm not going to pretend Wild Creek didn't happen. But I'm not going to push you into anything you don't want, either.”
She blinked. "Then why are you here?"
"Because you've been running through my head since you left me in that motel room, and I'm tired of pretending you haven't. I figured I could lie awake in the bunkhouse for another four hours, or I could come tell you that to your face."
Maggie stared at me. Her expression cycled through irritation, confusion, and something that looked like relief she was trying very hard to kill.
"You can't just say things like that."
