Slipped out of bed carefully, pulling on clothes in the dark. Maggie stirred but didn't wake, her face soft with sleep, one hand still resting on the warm spot where I'd been.
I wanted to stay. Wanted it with an ache that sat heavy behind my ribs.
But this was her call. Her timeline. Her choice about what this meant and who got to know.
Sully was on the porch. He rose when I stepped outside, pressed his shoulder against my leg as we walked through the dark toward the bunkhouse.
Cool air. Stars fading. The ranch still asleep around us.
She'd wake up and rebuild the walls. But last night, she'd asked me to stay. That meant something.
I paused on the bunkhouse porch. Looked back toward her cabin, invisible now behind the trees.
Sarah would have laughed at me. Would have called me a coward for spending six days in a truck and a barn and a storm, two inches from a woman I wanted, saying things like "That was a good day" and "Yes, boss" like some kind of gentleman.Just tell her, you idiot,she'd have said.Life's too short for noble.
She'd have been right. She usually was.
I went inside. Didn't look back again.
But I slept better than I had in four years.
8
Maggie
I woke up alone.
For approximately three seconds, this was fine. Normal. Expected. I always woke up alone. I was a woman who had her own cabin and her own space and absolutely no need for—wait.
There was a dent in the pillow next to mine.
The sheets that smelled like leather and pine andhim.
The pleasant ache in muscles I'd forgotten I had.
Oh no.
I sat up so fast the room spun. Morning light was streaming through my curtains—later than I usually slept, which meant I was already behind schedule, which meant?—
Focus, Blackwood. Priorities.
Priority one: Jack was gone. Good. That was the deal. Professional. Discreet. No lingering, no awkward morning-after conversations, no pretending this was anything more than what it was.
Priority two: I had apparently lost my entire goddamn mind last night.
I stared at the empty space beside me and conducted a ruthless mental inventory of every single decision that had ledto this moment. The knock on my door. The conversation on the porch. The way he'd looked at me and said, “I want to be the place you put the weight down,” like that was a normal thing to say to someone, like those words wouldn't crack open something inside me I'd spent years keeping locked.
The way I'd stepped back from the doorway without much thought behind the consequences.
The way he'd pinned my wrists against the wall and told me he was in charge tonight, and instead of shoving him off or telling him to go to hell, I'd said, “Yes, Jack,” like it was the easiest thing I'd ever done.
Because it was. God help me, it was.
Nope. Not going there. Not reliving that. Not thinking about his hands or his mouth or the way he'd whisperedgood girlagainst my skin and my whole body had lit up like a?—
“Stop!” I groaned.
I threw off the covers and stalked to the bathroom, where I proceeded to brush my teeth with the intensity of someone trying to scrub the previous twelve hours from existence.
