"Reid is right. You stay here." Jace cuts me off. "You done with the tea?"
I look at the mug. Swallow what is left.
I nod.
He takes the mug. Sets it on the stone hearth. And then he crouches beside me and his hands go under my knees and behind my back and he straightens and I am off the floor, lifted clean off the ground in a motion that contains no visible effort, no adjustment, no recalibration for my weight. The room swings and then steadies around the fixed point of his chest against my shoulder, the solid lock of his arms beneath me, and the heat ofhim seeps through the borrowed cotton into my ribs, my hip, the length of my thigh where it presses against his forearm.
The ease of it. The complete, undeniable ease of it.
A laugh escapes from somewhere in my chest, disbelieving. "What are you doing."
"Taking you to your room." Already moving. His stride doesn't change to accommodate the additional weight of a protesting woman. I might as well be a blanket.
"My room? I don't have—"
"You do now."
He carries me through the living room and I have enough composure left to notice Reid following, and Owen behind him, and the fact that all three of them appear to consider this a settled matter. Jace kicks a door open with the side of his boot and the room beyond it is already warm, a fireplace lit and going in a stone surround that matches the living room, a bed made with a dark quilt and white sheets pulled down at one corner, a lamp on the side table throwing amber light across wood-paneled walls.
They prepared this room for me.
Owen steps past us and pulls the quilt back further, moving out of the way.
Jace lowers me onto the bed.
He doesn't step back.
He puts one hand on the mattress on either side of my head and he's close, closer than the act of setting me down requires, his arms and shoulders forming a cocoon that eliminates everything in my field of vision except his face. Firelight on one side of it. Shadow on the other. The pale blue of his eyes direct and unguarded.
He looks at me for a beat too long.
Then he says, quietly, like the words cost him something to release:
"You scared the hell out of us. Don't do that again."
His eyes stay on mine. And I hold very still, not because I'm frightened but because I'm not.
7
REID
I've been standing outside her door for six minutes.
Owen's chair scrapes across the office floor down the hall, the sound of him settling in before six-thirty. Jace's boots hit the porch, then the rhythmic crack of the axe, splitting wood before breakfast.
And I'm in the hallway, not moving.
The grey-blue light from the window at the end of the corridor has shifted a shade warmer since I stopped here. The house smells like coffee and split pine. I have a full day at the rescue center. Two yearling wolves in the acclimation pen that need assessment before the veterinary visit. I know what my morning looks like. This isn't part of it.
I knock. Too light. Quiet enough that if she's still sleeping she won't hear it, which means I've built myself a way out before I've walked in.
Silence.
Then her voice, soft and rough from sleep, on the other side of the door. "Come in."
Something tightens across the back of my shoulders. I am forty-two years old. I have operated in environments where the consequences of hesitation were permanent. This sensation is familiar from those environments. It made sense there. Not here.
I open the door.
