There is no sound. Not a word, not a gasp. He drops to his shoulders, then his head, and holds.
My mouth has gone dry.
He stays under longer than seems reasonable. I count without meaning to. One, two, three, four, and on five I start thinking about knocking on the glass. And then he surfaces with a long exhale that fogs the cold air. Bits of ice cling to his beard. He runs one hand over his face and stands there for a moment like he's in no hurry to be anywhere else, water streaming off his shoulders, his chest red from the cold, his expression completely, terrifyingly calm.
It is, without question, the most aggressively attractive thing I have ever seen a man do.
Owen has moved to the TRX. He's working his upper body in suspension, slow controlled reps, and where Reid is brute scale and force, Owen is architecture. The long muscles of his back pulling in sequence under cold-flushed skin, shoulder blades drawing together and releasing with controlled precision. Line and form and controlled tension, the kind of movement my hands would want to draw before my brain caught up to the reason.
"See something you like?"
The voice is right at my ear.
I flinch hard enough to slosh coffee onto my hand and the front of my shirt. I spin around and Jace is there, three inches away, those pale blue eyes lit with an expression of profound innocence that doesn't fool me.
"You scared me." I step back and shake coffee off my fingers. "I could have burned myself."
"Coffee's been cold for ten minutes." He nods at the mug. "I've been watching you watch them."
My face goes hot. "I was not watching them."
"You were so watching them." He leans one hip against the counter and crosses his arms, and there's something about the way his mouth works when he's enjoying himself that makes me want to throw the mug at him.
I pull at my damp shirt, the fabric sticking to my collarbone where the coffee hit. "I wanted to know when they'd be done so I could start breakfast."
Jace tilts his head. "Uh-huh."
"I'm making breakfast. As a thank you."
He holds my gaze for a beat. I hold mine. I will not blink first. I will not give him the satisfaction of watching me squirm, even though there's a warmth spreading up the back of my neck that has nothing to do with the coffee.
"You could use some situational awareness," His voice drops half a register, easy and amused. "Living out here. In the wild."
He moves past me before I can respond, close enough that his arm brushes mine, and the contact is so brief and so casual that I can't tell if it was deliberate. He unhooks the window latch and leans out. "Hey." His voice carries clean across the cold air. "Maya's making breakfast. Wrap it up."
Outside, Reid looks toward the house. His hands drop to his sides and something in his posture releases, the operational tension replaced by something warmer. Owen drops out of suspension and catches the towel Reid throws at him, and they move toward the house together, with the wordless coordination of two people who have been doing this for years.
I watch them come and tell myself that this is the ordinary norm of gratitude. Making breakfast for people who've been kind to me. Nothing more than that.
Then Jace is behind me again, and before I can turn he lifts the mug out of my hands and sets it on the counter, easy and unhurried. His fingers brush a strand of hair back from my jaw. The touch is light. Not tentative. His mouth drops to my ear.
"For the record," he whispers, "I know exactly what I want to eat."
He's gone before I can find a response. I hear his footsteps on the stairs, then the sound of a door down the hall, and I stand in the middle of the kitchen with my skin still buzzing where his fingers touched.
I can feel my own pulse in the hollow of my throat. My breath has gone shallow and every nerve between my collarbone and the base of my spine is awake and paying attention.
I start breakfast.
The work helps. Eggs and the good bread Reid keeps and bacon. I find butter and a cast iron pan and I let myself exist in the mechanics of it. Cracking eggs, watching the butter foam and hiss in the iron, calculating quantities, because there are three of them and they have been outside in the cold lifting things and fighting each other, so I double the bacon. The fat renders and the kitchen fills with the smell of it and I realize I'm humming.
Reid comes in first. He's changed into clean clothes, hair still slightly damp, and he stops in the kitchen doorway and looks at what I'm doing. His eyes move from the pan to the eggs to the bread I've sliced and laid out, and the lines around his mouth soften, the set of his brow eases a fraction, like something behind the surface has just exhaled.
"How's the ankle?" he says.
"Better. Barely notice it."
He watches me for another moment, reading me with that quiet thorough attention that somehow never feels intrusive. "You didn't have to do this."
