I know it the way I always know. Not by sound or movement but by the quality of the air. A focus that didn't leave with the others. I turn off the faucet. Turn around.
He's standing by the table. Dishes in his hands. Looking at me.
With an intensity that crosses the kitchen like radiant heat. His face is composed. Calm as still water. And underneath it something I can't read, something taut and controlled and pulling at me the way Owen always pulls at me. Steadily. Quietly. From a depth I haven't found the bottom of.
The silence stretches.
"I have a call I need to make," he says.
He sets the dishes on the counter. Carefully. Without hurry. He nods once, to me or to something he's decided, and walks out of the kitchen with a steadiness that feels chosen, each step even and measured down the hall until I hear a door close softly at the far end of the house.
I stand in the empty kitchen.
Reid makes me feel safe. Jace makes me feel free.
And I don't understand Owen Calloway at all. His restraint. His stillness. The way he gives me his complete attention and then leaves the room like staying would cost him something he isn't ready to spend.
But I can't stop wanting to.
20
JACE
I spent hours in town and most of it thinking about her.
The hardware run took forty minutes. The rest was errands I could have done next week, stretched thin because I needed the distance to think. Didn't help. Every aisle in the supply store, every conversation with the kid behind the counter who wanted to talk about crampon ratings, my brain kept circling back to the same place.
Maya in the kitchen this morning, color climbing her throat when I pushed too hard on the teasing.
I pull the truck onto the gravel road toward the cabin and the mountains open up on either side, late afternoon light turning the snowline copper and gold, and I realize something that would have bothered me six months ago.
I missed her. Not in the abstract, not in the way you miss a good meal or a warm bed. Specifically. The particular way she frowns when she's concentrating. The sound she makes when I say something that catches her off guard, half laugh, half protest.Three hours away from her felt like wearing a boot that didn't fit right. Irritating. Wrong in a way I kept noticing.
This is new.
I've liked women before. But I've never rearranged my internal calendar around one. The Amazon trip has been on the books since October, gear tested, route mapped, clients confirmed. Two weeks ago I started quietly looking at whether the dates could shift. Not cancel. Postpone. Because the idea of being four thousand miles away from this valley right now, from this specific stretch of gravel road that leads to a cabin where she is, makes something in my chest go tight.
Up until her, the next trip was always the point. The thing pulling me forward. Now the pull is different and I'm driving toward it and I don't regret the change. That surprises me more than the change itself.
I think about this morning. Reid's knee against hers under the table. The way he sat down beside her like he'd been doing it for years, like the chair next to Maya was simply where he belonged and always had.
I waited for the jealousy. It didn't come. What came instead was something I don't have a clean word for. Rightness, maybe. The sense of a pattern completing. Reid has been carrying this family on his back for fourteen years and I have never, not once, seen him look the way he looked this morning. Settled. Present in a way that wasn't about duty or vigilance but about wanting to be exactly where he was.
I'm not threatened by that. I'm glad of it.
The cabin comes into view through the trees and I see her.
She's on the porch. Cross-legged in one of the wide Adirondack chairs, sketchpad on her knee, pencils fanned out on the table beside her. Her hair is pulled back but pieces of it have escaped, catching the late light. She's frowning at whatevershe's drawing with the specific concentration of someone who has forgotten anyone else exists.
She looks up. Sees the truck. Sees me. Smiles.
And there it is. The thing I've been driving towards.
I've got it bad.
I park the truck and climb out. The cold hits immediately, clean and mineral, the mountain air carrying pine and the faint metallic edge of snow coming. I cross the gravel to the porch steps and take them two at a time.
"Working al fresco?" I lean against the porch railing, arms crossed. "Bold choice."
