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Zach Whitaker walked into the bay with his broad shoulders set and his jaw tight, looking every inch the contractor he was. He was tall, though not quite as tall as Cole, with a solid, heavily muscled build that came from hauling lumber and swinging hammers.

Cole set down the chamois.

He didn’t say anything. He just turned and waited, because Zach had come here to say something, and the fastest way through it was to let him say it.

“You had your hands on my sister,” Zach said. Not a question.

“Yes,” Cole said.

Zach’s jaw worked. “You want to tell me when that happened?”

“Not particularly,” Cole said. “But I will if you want.”

“What I want,” Zach said, “is to know what your intentions are. Because Emily has had people walk away from her her whole life, and I’m not going to stand here and watch⁠—”

“I’m not walking away,” Cole said.

“You said yourself you were only here for a few months. Back to New York when⁠—”

“That was before.” Cole held his gaze steadily. “Things have changed.” And that was the first time Cole had acknowledged it. He no longer had an exit strategy.

He could see it. He could admit that to himself, standing in the fire station bay, being stared down by Emily’s brother. He could see a life here. Not the temporary posting he’d signed up for. An actual life.

Coffee and kisses at the bakery before it opened. Sunday dinners with his grandfather, Emily beside him, Captain sprawled under the table. Evening walks around the lake. The seasons, all of them, experienced in Maple Falls. Carving pumpkins at the fall carnival. Next year’s Christmas tree lighting with her by his side, hot buttered rum from the Kettle, the whole town lit up around them. He’d make sure of it.

He wasn’t sure she wanted the same thing. He wasn’t sure he’d earned the right to want it yet. But he could see it, clear and specific and real, and that was new.

“Things have changed,” Zach repeated, weighing the words. “In what, a week?”

“Sometimes that’s how it works,” Cole said.

Zach looked at him for a long moment. Cole let him look. He’d been looked at by Zach Whitaker before—across schoolyards, across bakery counters, across the length of a blizzard-hit street—and he was done flinching under it.

“She’s not easy,” Zach said finally. The alpha edge had softened slightly, not gone, just making room for something more honest underneath. “You know that. She’s—she loves hard and she doesn’t let go of things and she will absolutely run straight at you when she’s scared instead of away, and you will take the full force of it.”

“I know,” Cole said.

“And you’re sure about this.”

“I’m sure.”

Zach looked at the engine. At the bay. At Captain, who had decided the conversation was interesting enough to warrant sitting up and was watching them both with his ears forward.

“My sister punched you in the face in fourth grade,” Zach said.

“She did.”

“And you still⁠—”

“Zach.” Cole picked up the chamois again. “I’ve been trying not to feel this way about your sister for weeks, and I was failing completely before that. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Zach was quiet for a moment.

“You hurt her,” he said, and it was the quietest he’d said anything, which meant it was the thing he actually meant, “and I’ll make the Alders–Whitaker feud look like a minor misunderstanding.”

“Understood,” Cole said.

Another silence.