Page 73

He was quiet for a moment. She heard him set the mug down.

"Anytime, princess."

The word hit her the same way it had on the steps — warm, proprietary, edged — and she pressed her lips together hard to keep whatever was happening on her face from becoming visible. She might also have been pressing her thighs together slightly. Maybe. Probably not.

She ate another fry. He drank his hot chocolate. The snow fell.

And the terrifying, beautiful, impossible feeling stayed.

CAL

Cal was watching the street.

Not consciously — or not entirely.

The front of his attention was here, in the booth, in the warm amber light of the diner. The sound of Sage crunching through her last few fries with the methodical focus of someone who had learned to treat every meal like it might be the last one.

But the back of his attention — the part that never clocked out, that ran on its own power supply independent of mood or comfort or the particular havoc a blue-eyed girl was wreaking on his nervous system — was tracking a delivery truck that had been idling in the alley beside the hardware store for eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes. Too long for a delivery.

The truck was a white Freightliner, Montana plates, no company logo on the side panel. The driver had gone in through the side door and hadn't come back out. The truck's position blocked the alley exit that connected to the back lot behind the diner — one of three ways out of this building, now reduced to two. Cal had noted the other exits when he walked in. He always did.

A car turned onto Main Street from the north end. Dark sedan. Out-of-state plates — he couldn't read the state from this distance, but the color was wrong for Montana. It drove slowly. Too slowly for someone who knew where they were going. It passed the diner, continued south, and disappeared around the bend toward the old mill road.

Cal’s right hand, resting on the table beside his mug, hadn't moved. His posture hadn't changed. His breathing was the same. But somewhere in the quiet machinery behind his eyes, a thread had been tagged and filed. Not a threat. Not yet. Just a data point, logged alongside the blocked exit and the eleven-minute delivery.

"What are you looking at?"

He blinked. Sage was watching him, her head tilted slightly, a fry suspended halfway to her mouth.

"Nothing."

She studied him a second longer, that bright, stubborn curiosity flickering across her face. Then she let it go, popped the fry in her mouth, and grinned around it.

“You do that a lot,” she said. “The whole window-staring thing.”

"Mmm."

"Very mysterious. Very brooding-loner-in-a-Western."

"Eat your food."

“See? That’s exactly what a brooding loner would say,” she said as she finished the last of her fries.

The kitchen door swung open.

Mary Sue came through it slower and intentional. She'd taken off the flour-dusted apron and put on a clean one, which was a detail Cal noticed and would remember because Mary Sue Ellen did not change aprons mid-shift. She was carrying a brown paper takeout bag in one hand, and she was not heading for any of the tables that needed attention.

She was heading for them.

She reached the booth. Looked at the empty plates. Looked at Sage, then at Cal, with an expression of a woman who had made a decision somewhere between the kitchen and here and was not interested in discussing it.

Then she did something Cal had never seen her do before during a lunch rush.

She sat down.

Next to Sage.