"You're shaking."
"It's cold."
He looks at me for a long moment, jaw tight, the scar cutting clean through the shadows the bar light throws on his face. He doesn't ask who called. He doesn't push. He just watches me hold myself very still and breathe through something I don't want to explain, and then he pushes off the wall and walks to his bike without a word.
He pulls the spare helmet off the sissy bar and holds it out.
I pull out my phone and type fast to Rosa:Heading out. I'm okay. Don't wait up.Three seconds later her reply comes back, a single thumbs up and nothing else. Rosa always knows when not to ask questions.
I pocket the phone and take the helmet.
He takes the mountain road.
I don't know if he planned to or if the bike just knows the way at this point. I sit behind him and hold on and let the wind tear through whatever Derek left on my skin, that crawling, cold feeling of being watched, of being known by someone who used that knowledge to hurt me.
The speed helps. The altitude helps. His back in front of me, solid and immovable, helps more than I want to admit.
By the time he pulls off at the overlook, I can breathe again. He cuts the engine, and the mountain settles into silence—wind, pine, the valley below, Copper Ridge glowing faint in the dark.
I take off the helmet, step to the edge, and stare out. He knows where I am. Fourteen months, and he still thinks I belong to him.
I hear Ronan behind me. Not touching. Just there. Solid, steady, a wall at my back that doesn't require anything from me.
"You keep watching me," I say quietly. To the valley. To myself as much as him.
A pause. The gravel shifts.
"Maybe I like what I see."
I turn.
He's closer than I expected. Always closer than I expect, and still somehow not close enough, and the almost and not-quite andhis hands on my waist in that corridor are all right there in the space between us.
"Or maybe," I say, "you're deciding something."
His hands find my waist.
There's nothing tentative about it. Both hands, firm, pulling me in, not rushing it but not hesitating either, like a decision he made a long time ago and is only now executing. I feel the span of his hands through my jacket. The heat of them. Every nerve I own goes very, very awake.
"Already did," he says.
He kisses me.
It’s not soft. It’s not a kiss that asks—it states, direct and certain, the way he does everything. Firm, warm, and when I react, something in his control slips. His hands pull me flush against him and I feel all of him—leather, muscle, restrained strength.
My hands find his chest. Grip the lapels of his jacket. His hands stay careful on my waist even while his mouth isn't careful at all. He pulls back just enough to look at me—dark eyes, steady, checking, like he's still giving me a choice even if he already knows where this is going, and when I look straight back at him without flinching, he kisses me again like the answer mattered to him.
My back meets the bike. His body follows. The cold metal at my back and the heat of him at my front and the mountain wind pulling at both of us.
When we finally break, the valley is still there below us, indifferent and beautiful.
He doesn't move away. His forehead drops to mine. He exhales once, slow and controlled, like a man getting everything back under command.
"That call," he says. Low. Not asking.
"Old problem," I say.
His jaw tightens. I feel it rather than see it, the shift in the muscles beneath the scar. His hands haven't left my waist.
