Two cautious creatures engaged in the same standoff.
Across the barn, Ethan crouches with the gray twins, Bug and Glitch, he calls them, though they look more like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum to me. The light coming through the slats catches his jaw, the line of his throat, the tendons in his forearms as he pours the kibble.
Pixel drops from the bale and eats. A small surrender.
“You know,” I say, watching her, “she reminds me of that stray you told me about. The one that lived under the porch for a week before she took food from your hand.” I’m quoting an email from March that I read at my desk at two in the morning, my fingerspressed against the screen. “You said she sat close enough to smell the food but not close enough to be caught. And you said?—”
“That sometimes the bravest thing a scared animal does is stay.” He finishes the sentence without looking up.
I stare at him across ten feet of hay-scattered concrete. The recognition is a physical thing, like a lock turning as the key I’ve been carrying all this time finally finds the door it was cut for. Iknowthis man. Not his face, but his mind. The way he says things in six words or fewer, as if the words cost him something, so he chooses the exact right ones.
Pixel winds between my feet and settles on my left shoe. The vibration of her purr echoes through the leather into the arch of my foot.
“She picked you,” Ethan murmurs.
I’ve read a hundred romance novels. I know what this is. The barn, the cat, the man who finishes my sentences. I’m inside the story. I know the shape of it. I’ve traced it on paperback covers with my finger and thought,not for me.Stories like this are for women who know how to stay.
The last rays of the afternoon sun filter through at an angle, turning the dust motes to gold. I stand to brush hay from my jeans, and Pixel protests with a small, offended sound.
My laugh is real and unguarded, and when I look up, Ethan is right beside me. Not across the barn. Here. He looks at me the same way he did in the kitchen, except this time there’s no question in his gaze.
“Jenna.”
My name. The pause before the important thing. I know this cadence, but it’s never sounded like this.
My brain short-circuits as I study him hungrily. The scruff on his jaw, his full mouth, the way his chest rises and falls. His scent—coffee and leather and warm skin and him.
He cups my jaw, and his thumb traces the line of my cheekbone. I stop breathing. The rough drag of his calluses on my skin is more than I imagined at my desk at midnight. Better. So much better because his hand is real, warm, and slightly unsteady.
That unsteadiness undoes me.
I don’t choose to close the distance. My body decides. It’s been deciding things my brain hasn’t authorized since I walked onto this ranch. I rise onto my toes, and my hand finds the front of his shirt, pulling. Then his mouth is on mine, and I can’t think.
My brain, my best tool and safest place, has abandoned me completely, and I don’t care.
He tastes like coffee, late-afternoon air, and six months of a voice in my ear. His hand slides from my jaw into my hair, while his other hand finds my waist and pulls me closer. My fingers find the collar of his shirt, the warm skin at the back of his neck, and I hold on because I’m drowning and he’s the surface.
He makes a low, almost pained sound against my mouth. It hits me somewhere below my ribs and detonates.
The kiss is not gentle. It’s the dam breaking, months of building a language we’re speaking with our lips and tongues. His grip on my waist tightens. I press closer, but closer isn’t close enough. My glasses bump against his nose, yet neither of us adjusts. My back hits the barn post, and he presses me against it. Hisheartbeat throbs through both our shirts and into my chest, or maybe it’s mine. I can’t tell where I end and he begins. For a woman who’s spent twenty-six years knowing exactly where her edges are, that should be terrifying.
It’s not.
Ethan’s breath catches as I slide my hand up the back of his neck into his hair. He wraps his arm around my waist and lifts me enough that my feet leave the ground for half a second. I make a sound I’ll be embarrassed about later, but right now?—
We pull apart. Not because we want to. Because if we don’t stop now, we’re not going to stop. His mouth is damp and swollen from mine. His breathing is ragged, and his eyes have darkened in a way that has nothing to do with the fading light. My fingers are still in his collar, and his hand is still on my waist.
“That was—” I clear my throat. The woman with the careful vocabulary has been reduced to rubble with one kiss.
He presses his forehead against mine as his thumb moves along my jaw in a slow sweep. I close my eyes because if I look at his mouth again, we’re going to end up on the barn floor in a pile of straw.
“Ethan.” My voice cracks around his name. “What are we? I mean… what is this now? We’ve been through the phone calls, the emails, and now I’m here and I’m?—”
The precise, formal language I’ve built like armor around my feelings cracks under the intensity of his gaze. His bright blue eyes throw me off balance. I need rules. Knowing the rules is how I survive. If I know the rules, I can follow them, and maybe... I get to stay.
I try again. “What’s the protocol?”Protocol?As if what’s happening between us can be categorized and assigned a reference number. “For this. For us. Is there a—are we?—”
Ethan strokes his thumb over my cheek. “There’s no protocol, Jenna.” His deep tone made my pulse spike over the phone, but in person, it halts my breath entirely. “There are no rules. Nothing is supposed to be. There’s just us. We’ll figure it out as we go.”
