Chapter 8
Ethan
Crowley is asleep on the router, and Pixel is curled up on my lap. I’ve been at my tech setup for an hour, the screens casting a glow into my study. Instead of running cattle reports, I’m tracing the three calls that came in on Jenna’s phone between 05:07 and 05:11. They were routed through a Virginia prefix that leads to a VoIP relay.
This pattern doesn’t constitute proof. Three calls routed through a relay could indicate a scam, a wrong number, or simply a bored intern at a marketing firm. But the timing, with the calls stacked within minutes, each lasting long enough to confirm the line was active, is not random. It’s a confirmation protocol. Someone is checking if the number is live before dispatching a real person.
I’ve accessed the perimeter cameras, reset all passwords, and switched the ranch network to the encrypted VPN Beckett set up months ago. My hands remain steady, as they always do in this mode, with the brain of an ordnance specialist clicking into gear. I assess, fortify, and contain.
A few minutes ago, I texted Beckett Lawson to explain the situation.
His reply arrived in eight seconds:En route.
A movement catches my eye, and I look up to see Jenna in the study doorway. I’m not sure how long she’s been there, but it seems long enough to watch me work.
She shouldn’t be beautiful standing there. She’s in Maggie’s old shirt, hair loose, no armor of makeup or careful posture, just Jenna watching me with those careful eyes she keeps trained on everyone. I’ve spent twenty years reading threat assessments; I read her the same way, cataloging, filing. I already know her tells. The way she holds the mug in both hands when she’s processing something she doesn’t have words for yet. The way she goes still when she’s trying to look unbothered.
I’ve learned many things about her over months of phone calls, but experiencing them in person feels like a privilege.
She’s held herself apart from everything soft. Then, this morning, she let me in. We let each other in.
Her expression falters for a second. Her eyes widen and soften as she takes everything in.
I know what she’s seeing. Not the ranch Ethan, contacts in, hat on, jaw set against the sun. The other one. The one I don’t show people. Glasses on, hair uncombed, three screens deep in data with a cat on my lap and code scrolling in the reflection of my lenses. The version I’ve kept hidden for years because it doesn’t match the frame, because cowboys don’t look like this, don’t work like this, don’t sit in the blue-white glow of a monitor tracing VoIP relays like a man who belongs behind a desk instead of on a horse.
She’s looking at me the same way she did earlier in her bedroom. It’s as if this version of me is not less but rather the one she’sbeen connecting with all along. Not the hat and the horse, but the mind beneath, the man who builds quiet systems of protection and tracks soil data at 2 a.m. and rescues feral cats.
An hour ago, she was pressed against a door with my hands in her hair and her breath in my mouth and the wordstaylodged in my throat. In that moment, she reached for me—not cautiously, as she typically does with everything else in her life, always ready to retreat. No, she reached for me as someone who had calculated the risks and found them worthwhile.
I’m still carrying the weight of that. The sound she made when I kissed her throat. The way her fingers shook against my chest, not from fear but from the effort of letting herself want something without a safety net. The relief and recognition in her eyes when I told her I chose all of her. The look of a woman who’d been waiting her whole life for someone to see the full inventory and not walk away.
I haven’t processed it yet. I’m not sure I can. My hands are steady on the keyboard because the threat gives them something to do, but underneath the calm, every nerve in my body is still tuned to the frequency of Jenna Calloway choosing me back.
She gazes at me like a woman who has never had anyone defend her and is now witnessing a man do just that because her phone rang at five in the morning.
I adjust my glasses and meet her eyes. “Beckett's coming. Former SEAL. He runs security for Havenridge and Stoneridge. He’ll establish a proper watch rotation.”
“You called someone.” Her voice is cautious, as if she’s holding something delicate. “For me.”
“For us,” I correct. “Come here.”
She hesitates. Not because she doesn’t want to, but because she’s spent twenty-six years learning that “come here” is usually followed by a condition.
“Come here and explain yourself.”
“Come here and pack your bag.”
“Come here, but don’t get comfortable.”
I wait. I’ll always wait for her.
As she crosses the room, I push back from the desk and pull her onto my lap in one smooth motion, settling her sideways against my chest. Pixel protests the disruption with a sharp meow before relocating to the armrest of the desk chair with the wounded dignity of a cat who’s been demoted.
Jenna tenses for half a second, the reflex of a body that doesn’t know how to be held without bracing for the catch. Then she exhales, and the tension leaves her like air from a punctured tire.
Her head finds its place between my shoulder and jaw, fitting perfectly as I knew it would.
“The calls were routed through a VoIP relay,” I say into her hair. “Could be nothing.”
