“Well...” Sawyer stared at the horizon. “First was Singapore, 2021. An audit flagged a data architecture issue I didn’t have the technical vocabulary to fully assess. I had to bring in outside expertise and trust someone else’s read on terrain I couldn’t map myself.” She sighed through her nose, like it still bothered her all these years later. “I find that situation uncomfortable.”
“And the second?” Nellie pressed.
Sawyer turned and looked at her.
“The second time...” She took a deep breath, as if she was bracing herself, and Nellie felt the need to brace herself too. “I feel out of my depth every time I see you. Every time I hear your voice. Yesterday, on the phone, Martha put you through and Ialready—” Sawyer made a short, dry sound that was not quite a laugh. “I have commanded rooms full of people trying to take something from me and I have never once lost the thread. I have been competent at most things I’ve attempted for a very long time, but now...”
“Now you’re in territory you can’t navigate without outside expertise?” Nellie smirked, the expression decidedly more self-assured than the absolute circus that was tumbling around in her stomach.
She’d known it already, and she hadn’t wanted to admit to herself that she’d known it, and now it was all coming out into the open, and she had nothing—no scientific framework, no field protocol, no rigorously annotated notebook entry— for what it meant to have Sawyer Alburn tell her, in plain language, that she was lost.
“I suppose that’s an accurate description of how I feel,” Sawyer mumbled.
Nellie turned from the valley to look at her properly. Sawyer was still facing the canopy below, jaw set.
“I know the feeling,” she said quietly.
Sawyer’s gaze came sideways.
“I mean it.” Nellie took a careful step toward her. “I have eight years of fieldwork and a master’s degree and a very good gut, and since approximately the day you showed up in front of Eleanor in those high heels, none of it has been particularly useful.” She stopped an arm’s length away. “I’m just as lost as you are.”
Her feet decided before her brain could tell them otherwise. She closed the last of the distance between them and took Sawyer’s face in her hands. “It can’t be all that terrible,” Nellie murmured, “being lost together.”
This kiss was nothing like the first one. That had been sudden—reflex dressed up as a decision. This was deliberate.Slow. She felt Sawyer’s stillness last a half-second and then release into it, the way a held breath finally goes. Nellie took her time with it, felt Sawyer’s mouth warm and careful and then—incrementally, measurably—not careful at all. Sawyer’s fist closed around the front of her jacket and pulled, and the tentative went somewhere else entirely and left something hungrier in its place.
Then, all too soon, Sawyer’s hands pressed at her shoulders. She pushed Nellie back.
Nellie blinked.
Sawyer’s expression was doing several things at once. Her color was high, and she looked—Nellie searched for the word—undone. Not distressed. Just undone, like an arrangement taken apart.
“This is getting complicated,” she said.
“Is it?” Nellie was perplexed, she did not think those would be the first words out of Sawyer’s mouth when just seconds ago they had been acquainting themselves with each other’s tongues.
“We are supposed to be on opposite teams.” Sawyer stepped back, put a precise foot of air between them. “There is a legal agreement. There is a development project. There’s a timeframe?—”
Nellie laughed. She hadn’t meant it to come out the way it did—slightly bewildered, a little unsteady, landing somewhere between amused and lost. But that was what it was. “You kissedmebefore.”
“I’m aware of what I did.” Sawyer suddenly seemed very interested in a point over Nellie’s shoulder. Nellie had never seen the CEO incapable of making eye contact. She was always direct, always using those piercing, pale eyes to drive her point home. This Sawyer Alburn in front of her felt like a nervous stranger.
“And today you’re all of a sudden worried about being on opposite teams?”
“I’m concerned about the conflict of interest.” Sawyer’s knuckles went briefly white as she tugged at her coat hem.
“Right.” Nellie blew out a slow breath and looked at the valley below them, then back. “Well… If you ask me, it doesn’t have to be complicated. That’s a choice.” She took a careful step forward again, like she was trying not to startle a wild animal. “You could just let yourself feel what you feel. It’s allowed. It’s not like our agreement is going to end in a fight to the death.”
Nellie laughed again, but Sawyer didn’t appear amused in the slightest. Sawyer’s jaw worked. She was chewing the inside of her cheek, eventually finding the courage to look Nellie in the eyes again. Her stare was achingly vulnerable, almost longing.
“I need to think this all through,” Sawyer said finally.
She turned abruptly, found the tree line behind them, and started back down the slope. Not quickly. Not with any particular agitation. Just away from Nellie.
Nellie stood at the edge of the rock for a moment and sighed at the valley below. Then she followed.
They didn’t speak on the way down. The forest filled the silence ably enough—bird calls and the drip of wet cedar and the soft percussion of two people navigating the same terrain even when they felt miles apart from each other.
At the cottage, Sawyer set the secondary pack on the porch without comment. She walked to her car. Got in. The engine turned over into its sleek purr, and she drove the access road back into the trees.
