Mitch was on the couch. Caleb was in the chair across from me, one leg tucked under him, breaking off small pieces of bread and eating them with the focused appreciation of someone who had made the thing and was still surprised it had turned out.
The bunkhouse was warm around all three of us in a way that had nothing to do with the cast iron and everything to do with the gravity of two people who had decided, without announcement, that they were staying.
I stayed at the table. The map could wait. The ridge was not going anywhere. The thing I was not thinking about had a name and two faces and was currently, at this specific table, breaking bread into pieces small enough to share.
I sat there in the warm amber light and did not move because moving meant acknowledging that I had chosen to stay, and choosing meant admitting I had wanted to, and wanting was a door I had kept shut for so long I had nearly forgotten what lived on the other side of it.
The door was open now. I could feel it. Could feel the draft of something warmer than the February cold finding the gaps in whatever I had built to keep it out, and I did not close it. I sat at the table with my empty mug and my bad leg and Mitch’s observation settling into the space between my ribs where it had no business fitting, and I did not close the door.
Not tonight. Just for tonight. Just because the bread was good and the bunkhouse was warm and the thing I was not thinking about had a laugh that carried across a winter pasture and found me exactly where I was sitting, which was exactly where I had decided, somewhere in the last hour, that I wanted to be.
Chapter Five
~ Mitch ~
I came back to the bunkhouse at nine-thirty with my shoulders wired tight and my lower back aching from the extra patrols. The security rotation was Sterling’s job, not mine, but his leg was still giving him hell, and somebody had to watch the perimeter while he sat at that table staring at maps like they held the answer to a question he wouldn’t ask out loud.
So I did it.
Two weeks of driving the fence line at odd hours, checking the motion sensors twice a night, sleeping in twenty-minute increments with the radio beside my ear.
Not complaining.
The job was the job, and the job kept the lights on, and the lights kept the roof over our heads, and the roof kept Sterling sitting at that table looking at Caleb like the man had handed him something he didn’t know how to hold.
The bunkhouse was quiet. East-facing windows dark, reflecting the single bulb hanging over the long table. I could smell bread. Caleb’s bread, the kind with the crackly crust that smelled like somebody’s grandmother’s kitchen if your grandmother had been good at anything besides disappointment.
I dropped my keys on the hook by the door. Shrugged out of my coat. Toed my boots off in the mud room and padded through the kitchen in sock feet, following the warm smell and the low, steady thrum of something that felt, after two weeks in a truck cab, almost too comfortable to trust.
Caleb wasn’t in the kitchen. The bread was there, cooling on the rack, but Caleb wasn’t. The house had that late-evening hush to it, the kind that meant everybody was somewhere doing thequiet version of whatever they did when the day was officially over. Sterling’s door was closed.
I headed down the hallway toward the bathroom, my body running on the last dregs of whatever energy I’d started the day with. My shoulders ached. My jaw was tight.
Two weeks of vigilance will do that to a man—keeps you sharp on the outside and hollow on the inside, and the hollow part was the one I needed to address before I fell face-first into a pillow and didn’t move for twelve hours.
The bathroom door opened.
Steam rolled out first, thick and warm, carrying the clean mineral smell of the bunkhouse water and something underneath it that I recognized before my brain caught up to my nose.
Sterling.
He stepped into the hallway in nothing but a towel slung low on his hips, and I stopped walking so fast my socks slid on the floorboards.
Water-dark hair pushed back from his forehead. That jaw, square and set, carrying a shadow of stubble that looked like it had been applied with something sharper than a razor. Broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, the towel riding the sharp cut of his hipbones, and his chest—Christ, his chest—mapped with tattoos and the occasional scar that had a story attached to it he would never tell and I had stopped asking about.
His eyes found mine across the six feet of hallway between us. Dark green, registering everything, giving back nothing. For one half-second, before the walls slammed into place, I saw something there—something warm and startled and immediately, visibly regretted.
Two weeks of driving fence lines. Two weeks of sleeping in a truck cab with the radio crackling. Two weeks of wanting something I couldn’t have because the man who had it wassitting at a table looking at maps and not looking at me, and the wanting had built up behind my sternum like pressure behind a dam, and the dam just broke.
I crossed the distance in two strides.
My hand found the back of his neck, wet hair between my fingers, and I kissed him. Not gently. Not carefully. The way a man kisses when he’s done waiting for permission—fierce and possessive and with enough heat behind it to melt whatever was left of the ice Sterling had been carrying around since I’d met him.
He froze.
For approximately one heartbeat, Sterling Callahan, who could field-strip a weapon in the dark and speak eight languages and had probably never been caught off guard by anything in his adult life, went completely, utterly still against my mouth.
Then his hands found my waist. Both of them, big and warm and surprisingly certain, and he kissed me back like a man who had been holding a line for too long and had just decided to abandon his post.
