4
SHELBY
The blizzard has been raging for six hours and Cory Matthews is going to drive me insane.
Not because he's difficult. Not because he's cold or dismissive or any of the things I braced for when I signed up to be trapped on a mountain with a man who rations conversation like battlefield supplies.
Because he'skind.
Quietly, stubbornly, almost reluctantly kind in a way that undoes me more effectively than charm ever could.
He made dinner. Not thrown-together survival rations, but actual dinner. Pan-seared trout he pulled from the lodge's chest freezer, roasted potatoes with rosemary, and a salad of pickled vegetables from his root cellar that tasted like someone's grandmother had been canning for decades. When I asked where he learned to cook, he said his mother taught him before she died and then changed the subject so smoothly I almost didn't notice the deflection.
Almost.
Now we're sitting in the lodge's main room, the woodstove throwing heat against the howling dark outside, and I'm on the leather couch with my laptop open pretending to work on article notes while Cory sits at the pine table sharpening a hunting knife with long, slow strokes of a whetstone.
The sound is hypnotic. The steady rasp of steel against stone, rhythmic and deliberate. His hands move with the kind of precision that makes my stomach tighten. Large hands. Scarred at the knuckles. Frostbite marks on three fingertips that he probably doesn't even notice anymore but that I can't stop looking at.
The firelight catches the angles of his face. The strong jaw under that neatly trimmed beard. The way his brow furrows slightly when he's concentrating. The ice-blue eyes that have thawed exactly two degrees over the course of the evening, from Arctic to merely glacial.
I look back at my laptop screen. I've typed the same sentence three times.
"You're not writing," he says without looking up.
"I'm thinking."
"You've been thinking at that screen for forty minutes. Either the words aren't coming or you're stalling."
Both. The words aren't coming because every time I try to write about Mountain Ready's operational philosophy, my brain redirects to the way his hand felt on my elbow at the observation point. The firm grip. The immediate steadiness. The way he held on for exactly as long as I needed and not a second longer, like he'd calculated the precise amount of contact required to keep me safe and anything beyond that was territory he wouldn't cross.
I close the laptop. "Fine. I'm stalling. The article needs more material and my subject is sitting ten feet away sharpening a knife instead of giving me something to work with."
The knife pauses. He looks up. In the firelight, his eyes are less ice and more deep water, the kind you can't see the bottom of.
"I gave you three questions at dinner last night."
"You gave me two answers and a deflection. 'That's not a three-question answer' is not an answer. It's a redirect."
His mouth does that thing again. The almost-smile that makes me want to throw something at him or climb into his lap. I haven't decided which.
"What do you want to know?" He sets the knife down. Folds his hands on the table. Gives me his full attention, which is overwhelming in a way I wasn't prepared for. This man's focus is a physical force.
I pull my legs up under me on the couch and face him fully. "I want to know about the training accident."
The air in the room changes. The stove keeps burning. The storm keeps screaming. But something between us goes very still.
"Rhea told you."
"Rhea told me you left the Teams after a training incident. She didn't give me details. I'm asking you for them."
He's quiet for a long time. The kind of quiet that would make a lesser interviewer rush to fill the space with a softening question or a reassurance that he doesn't have to answer. I don't do either. I sit still and I wait, because this man told me himself that patience is the hardest survival skill, and I'm going to show him I have it.
"Petty Officer Tyler Rawlings," he says finally. His voice is low and stripped of everything except the facts. "Twenty-two years old. From Duluth, Minnesota, four hours from where Igrew up. His mother taught third grade. His father ran a bait shop on Lake Superior."
He picks up the whetstone. Turns it over in his fingers. Not sharpening. Just holding.
"We were running a cold-weather endurance exercise in Alaska. Standard advanced training. I was lead instructor. Tyler was in my group of six. He was good. Fast learner, strong, didn't complain. The kind of kid who made you believe the next generation was going to be better than yours."
