Page 18 of Savage Ranger Daddy

"So should you."

"I will. After I send this to Mason."

I stand, stretch my aching back, and walk around the table to his side. He looks up at me. I lean down and press my mouth to his, quick and certain. Not a passionate kiss. A promise.

"Postponed," I say against his lips. "Not cancelled."

His hand catches the back of my neck and holds me there for one extra second. "Not cancelled."

I straighten up and walk to the bed, crawl under the quilts, and close my eyes. The last thing I hear before sleep pulls me under is the quiet scratch of his pen and the hiss of the radio, standing guard over everything we've built and everything we're about to face.

9

Brock

I wake up to gray light and silence.

The storm has stopped. Not eased. Stopped. The wind that's been hammering the cabin for two days is just gone, replaced by a stillness so complete I can hear the fire ticking in the hearth and Hazel's breathing from across the room. I lie on the couch for a minute and listen. Snow settling. A branch creaking under its weight somewhere in the trees. Nothing else. No engines. No voices. No radio traffic.

I sit up and check the sat phone. The frequency we've been monitoring is dead quiet. Either they've gone silent or the storm knocked out their equipment. I log the gap and set it aside.

Hazel is asleep in the bed, curled on her side with the quilts pulled up to her chin and her notebook still clutched in one hand. She fell asleep mid-sentence last night after our final monitoring shift, pen trailing off the page in a drowsy line. I eased the pen out of her fingers but left the notebook because taking it felt like taking her armor.

She worked harder than most field agents I've partnered with. Four pages of exact transcription. Every word logged, timestamped, annotated with her own observations in the margins. She caught a detail I missed: one of the voices used the phrase "the usual route" in a fragment I'd dismissed as too garbled. She played it back three times and pulled the words out of the static like a signal from noise. That's not luck. That's training.

I make coffee and bring her a mug. She stirs when she smells it, blinking up at me with unfocused eyes and a crease from the pillow across one cheek.

"Storm's over," I tell her.

She sits up slowly, takes the mug, and wraps both hands around it. Her hair is a disaster. She looks exhausted and beautiful and entirely too comfortable in my bed.

"How long was I out?"

"About four hours. You needed it."

She nods into the coffee. Takes a long sip. Then she looks at me over the rim with those sharp eyes that miss nothing. "You didn't sleep."

"Slept enough."

"Liar." But she says it gently, with a small smile.

We eat breakfast at the table, side by side rather than across from each other because neither of us suggests the old arrangement and the new one happens without discussion. Our elbows brush. She steals a piece of bacon off my plate and grins when I narrow my eyes. Her knee presses against my thigh under the table and stays there.

Something has shifted between us since last night. Not just the kissing. The monitoring shift. Working through the dark together, passing the phone back and forth, her handwriting filling pages while I logged frequencies. We fell into a rhythm that felt less like protection detail and more like partnership. I'm not used to that. I've always worked alone or with men I trained with. Having someone who thinks differently than I do, who sees connections in documents that I'd walk past, who listens to static with a journalist's ear instead of an operator's, is changing how I process this case.

After breakfast she pulls out her notebook and flips to a clean page. "Okay. What do we know after last night?"

I lean back in the chair. "Three confirmed voices on the frequency. They're working under someone called Voss. They know the Marshals Service is involved but not the specific marshal or location. They're backtracking your movements in Timber Creek. One reference to 'the deputy,' no name."

"And the timeline. Voss wants it wrapped before the roads clear. That was last night. Storm's over now, which means whatever they're planning is imminent." She taps the pen against the page. "We also know from the first transmission that they moved the shipment timeline up. Whatever they're moving, it's not waiting for spring anymore."

"Which means the active sites might be hot right now. If we can get to RC North before they move the goods, we could catch them in the act."

Her eyes light up. "When can we move?"

"Roads won't be clear today. Tomorrow, maybe, if the temperature holds. I need to get the truck dug out and checkthe access road." I hold her gaze. "This is going to get more dangerous from here. You understand that."

"I've understood that since I hit publish." She doesn't flinch. "I'd rather be moving toward the story than sitting here waiting for them to find me."