Page 49 of The SEAL and the Sheriff

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Hudson had spent the last hour pretending the silence didn’t matter.

He counted steps and measured the rhythm of his breathing. The wilderness unwound through the spruce ahead of them, while the cold burrowed deeper into his lungs with every mile.

It worked until it didn’t.

The quiet had been easy for the first hour. Tired. Silence earned by two people surviving something together. Then Sarah stopped talking entirely, and the quiet felt like something she was deciding whether to break.

She walked a stride ahead of him, hands deep in her jacket pockets, breath fogging steady and even. He counted the minutes without meaning to, hands and brain needing somewhere to put themselves when the rest of him wanted to be doing something else.

The faint path had narrowed until there was nowhere left to look except ahead.

Or at her.

“Back at the diner.” She didn’t turn around. “You said you should have caught him the first time.”

He didn’t speak.

“Then you told me to forget it.”

His stomach dropped, but there was nowhere to grab onto. “I remember.”

She tramped on a few steps, snow compressing beneath her boots.

For three strides neither of them said anything else, and he thought, with relief, that maybe that would suffice.

“Why did you kiss me, Hudson?” She still didn’t turn. “If you were just going to disappear the next morning.”

He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He’d rehearsed this conversation a thousand times, and every version ended before this question.

“It was a long time ago,” he finally said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Sarah—”

“I’ve waited fifteen years to ask it properly.” Now she turned, walking backward a few steps so she faced him, her expression unreadable in the dark. “You don’t get to say it was a long time ago.”

He came to a halt.

She stopped too, a few feet ahead, watching him with the patience of someone who had genuinely waited fifteen years and decided she’d wait a little longer if that’s what it took.

He looked past her, into the black between the trees, as if the answer might be easier to find out there than inside his own heart. “I told myself I was protecting you.”

“From what?”

He looked away. “From me.” He kicked snow with his boot, unable to meet her eyes. “You weren’t just Wyatt’s little sister anymore.” He swallowed against the thickness in his throat. “You weren’t just the kid hanging around the docks.” His laugh was almost painful.

“I don’t know exactly when. I just knew that night I looked at you and you weren’t her anymore. You were just⁠—”

Sarah waited, breath fogging, eyes locked on him so it was impossible to look anywhere else.

“You were just Sarah,” he said. “I’d been trying not to kiss you for months.”

He looked at the snow. “I stopped standing too close. Stopped touching you. Started leaving whenever you walked into a room.” He blew out a noisy breath. “None of it helped. And then I kissed you before I let myself think about whether I had any right to.”

She didn’t say anything yet, so he carried on.