Page 66 of The Fire Line

Jay returned to the camera before that interest could become visible on his own face. He rejected three positions, climbed halfway onto the old steps and down again, then crouched near a granite shelf outside to catch the survey stakes on the distant slope.

The wind had strengthened, pulling his hair loose from the tie at his neck and blowing several strands across his face while he adjusted the focus.

“Careful,” Harris said. “You’re close to the edge.”

Jay didn’t turn. “I know where I am.”

“Do you?”

The concern was mild enough to be irritating and familiar enough to feel almost… intimate.

Jay looked back. Harris stood several feet away, still holding his hat. His hair had been flattened beneath it and was darker near the roots with sweat, the wind pressing his shirt against his chest.

Harris’s attention seemed fixed on Jay’s loose hair.

No—lower. His mouth?

The look lifted to Jay’s eyes a fraction too late.

Don’t point it out. Don’t make it weird. Whatever that had been, it could remain perfectly harmless if Jay demonstrated even a modest amount of self-control.

“You know, for someone who keeps claiming that I’m the observant one, you spend a lot of time watching me.”

Oops.

For the first time since Jay had met him, Harris looked genuinely caught. Something almost guilty flashed across his face, followed closely by what might have been anger, before the familiar control came down over both.

“Didn’t mean to,” he said gruffly.

Jay’s pulse struck hard enough to register in his throat, but he kept his gaze on Harris’s face. “Anything you want to say to me?”

Harris was quiet for a moment, his jaw shifting once. “Nope.” His eyes dropped toward Jay’s mouth again.

Wind moved through the empty lookout, tapping a loose sheet of metal somewhere overhead while Red shifted behind them, saddle leather creaking softly.

Then Harris stepped toward him.

Jay stayed right where he was, because surely Harrison Shaw—rugged rancher, Claire’s ex-husband, owner of nine nearly identical work shirts—was not about to cross the remaining space and kiss him.

There had been moments, of course. Harris watching him a second too long, the decision to bring him into the mountains alone, the strange way he could let Jay close and then seem to remember himself and pull back. Jay had noticed all of it and spent weeks refusing to turn any of it into something it wasn’t.

None of it had prepared him for Harris lifting one hand and catching him by the jaw.

Jay had just enough time to think oh, shit before Harris kissed him.

Their noses bumped, Harris’s mouth warm against his, and Jay’s brain simply… stopped.

This was not one of the versions he had imagined alone in bed, which he would deny under oath. In those, Jay always knew exactly what to do. Harris kissed him and Jay kissed him back without hesitation, hands already moving, pulling Harris closer and enthusiastically making every impossible thing he had wanted considerably worse.

Reality, apparently, had other plans.

Harris was kissing him in an empty fire lookout, and the fact was so incompatible with everything Jay thought he knew that his body misplaced the next instruction entirely. A startled sound caught in his throat, but he didn’t lift his hands or kiss Harris back; he could only stand there while the thing he had wanted, dismissed, and very carefully filed under never going to happen happened anyway.

Even through the short circuit, details made it through: the rough warmth of Harris’s mouth, the broad palm cupping his jaw, leather and sweat and the pine smoke worked into both their clothes from the cabin.

Then Harris was gone.

He pulled back so abruptly that by the time Jay’s body finally remembered it had been waiting weeks for exactly this, his hand closed on empty air.