Page 97 of The Fire Line

“Yup.”

Neither of them made any move toward the door.

Jay noticed. Of course he did.

“That means not doing this in a room with an open entrance.”

“Know what it means.”

“Do you?”

Harris looked toward the aisle and then back at him.

Jay’s shirt remained partly untucked, his mouth visibly kissed. Harris could see his pulse beating quickly at the base of his throat, evidence that Jay had not recovered any better than he had.

A minute earlier, Harris had been willing to let him touch a part of his body nobody else ever had while Evan stood perhaps twenty feet away.

The worst part was that Harris had not forgotten where they were.

If he had simply lost track of the risk, he could have understood that. People got distracted. They made mistakes.

Harris had known exactly where they were and what could happen if someone walked through the door. For those few minutes, he had simply wanted Jay badly enough that the consequences stopped mattering.

That realization bothered him far more than the near discovery itself.

Harris had spent most of his life believing caution was built into him. He checked gates twice, watched wind direction without thinking about it, fixed small problems before they had time to become expensive ones. He planned around risk because waiting for risk to become emergency was how people got hurt.

A man like that did not stand in an unlocked tack room with another man’s hand inside the back of his jeans while his brother worked twenty feet away.

Except apparently Harris did.

Jay had gone quiet while watching him.

“Regretting it?”

The teasing was gone from his voice.

“No.” Harris rubbed a hand over his jaw, needing Jay to understand that much immediately. “The risk. Not you.”

Something in Jay’s posture eased. “Good distinction.”

“Ain’t funny.”

“I know.”

And he did know. Maybe not every reason Harris had built his life so carefully around never giving anyone cause to wonder, but enough to understand that discovery here would not be a minor embarrassment Harris could laugh about later.

“We can’t do this again.”

Jay’s expression closed before Harris had even finished hearing his own sentence.

“Here,” he corrected. “Like this.”

Understanding returned almost immediately. “Yes,” Jay said. “That was what I meant by more careful.”

“Cabin.”

“The cabin has a door. A revolutionary safety feature.”