Page 30 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Got a minute?"

"Sure." She sets her pen down, gives me her full attention, which somehow makes the next part harder instead of easier.

"I want to talk about the storm. About what happened at the loft." I stay standing, hands loose at my sides, the way I'd brief a room that needed calm information delivered fast. "It shouldn't have happened. It wasn't professional, and you work for me, and that puts you in a position I should have been more careful about. I'd like to just move past it. Chalk it up to a stressful night and a lot of adrenaline, and go back to how things were before."

I get exactly that far before she says one word.

"No."

"No?"

"No, I'm not going to sit here and let you call it a mistake." She stands up, and for a second the desk between us feels a lot smaller than it did a minute ago. "You don't get to hand me a speech you clearly wrote in the shower and expect me to just take it because you used the word professional enough times."

"I'm trying to do the responsible thing here."

"You're trying to hide behind a job title so you don't have to say the actual sentence." Her voice stays level, but there's an edge in it now, sharp enough that I feel it land somewhere under my ribs. "Professional isn't a shield, Rafe. It's a word you're using so you don't have to tell me the truth."

"And what do you think the truth is?"

"I think you're scared. I think that kiss meant exactly as much as it felt like it meant, and that terrifies you more than any nail gun ever could, so you built a speech about professionalism to avoid saying so." She crosses her arms, steady, unwilling to look away first. "Tell me I'm wrong."

I open my mouth to tell her she's wrong, and nothing comes out, because she isn't, and we both know it. Standing here trying to force out a lie feels suddenly like the stupidest tactical decision I've made in longer than I can count.

"You're not wrong," I say instead.

The room goes quiet in a way that feels different from every other silence we've built between us this week, less like a wall and more like a held breath.

"It wasn't a mistake," I say, and once I start I can't seem to stop, four days of pressure finding the crack all at once. "The kiss. Any of it. I've been telling myself otherwise because the alternative means admitting I want something I don't know how to keep safe, and I'm better at fixing woodstoves and running numbers than I am at that particular problem."

"What problem?"

"You. This. The fact that I've got a rule about not putting people I care about anywhere near the parts of my life that go wrong, and you and those two kids walked straight through it without even trying, and I don't have a system for that. I've got systems for everything, Jenna. Combat, inventory, grief. I don't have one for this."

"You don't need a system. You need to stop running the numbers on it and just say what's true."

"I'm scared." It comes out rougher than I mean it to, but it's out now, plain, no cover left to retreat behind. "Not of you. Of what happens if I let this be real and then lose it anyway, the way I've lost enough already that I built an entire life around never getting close enough to lose anything again. That's my problem, not yours. It was never about whether the kiss was a mistake. It was about whether I trust myself not to wreck something good once I let myself want it."

Jenna's quiet for a long moment, studying me the way she studies invoices that don't add up, patient and thorough, refusing to accept the first easy answer.

"Those are two different problems," she finally says. "The one about the kiss, and the one about you being scared."

"I know that now."

"Only one of them is actually about me."

"I know that too."

"Good." Something in her shoulders loosens, and the careful distance we've both been keeping all week collapses down to almost nothing. "Because I wasn't interested in being managed like an incident report. If you're scared, be scared. Just don't hide it behind a word like professional and expect me not to notice the difference."

"Understood."

"That's a very military answer."

"It's the one I've got."

She almost smiles at that, the first real crack in the wall between us all week, and something loosens in my own chest to match it.

"So what happens now?" I say, because somebody has to say it out loud, and it might as well be me, given I'm the one who spent days building walls instead of asking the question directly.