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"And you just, what, prepare for all of them?"
"Somebody has to." Sparks spiral up the flue. "My father used to say a house is a promise. You make it honest, or you don't make it at all."
"That's the most words you've said in a row since I met you," she says.
"Storms make me talkative." A lie. She makes me talkative, and we both know it, and I let the lie sit because the truth would fill the room faster than the water in the buckets.
I add a split to the fire. The oak catches with a hiss, resin popping, and the light swells and throws her shadow long across the plywood. She tips her head back against the stone and closes her eyes, and the tension bleeds out of her by degrees, shoulder, then jaw, then the small fierce line between her brows that no filter has ever quite erased.
"My grandmother had a hearth like this," she says. "Nothing fancy. But she'd sit us in front of it every time the power went out, and she'd say the storm was just the sky doing its housekeeping." A soft laugh. "I hated storms as a kid. Loved that fire."
"And now?"
She opens her eyes. The flames dance in them. "Ask me in the morning."
She goes quiet a while. The coat slips off one shoulder, and I reach without thinking and settle it back into place, and my knuckles graze the bare curve of her collarbone, and she goes very still.
I pull my hand back. "Cold," I say, like an idiot.
"Yeah," she breathes. "Cold."
Neither of us is cold anymore. The fire has seen to that. The room glows amber and close, and the rain locks the doors better than any deadbolt, and for the first time in weeks there is no camera, no manager, no reason to be anything but exactly what we are.
A bucket by the low wall overflows with a soft splash.
She jumps up, coat swirling, and grabs the empty and swaps it before the water can spread, quick and sure. When she drops back down beside me she's grinning, actually grinning, mud-streaked and firelit and pleased with herself, and the grin isn't for anyone.
It's just hers.
I have wanted many things in my life. A workshop of my own. A quiet acre. Peace. I study this small human wrapped in my coat, glowing in a fire I built, saving a floor for no audience, and every one of those wants rearranges itself around her without asking my permission.
"Oggan." She's studying me now, head tilted, firelight in her lashes. "Can I tell you something, and you don't do the grumpy thing?"
"I don't do a grumpy thing."
"You absolutely do a grumpy thing."
The corner of my mouth betrays me. "Tell me."
She pulls the coat tight and squares her shoulders inside it, gathering something up.
Outside, lightning splits the dark, and thunder rolls in right on its heels, closer now, the storm sitting directly overhead. The fire gutters and stands tall again.
She opens her mouth to say the thing.
And I lean in, because whatever it is, I want to be close enough to catch it before the storm takes it away.
CHAPTER 23
JILLY
The fire turns everything honest.
There's no ring light doing me favors. No filter softening the dark circles Patsy calls "unmarketable." Just this: raw flame, raw wood, a man the size of a doorway leaning in close enough that his warmth reaches me before his words do.
"I made you wear the shirt," I say.
He goes still.
