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"I'm sitting behind a root system taking notes. So, I’m fine." She finished whatever she was writing and closed the journal. "And yes, the ground split open. That's kind of the point of excavation."

"Excavation doesn't usually involve near-miss rockslides." He reached down and took her arm to pull her to her feet. She let him, but the look she gave him when she was standing could have peeled paint. "We need to get you out of here."

"We don't need to do anything. I need to document what just happened before the readings degrade, and you need to be somewhere else."

"Stephanie, look at this site." He gestured at the destruction around them. "This isn't stable. Those cracks are still settling and you've got a hole in the ridge face that wasn't here yesterday. You can't work in this."

"I've worked in active seismic zones. I've worked on sites during monsoon season in Southeast Asia. I've excavated ruins while mortar rounds hit a hillside two miles away." She pulled her arm free and stepped back. "I appreciate the concern, but I know what I'm doing."

"I'm not questioning your competence. I'm questioning your survival instincts."

"My survival instincts are excellent. They're the reason I was behind the oak and not under the slab." She bent to retrieve her tripod, and the ground chose that moment to shudder again.

It was smaller this time, a tremor rather than a jolt, but it sent fresh cracks racing across the basin floor and knocked a shower of loose stone from the ridge face. Stephanie braced herself against the oak and rode it out with the practiced balance of someone who'd done this before. Criss grabbed the back of her jacket on instinct and hauled her away from the ridge face toward the tree line.

"Stop." She twisted out of his grip, eyes blazing. "Do not grab me."

"There are rocks falling three feet from your head."

"And I can see them just fine without you dragging me around like luggage." She planted her boots and squared up to him with the particular fury of being underestimated one too many times. "I didn't ask you to come here. I didn't ask for backup, for protection, or for a tiger shifter to show up and start making decisions about my safety."

"I heard the ground shake. I heard you. What was I supposed to do, keep walking?"

"Yes. That's exactly what you were supposed to do." She stepped closer, and up close the gold in her hazel eyes burned. "I have permits. I have council authorization. I have ten years of fieldwork and a track record that got me access to one of the most sensitive sites in this town's history. And I did all of that without anyone holding my hand."

"Nobody's trying to hold your hand."

"Then what do you call hauling me across a dig site by my jacket?"

He opened his mouth but had nothing to say. She had a point, and he hated that she had a point. "I call it reacting to someone being in danger."

"You call it control. You call it deciding you know better than I do about a situation I've been managing for days." She shoved her journal into her jacket and started collecting her scattered equipment with sharp, efficient movements. "This is my site, Criss. My work. My risk to take. And if I want your help, which I don't, I'll ask for it."

"I'm not trying to control you."

"Then stop acting like you have a say in what I do."

He felt his tiger bristle, the animal reacting to the challenge in her voice, the refusal to yield. Every alpha instinct he had was screaming at him to stay, to secure the perimeter, to put himself between her and whatever the hell was happening under this ridge. She was in danger, his body knew it the way it knew how to breathe, and walking away felt like swallowing glass.

"I'm not leaving you here alone with the ground cracking open," he said, and even he could hear how it sounded. Not a request. An order.

Her face went flat. "Then I'll leave. I need to review my notes anyway."

She shouldered her field pack, collected her camera and tripod, and walked past him toward the trail without breaking stride. He stood in the wrecked basin surrounded by fractured stone and watched her disappear into the trees, her back straight and her pace unhurried, not running from him but dismissing him, which was worse.

Every fiber of the animal strained toward the trail she'd taken, demanding pursuit, demanding proximity.

He stood there until the sound of her boots faded, and the basin went quiet except for the settling stone and the slow drip of water into new cracks.

He'd handled that badly. He knew he'd handled it badly. And the worst part wasn't that she was angry. It was that she was right.

13

STEPHANIE

Steph was on the trail before the sun cleared the ridge, moving fast with her pack heavy on her shoulders and her jaw set in the particular way it got when she was still angry about something from the day before and hadn't decided whether to let it go.

The nerve of him. Showing up at her site, grabbing her jacket, telling her what was and wasn't safe like she hadn't spent a decade building the exact expertise required to make that call herself. She'd excavated a burial chamber in Peru while the ceiling was actively collapsing. She'd pulled artifacts from a flooded cenote in the Yucatán with nothing but a dive light and a waterproof bag. And some shifter thought he got to decide when she should stop working.