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He hadn't.

"...Don't leave me either." The words came out so low. So quiet and stripped of everything except what they were. His jaw flexed. He kept his eyes on the valley. "Okay?"

She studied him for a long moment.

Then she slowly raised her small hand to his face, laying it gently against his cheek. Her touch was warm. Steady. Like she was making a vow with more than just words.

He didn't look down. Couldn't, quite. The valley was safer — the silver expanse of it, the mountains holding the dark, the fixed and indifferent stars. His jaw worked once. He leaned into her hand without meaning to.

She turned back to the stars. Pressed closer into his chest.

"I won't," she said. Soft as snowfall. "Promise."

The words landed in him like something sacred. Like she was giving him something she'd never given anyone else.

He breathed.

Brutus sighed at their feet.

The valley held its silver silence and asked nothing of either of them, and after a while — not long, not as long as he expected — her breathing evened out and her weight went fully heavy and she was asleep in his arms under the Montana stars with his coat around her shoulders and his heartbeat under her cheek.

Cal didn’t sleep.

He watched the stars wheel overhead and held her and kept watch the way he’d always kept watch — over things that mattered, over things worth protecting. And as he held her, Cal knew that the feeling that had been growing since the moment he first saw Sage Thompson had become impossible to ignore.

The sky began to gray at the eastern ridge.

Sage breathed slowly against his chest.

Brutus shifted in his sleep at the base of the steps.

Cal looked down at the dark crown of her head against his bare skin and felt the universe shift under him — not violently, not all at once, but with a slow unstoppable finality.

He held her a little closer and watched the land be born again in the golden rays of the rising sun, knowing that something else had been born in him that would never go away.

21

SAGE

“Ido NOT drool!”

Cal didn’t comment as he climbed the stairs behind her, but Sage heard that particular low grunt rumble out of him — the one that clearly meant whatever you say, princess.

Sage bit back a smile.

Ha. Getting pretty good at mountain man.

She led the way down the hall toward her shattered door. “Whatever,” she muttered under her breath, grateful he couldn’t see the fresh blush burning across her cheeks.

She had woken earlier that morning to sunlight spilling across her face like warm honey.

For one perfect, weightless moment she was still floating in the dream — wrapped in liquid gold, utterly safe, completely held. Then she stretched languorously, a contented little yawn escaping as her body arched against the solid warmth beneath her… only to freeze when Cal’s deep, sleep-rough voice brushed over her.

“Morning, sweetheart.”

Several things slammed into place at once.

She wasn’t in her bed. She was curled in Cal’s lap on the big porch chair, his heavy trench coat wrapped around them both like a wool cocoon against the cold. Her cheek was glued to his bare chest, skin warm and smooth over ridiculous slabs of muscle. One thick arm rested possessively across her back, the other hand loosely cupping her hip. Her legs had tangled with his sometime in the night, and — oh God — she could feel the unmistakable damp spot on his skin where she had definitely been drooling.