Sterling (Black Butte Ranch #7)

Chapter One

Sterling

AJA FOXX

~ Sterling ~

I shouldered the bunkhouse door open on a bad leg and stopped cold. Two scents hit me before my eyes adjusted to the dark, and my body recognized them before my brain did — which was a problem, because my brain was supposed to be in charge.

Mitch’s scent came first: sharp, warm, something like wood smoke and clean sweat with an undercurrent of dominance that didn’t match his omega designation and didn’t seem to care.

Underneath it, softer and more insistent, Caleb’s—sweet without being cloying, the kind of scent that made you want to lean closer even when you knew better.

I had spent four months in Tbilisi and Caracas and a series of very unfriendly transit hubs trying to forget exactly what those two smelled like. My body had not gotten the memo.

The bag on my shoulder weighed about forty pounds. My leg hurt like someone had taken a crowbar to the muscle and then left the crowbar in. I stood in the doorway and let my eyes do what they’d been trained to do: scan, assess, catalog.

A long plank table in the center of the main room.

The cast-iron stove in the corner, banked but still throwing enough heat to take the February bite out of the air.

A worn leather couch and two armchairs pulled close to the warmth, the cushions dented where someone had been sitting recently.

Mud room hooks along the back wall, the utility sink, the shower stall with its plain curtain pulled closed.

And then the wrongness.

Two pairs of boots by the door that weren’t mine.

Work boots, well-used, one pair larger than the other, both caked with the same dark Montana mud.

Gear stacked against the far wall: a saddlebag, a coiled rope, a canvas pack with the drawstring pulled tight.

A flannel shirt thrown over the back of the chair I always used—the one at the head of the table, positioned so I could see both exits without turning my head.

I stared at the flannel.

It was red and black plaid, worn soft at the elbows, the kind of shirt that had been washed so many times the pattern had started to fade. I knew without touching it that it would smell like Mitch.

My hand reached for it before I could stop the impulse, and then I was holding it, feeling the weight of it, the warmth still caught in the fabric from whoever had been wearing it last.

This was not operational behavior.

I hung the flannel on the hook by the door where it belonged—where all outerwear belonged, because that was the rule, and the bunkhouse ran on rules—and dropped my bag on the chair.

The chair that was mine. The chair that had my specific ass-groove in it from three years of sitting in the same spot, eating the same meals, staring at the same wall, and not complaining about any of it.

This is logistics, I told myself. I do not sit where someone else’s clothing has been. That’s basic field hygiene.

I did not examine that claim. Examining claims was what I did for a living, and I was off the clock.

The leg was bad enough that standing for more than five minutes made the pain start to climb from manageable to something I’d have to address with the pills in my bag, and I wasn’t ready to open that particular door yet.

Pills meant acknowledging the injury. Acknowledging the injury meant acknowledging the mission that caused it. That was a longer conversation than I wanted to have with myself at nine-thirty on a Tuesday night in a bunkhouse that suddenly didn’t feel like mine.

I gave myself twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes to unpack the essentials in the downstairs bedroom, to wash my face in the mud room sink, to check the security feed on the wall-mounted monitor and confirm that the perimeter was clean and the motion sensors were active.

Twenty minutes to move through the space on a leg that didn’t want to cooperate and pretend that the wrongness—the boots, the gear, the smell of two people who were not supposed to be here—was something I could file under ‘irrelevant’ and move past.

The bunkhouse was quiet. The stove ticked. The wind pushed at the east-facing door and found no gap to slide through. I sat on the edge of the bed—the one downstairs, because climbing stairs right now was off the menu—and listened to the silence of a building that knows it’s being occupied.

For approximately twenty minutes, I had the relief of a man who has retreated successfully. Who has closed a door and locked it and does not intend to answer when someone knocks.

Then Mitch filled the doorway.

He didn’t knock. He just appeared, one shoulder propped against the frame, arms crossed over his chest, wearing a t-shirt that had seen better days and a grin that said he had already assessed the situation from every possible angle and found it personally satisfying.

His hazel eyes caught the low light from the stove and held it, green-gold and entirely too aware of what they were looking at.

“You look terrible,” he said.

No preamble. No greeting. Just five words delivered with the cheerful confidence of a man who had never in his life worried about whether someone wanted to hear what he had to say.

I looked at him. He looked exactly the same as he had four months ago—broad shoulders, narrow waist, the kind of build that came from actual work rather than a gym membership, and a face that carried its own authority without asking permission.

The only difference was the stubble, which was heavier than I remembered, and the fact that he was standing in my doorway like he belonged there.

“You look worse,” I said.

Mitch laughed.

Not the polite laugh people give when they’re being diplomatic.

Not the performed laugh that comes with an agenda.

The real one—full and warm and surprised, like I’d caught him off guard with something genuinely funny, and the sound of it did something to the air in the room that I didn’t have a category for.

I filed it under: problem.

“You always say that,” Mitch said, pushing off the door frame and stepping into the room.

He moved the way he always moved—unhurried, covering ground without seeming to hurry, taking up exactly as much space as he wanted and not apologizing for any of it.

“It’s not getting more convincing with practice. ”

“It’s not supposed to be convincing. It’s supposed to be accurate.”

He was still grinning. “You want a beer?”

“No.”

“You want the truth about how bad that leg looks from where I’m standing?”

“Also no.”

“Tough. You’re getting both.”

And then Caleb was there.

He appeared at Mitch’s shoulder the way he always did—smaller, quieter, moving with the grace of someone who had learned to take up less space than he was entitled to.

His strawberry-blond hair caught the last thin light from the east window and turned it copper.

His eyes—hazel like his brother’s, but warmer, softer at the edges—found my leg first, then my face, and something in his expression shifted.

It went soft. Not the kind of careful concern people offer when they’re being polite. The real kind—a warmth that reached across the room and landed somewhere behind my sternum with the precision of a round I hadn’t heard coming.

My threat-assessment instincts had no category for that look. They spun for a second and came up empty, which was worse than coming up with a threat, because at least a threat I knew how to handle.

“Sit down,” Caleb said.

His voice was gentle. So gentle it almost sounded like a suggestion, the kind of thing you could take or leave depending on your mood and the state of your leg and how badly you wanted to prove a point to the man who had just laughed at you.

I sat down.

My body made the decision before my brain had finished processing the command. The relief was immediate and humiliating—the weight off the bad leg, the tension in my lower back releasing all at once, the specific surrender of muscles that had been holding a line for too long.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my hands on my knees and my bag still on the chair across the room and Caleb Pruitt looking at me with an expression that contained no judgment whatsoever, which was somehow worse than if he’d looked smug.

I had sat before I decided to. The command had bypassed the part of my brain that refuses things on principle, and I didn’t know what to do with that information except file it under the same category as Mitch’s laugh and the flannel on the hook and the wrongness of boots by the door that weren’t mine.

Problem.

Caleb didn’t say anything else. He just looked at me for a long moment, his head tilted slightly to one side, and then he turned and walked into the kitchen.

I could hear him opening cabinets, running water, the domestic sounds of someone who had decided that making coffee at nine-forty-five at night was a reasonable response to finding a wounded operative sitting on a bunk with his guard down.

Mitch was still standing in the doorway, watching me with that same unhurried grin, and I knew without asking that he had seen exactly what happened—the command, the response, the gap between what Sterling Callahan was supposed to do and what Sterling Callahan had actually done.

“You want to tell me what happened to the leg?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

He nodded, like that was the answer he’d expected, and pushed off the door frame. “Coffee’s coming. Try not to look so fucking miserable while you drink it. It hurts my feelings.”

He was lying. Nothing hurt Mitch Pruitt’s feelings.

He said it anyway, and then he followed his brother into the kitchen, and I was left sitting on the edge of the bed with a leg that hurt and a door in my head that had just been kicked open by two men who had no business being there, and the particular, uncomfortable certainty that the twenty minutes of peace I’d just bought myself were the last twenty minutes of peace I was going to get for a very long time.

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