Chapter 9
KENDALL
Alex woke up dangerous this morning. More dangerous than usual.
He's been watching me since I walked through his door. That's not new. The man watches everything with the steady patience of someone who has never once been in a hurry to act.
He watches the way predators watch, not with aggression but with absolute attention, and I've spent enough time around dangerous men to know the difference between surveillance and interest.
This morning the watching is different. He's in the kitchen when I come downstairs. The coffee is made, the fire rebuilt, the lodge warm and settling around us.
Last night I slept hard for the first time since I got here. Amberly's anti-inflammatories earned their money last night.
"Morning," he says.
"Morning."
The word is the same. The weight behind it isn't. He's looking at me the way he looks at a storm system on the ridge. He's measuring what's coming and deciding whether to shelter or stand in it.
I pour coffee and take my usual spot against the opposite counter. The kitchen has become our neutral ground, the place where the banter happens, where we've been circling each other in a pattern that feels more like a slow-motion collision than a conversation.
"You slept," he says.
"That obvious?"
"You missed the third step when you came down."
I drink. He noticed. He notices everything.
"Amberly's pills," I say. "They knocked me out."
"Good."
It's not sympathy. It's not concern dressed up as interest. It's just good. The simplicity of it gets under my skin in a way that has no business getting anywhere.
The fire pops in the main room. Cameron's truck rumbles past the window.
"Bryan left early," Alex says. "Cameron's running the road. Dash went with him."
"Running the road?"
"He's checking conditions. The pass should open soon."
The pass is opening. The road out is right there.
The route I've been planning since the first night is about to become real.
I can still feel his mouth on my skin from a kiss that never finished.
Every night since, the bag on the floor has been the only thing keeping me honest about why I'm still here.
I should want the pass to open. Every day I stay is another day Gary has time to narrow the search.
I don't want to leave. The realization sits in my throat like something I swallowed wrong.
"The pass should open soon," I say. Testing the sound.
Alex picks up his mug. Drinks. Sets it down. The pause before he speaks lasts long enough that I notice it.
"It should."
Two words. Yesterday he would have followed that with road conditions, switchback warnings, fuel stops.
Yesterday he was a man conceding ground he didn't want to give.
Today the concession is gone. Something behind his face has closed, and the thing that replaced it is harder, quieter, more certain.
"You're not going to tell me the route," I say.
"I'll tell you whatever you want to know." His voice is even. His hands are still. The stillness is new. "When it's safe for me to tell you."
Yesterday that line would have been about respecting my choices. Today it sounds like a man buying time, and I don't know what he's buying it for.
"What changed?" I ask.
"Nothing you need to worry about."
The deflection is so clean it's almost invisible. Almost. I've spent years reading the distance between what a man says and what a man means. Gary trained me for it.
The gap between Alex's words and his body is wider this morning than it's been since I got here.
Whatever changed between yesterday's argument and this morning's coffee, he's not offering it up.
The fact that a man who told me he'd check my tires and let me go is now measuring his words like ammunition tells me everything his silence won't.
The way he says it, the rawness underneath the control, tells me something shifted between yesterday's argument and this morning's coffee. I don't know what. But the man standing across from me isn't fighting the same fight he was fighting yesterday. This one is bigger.
The honesty is the problem. Gary was charming.
Gary brought flowers, spoke softly, framed every locked door as protection.
This man stands in his kitchen and tells me flat out that he won't explain himself.
Not yet. Not until it's safe. The withholding is in his jaw, his hands, the measured weight of every word he chooses not to say.
The words come out bare, unpolished, with no performance behind them. He wants what he wants and he says so, and the directness of it does more to me than every performance Gary produced in years.
"Stop looking at me like that," I say.
"Like what?"
"Like you're deciding something."
"I already decided."
"What?"
"You'll know when it matters."
The words land somewhere I wasn't guarding. The heat has been building since the night he put his mouth on my throat, since his hand found the ridge of bone that shouldn't have been there. The night that ended before it started.
I should walk away. Pour more coffee. Make a joke about Cameron's oil stains or Amberly's spirometer. Put the banter back between us like a wall I can hide behind... I don't.
"And if I'm ready now?"
The kitchen goes quiet. Not the easy quiet from before the conversation started. It's the kind that happens right before something irreversible.
Alex stays exactly where he is. His hands stay flat on the counter.
"Then come here."
I cross the kitchen. Every step is a choice. Every step is mine.
I stop in front of him. Close enough that the heat from his body reaches me through the flannel. Close enough that I have to look up to hold his gaze.
"I need to know one thing," he says. His voice has dropped into a register I've only heard once before, the night at the bar. "Are you walking toward me or away from someone else?"
The question stops me. I know the answer. What stops me is that no one has ever asked it.
"Toward you," I say. "Right now, toward you."
His hand comes up and finds the side of my jaw. His palm is rough and large enough that his fingers reach into my hair. He tilts my face up.
"There's something we need to talk about first," he says.
I almost laugh. The timing is absurd and exactly right. "Birth control."
"Yeah."
"I'm on the shot. I'm clean. I got tested right before I left Anchorage." The words come out flat and clinical, the way you discuss logistics before something that has nothing to do with logistics. "I haven't been with anyone since."
"I'm clean," Alex says. "It's been a while."
"Define a while."
"Long enough that I don't want to talk about it when I could be doing something else."
The half-smile that cracks his face lasts less than a second. Then his hand tightens in my hair and his mouth is on mine. The conversation is over.
He kisses the way he does everything, with his whole body committed. His other hand finds my hip and pulls me against him, and I can feel exactly how much he wants this through the denim between us.
I grab the front of his shirt because my knees are unreliable. His mouth is thorough and demanding and every wall I've built is coming down around me.
He pulls back just far enough that his mouth brushes mine when he speaks. "Upstairs."
He takes my hand and walks me to the staircase. We go up the steps to his room. He opens the door, pulls me inside, and the lock turns behind us. He turns me around and backs me against the door. Both hands on my jaw now, tilting my face, holding me exactly where he wants me.
"If something doesn't feel right, you say stop," he says. "I'll stop."
"I know. You stopped last time."
He kisses me again. Slower, deeper, with a control that makes it clear the pace is his.
His hands move from my jaw down my neck, down the center of my body to the top button of the flannel.
He unbuttons it one-handed without looking.
Every button unhurried. He's watching my face while his fingers work, reading every reaction with total attention and zero mercy.
The flannel falls open. His hands slide inside, against my bare skin, and my breath catches hard enough that I hear it.
His thumb finds the edge of the bruise. Light enough that it doesn't hurt. He traces the line of it, slow, and then his mouth follows the path his thumb took.
"I hear you," I whisper. "Now stop being careful."
He takes me at my word. His hands stop tracing and start taking.
He strips the flannel off my shoulders and his mouth drops to my throat, teeth and tongue, biting down where my neck meets my shoulder hard enough that I gasp.
His tongue follows, slow and hot over the mark he just left, and the spike of heat between my legs is immediate.
His hands close over my breasts through the bra, and even through the fabric his grip is rough enough that my breath catches. His thumbs find my nipples and drag across them until they harden under the pressure. My hips roll against him on instinct.
"That's it," he says against my collarbone. "Don't hold back."
He pins me against the door with his hips.
The hard length of him presses against me through his jeans and the friction hits me right where I need it.
I grind into him before I can think about it.
He lets me. His eyes stay on mine the entire time.
His jaw is tight and the heat in his face is controlled and savage.
One hand slides down my ribs, over my hip, and grips the back of my thigh. He pulls my leg up against his side, opening me wider, changing the angle so the pressure of him lands exactly where the ache is worst. I make a noise against his neck that I've never heard from my own mouth.
"Louder," he says. "I want to hear you."