Chapter 3 #2
"It is a plan." She crossed her arms, trying to reclaim some ground. "I can grab a blanket from my cabin and set up in the office. The desk chair reclines. I've slept in worse."
"The cabin is on the same property that just turned into a crime scene," he said, his voice going gentle in a way that made her chest ache. "And, honey, there's nothing left of the cabin. It was engulfed with the house."
Sabrina's gaze moved to the spot where her little caretaker's cottage had stood for the past four years. Where she'd hung curtains she'd sewn herself and kept a pot of herbs on the windowsill and fallen asleep to the sound of the lake through the screen door.
There was nothing there now but a blackened rectangle of foundation.
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed once, twice, three times. Her eyes watered and glistened in the light from the remaining fire truck, and she blinked hard, refusing to let the tears fall. Not yet. Not here.
Bree's voice came carefully and low. "Your ex?"
Sabrina gave a tiny shake of her head. "Later."
"Okay," Bree said slowly, exchanging a look with Colby. "Later.”
"I don't want to sit at your kitchen table and cry." Sabrina's voice broke on the last word, which did not help her argument. She swallowed it down, forcing steel back into her spine.
Colby spoke before Bree could. "What about my place?"
Both women looked at him.
He shrugged one shoulder, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"It's quiet. About ten minutes from here, out past the marina.
I've got a spare room that I was going to turn into a home office until I stopped pretending I knew how to do paperwork anywhere but the station or the garage.
Bed's already there. Door locks. Nobody comes out that way unless they mean to.
" He paused, letting that sink in. "If your ex is still in town and watching the inn, he won't think to look for you at some random firefighter's cottage. "
The word cottage pulled up a faint picture in her mind, something half-remembered from a magazine or a dream. Cozy and small and tucked away from the world. Safe.
She shoved the image away.
"That's not necessary," she said.
"Necessary is you not sleeping alone at a location Diaz just marked as an active crime scene," "This is just practical," Colby said.
Bree folded her arms, nodding along. "He's right."
Sabrina looked between the two of them. "You're both very bossy."
Bree didn't apologize. "We care about you."
Colby added, "And we'd like you not to get murdered."
Sabrina let out a surprised sound that might have been a laugh. It came with a sting of tears she refused to let fall, her eyes burning with the effort.
"I don't want to be your problem," she said to him.
"You're not a problem." His brown eyes held hers, warm and steady in the fading light. "You're a person who had her home burned down and her safety ripped away in one night. There's a difference."
She rubbed a thumb over the seam of her pocket, feeling the rough edge of the sweatpants. "What if I say no?"
"Then I'll park my truck outside your crime scene and sit there all night," he said. "And I'll tell Diaz it was your idea when she asks why I look like I haven't slept."
Bree's mouth curved despite everything. "He would, too. He's done stupider things for less."
Sabrina looked back at the ruins. The pile of blackened beams and collapsed rooms didn't offer an opinion. It just lay there, steaming and silent and permanent, the last wisps of smoke rising toward clouds that were beginning to appear overhead.
Everything inside her felt scraped raw. She had held herself rigid at the hospital, answering questions and signing forms and pretending her hands weren't shaking. She had stood at the fire line and watched the last post fall without making a sound. She hadn't allowed herself to crack.
Something in the way Colby stood there, calm and certain and utterly unbothered by her resistance, made that stance feel less like strength and more like punishment.
"What does your cottage look like?" she asked, stalling.
He didn't describe it. Didn't paint a picture of comfort or charm or rustic appeal. He kept it simple. "Four walls. A roof. A bed that isn't in a hospital. Coffee in the morning. Locks on the doors." He paused. "Me between you and whatever's out there."
The last line slid under her ribs with quiet ease, settling somewhere near her heart.
Bree touched her hand gently. "If it helps, I'd trust him with my life. Hank does. Brian does. Half this town does."
Sabrina searched Colby's face for any sign that this was an obligation that he was offering because he wore a uniform, and it came with built-in responsibility. She didn't see that.
She saw a man who had seen her at her worst—smoke-stained and terrified and barely holding together—and still looked at her like she was worth protecting.
"I don't want to be in the way," she said.
"You being there isn't in the way," he replied. "You being alone is what I can't live with."
The certainty in his voice tipped something inside her, some last defense she'd been clinging to without knowing why.
"Okay," she said softly. "For tonight."
Relief moved through Bree's shoulders, visible even in the dim light. "Good. I'll bring you clothes in an hour. Pajamas and other things I think you'll need—toothbrush, hairbrush, the basics. And coffee. And probably muffins, because that's who I am as a person."
"Bree," Sabrina warned.
"Okay, fine, I'll ask what you want first." Bree hugged her again, quick and fierce, her arms tightening for just a moment before letting go. "Text me when you get there. I mean it."
"I will."
Bree gave Colby a look that said more than words—gratitude and warning and something like hope all tangled together. He nodded once in return, a silent promise passing between them. Then he walked around to the passenger side and opened the door for Sabrina.
She hesitated only a second before climbing in.
Colby's cottage sat back from the road, tucked behind a line of old oaks that turned the headlights into shifting shadows as they pulled up the gravel drive.
Sabrina glimpsed a small porch with a single step, the outline of a modest one-story structure with a metal roof, and what looked like a vegetable garden gone wild along one side.
No grand entry. No sweeping staircase. No polished wood floors buffed for guests who paid two hundred a night to feel pampered.
Just a house. Lived in. Real.
He killed the engine. The sudden quiet rang in her ears, broken only by the distant call of a whippoorwill and the tick of the cooling motor.
"You ready?" he asked.
"I don't know what that means anymore," she said.
"We're redefining it as 'capable of walking to the door without assistance.'"
She snorted softly, surprising herself. "In that case, maybe."
He rounded the truck and opened her door.
She slid down, her feet grateful for the borrowed sneakers someone at the hospital had scrounged from a lost-and-found box.
The gravel here was different from the inn's—smaller, more worn, the kind that had been driven over a thousand times.
The air felt cooler this far from town, cleaner.
Only the faintest hint of smoke clung to her hair and the thin fabric of her hand-me-down clothes, a stubborn reminder of where she'd been.
Colby unlocked the front door—solid wood, painted dark green—and pushed it open. "Lights are to the left."
She stepped past him, close enough to catch the scent of sweat and ash and something underneath that was just him, and reached for the switch.
Warm lamplight filled a small living room.
A worn but clean couch in faded brown leather faced a fireplace with a simple wooden mantel.
A coffee table held a few rings from old mugs and a stack of paperbacks with cracked spines.
A bookcase against the far wall was stuffed with actual books—leather spines and dog-eared paperbacks mixed together without any apparent system.
A pair of work boots sat neatly by the door, laces tucked inside.
The walls held a few framed photographs she couldn't make out from here, and nothing else.
The scent in here was subtle, layered. Coffee grounds. Laundry soap. A trace of wood smoke from the fireplace. And underneath it all, that particular freshness that seeped into everything this close to the water.
It was simple. It was quiet. It was everything the Norman House Inn had not been—no history pressing down from every corner, no guests to tend, no legacy to carry.
It felt safe.
Her shoulders dropped an inch without her permission.
"This is..." The word lodged in her throat.
"Under-decorated?" he offered, setting his helmet down on a small table by the door. "Sparse? Bachelor-pad tragic?"
"Real," she said.
He paused in the act of shrugging off his coat, something flickering across his face too fast to read.
Then he hung the coat on a hook by the door and turned back to her.
Without the bulky turnout gear, he looked less like a firefighter and more like a man who had just finished the longest shift of his life and had come home to find a stranger standing in his living room.
"There's a bedroom down the hall you can use," he said, gesturing toward a short hallway.
"Second door on the right. Extra sheets are already on the bed—I changed them this morning, so they're clean.
Bathroom's next to it. Towels are in the cabinet under the sink.
" He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it standing up in dark spikes. "I don't have anything fancy, but—"
He broke off.