Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
RONAN
She sits in the passenger seat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the road.
She hasn't spoken since we left the parking lot, but it's not uncomfortable.
It's the silence of a woman assessing a situation, calculating risks, deciding how many exits there are and how fast she can reach them.
I recognize the posture because I've spent six years perfecting it.
"There's a guest room," I say as I turn onto the ridge road. "Clean sheets. Lock on the door. You'll have your own space."
"You know," she says without looking at me, "most men who bring a woman back to their cabin in a snowstorm don't lead with the guest room."
"Most men didn't spend two hours watching you drink whiskey and assess every exit in the building."
That gets her to turn her head. She looks at me with an expression that's half amused and half something I can't name, something that lives in the same neighborhood as surprised. "You noticed that?"
"I noticed everything."
She's quiet again. But the quality of the silence changes, gets warmer somehow, like I said something she didn't know she needed to hear.
My cabin sits at the end of a gravel road that's already invisible under six inches of fresh powder.
I built the front porch with Declan the summer after I got home from my last deployment, and every time I pull up to it I remember the way my hands shook on the nail gun and how he pretended not to see.
The place isn't big. Two bedrooms, an open kitchen that flows into the living room, a stone fireplace Callum helped me lay, and a back deck that overlooks a valley I've spent two years memorizing because it's easier to study landscapes than people.
I park and kill the engine and the silence of the mountain swallows us whole. Snow piles on the windshield in the thirty seconds it takes me to get out and come around to her side. She's already opening her door because of course she is. She doesn't wait for anyone to open anything for her.
"I can manage a truck door," she says when she catches my expression.
"I know you can."
"Then why are you standing there like you were going to do it for me?"
Because I wanted to. Because the ground is icy and she's wearing heels that were designed for a sex club not a mountain driveway. Because the urge to take care of this woman is so immediate and so total that it bypasses every rational objection I've filed against it.
"Habit," I say.
She gives me a look that says she doesn't believe me. Then she steps down from the truck and her heel hits a patch of ice and she grabs the door frame with reflexes that confirm military training. Quick. Controlled. No panic, just adaptation.
"I'm going to need different shoes if this is a regular thing," she mutters.
If this is a regular thing. The words land in a place I wasn't guarding, and I have to remind myself that she thinks she's talking to a man she's been messaging for three weeks.
A man she vetted. A man who earned the right to bring her home through conversation and compatibility and the slow building of digital trust.
I earned nothing. I'm here on borrowed time in a borrowed identity, and every minute I spend with her adds another brick to the wall of deception I'll have to dismantle when the snow clears.
Tell her. Right now. Before she walks through your front door and sees where you live and learns how you take your coffee and becomes any more real than she already is.
I unlock the front door and hold it open.
She walks in and I watch her do the same scan she did at the Ember Lounge. Exits, layout, terrain. Then her shoulders drop by a fraction of an inch, and the tension she's been carrying rearranges itself into something closer to curiosity.
"This is not an accountant's cabin," she says.
She's not wrong. The walls are lined with topographical maps and wildlife surveys I've marked up by hand.
There's a stack of field guides on the coffee table next to a half finished sketch of a red tailed hawk I was working on last Tuesday.
My hiking boots are by the door. My climbing rope is coiled on a hook by the fireplace.
The entire space smells like cedar and wood smoke and the particular kind of solitude that comes from a man who's spent two years living alone and making peace with it.
"What exactly do you think an accountant's cabin looks like?" I ask while I start the fire.
"I don't know. Tax software manuals. A framed photo of a calculator. Aggressive feng shui." She runs her fingers along the spine of a field guide on local raptors. "This looks like the cabin of a man who knows every tree on this mountain by name."
She's not wrong about that either.
I get the fire going and pull a flannel shirt from the closet by the door. It'll be massive on her but it's warm and it's the closest thing to a peace offering I can manage. "Here. That dress wasn't designed for mountain temperatures."
She takes the shirt and holds it up against herself. It hangs past her thighs and the sleeves would swallow her hands and the image of her wearing it sets something on fire in my chest that has nothing to do with the fireplace.
"Bathroom's down the hall on the left," I tell her. "I'll make coffee."
She disappears and I stand in my kitchen gripping the counter with both hands and breathing through the kind of slow measured exhale I learned in a combat stress management class eleven years ago.
The method was designed for firefights and hostage situations.
I'm using it because a woman in a burgundy dress is changing clothes in my bathroom and the thought of her skin under my flannel is enough to compromise every principle I've built my life around.
I don't do this. I don't bring women home.
The last person who slept in that guest room was Flynn, and that was because he'd had too much wine at Sunday dinner and Callum wouldn't let him drive.
My cabin is my decompression chamber, the one place where I don't have to perform competence or stability or the particular brand of quiet strength that everyone expects from the youngest Ridge brother who came home from war and didn't fall apart.
Except I did fall apart. I just did it where nobody could see.
The bathroom door opens and she walks back into the living room wearing my flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and the collar sitting wide against her collarbone, and I forget every word I've ever learned in English and two other languages.
"This shirt," she says, plucking at the fabric, "smells like a lumberjack's fever dream."
"It's clean."
"I didn't say it was a bad fever dream."
She settles onto the couch near the fire and pulls her legs up underneath her, and watching Zara Montgomery make herself comfortable in my space feels like watching someone pick a lock I've been guarding for years.
She fits here. She shouldn't. She doesn't know who I am.
But she looks at the firelight dancing across my maps and my sketches and my solitary life and she doesn't look disappointed. She looks interested.
I hand her a coffee. Black, because she told me at dinner that milk in coffee is a betrayal of the bean, and the fact that I remember that makes me a man in serious trouble.
"Thank you." She wraps both hands around the mug and watches me over the rim. "You know, you still haven't told me anything about yourself."
She's right. I've been asking questions all night and answering hers with carefully constructed deflections that aren't technically lies but aren't anywhere close to the truth.
She told me about growing up military. About being an army nurse.
About losing her mother and the way the folded flag felt heavier than any body she'd ever carried.
And I sat there and I listened and I gave her almost nothing back.
"What do you want to know?" I ask, settling into the chair across from her because sitting on that couch next to her in my shirt would end whatever remains of my self control.
"Anything real." She says it simply, without challenge. Just a request from a woman who's been brave enough to give me the truth all night and is asking for the same in return.
Anything real. I look at her curled up on my couch wearing my flannel with firelight turning her skin to gold, and the truth rises in my throat like a confession.
I'm not who you think I am.
"I have three brothers," I say instead. "I'm the youngest. Our parents died when I was eighteen and Callum, the oldest, held us all together by sheer force of will.
I work on the mountain. I draw when I can't sleep.
And the last time I let someone close enough to matter, I hurt her without meaning to, and I've been trying to figure out how to trust myself again ever since. "
Every word of that is true. Every single word. And none of it answers the question she's actually asking.
She studies me for a long time. The fire crackles. Snow taps against the windows in a rhythm that sounds like the mountain is trying to tell us something.
"That's not everything," she says quietly.
"No," I admit. "It's not."
"But it's real."
"Yeah." My voice is rough and I don't bother smoothing it out. "It's real."
She nods. Takes a sip of coffee. And the look she gives me over that mug is the same look she gave me at the bar when I told her she had limits she hadn't found yet. Like I've offered her something rare in a world that usually trades in cheap imitations.
"Okay," she says. "I can work with real."
I sit across from her in my own cabin, lying by omission to a woman who just told me she can work with what I'm giving her, and I think this is the moment I should stop. This is the edge of the cliff. One more step and I'm falling.
I don't stop.
I pour myself a coffee and I sit back and I ask her about the scar on her collarbone.
And she tells me.