Chapter Ten #2
It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t a proposal. It was just a question, the kind a man asked when the answer mattered to him, but he wasn’t ready to say why out loud.
Jasper went still against me, the unconscious movement of his thumb pausing mid-circle. “What do you mean?” he asked, voice careful in a way that spoke of practice rather than calm.
I kept my hand moving, tracing small circles at the base of his spine. “Just a question,” I said, keeping it simple. “You seem to fit here. That’s all.”
In the silence before Jasper answered, I turned over what I’d watched over the past days: Jasper crouched in the gravel with a scraped-knee toddler, his movements careful and sure, voice in the soft tone adults used with children who were hurting.
Jasper talking neonatal feeding technique with Carter like he’d never stopped being a nurse, hands moving with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
Jasper on the east porch in the early light looking at the Black Butte mountain like it was the first thing in a long time that hadn’t asked anything of him.
I’d seen him finding his footing—not performing competence, but actually building it, one careful interaction at a time.
He’d earned his place here—not through obligation or charity or because of what had been done to him, but through the simple fact of who he was and what he brought to the community.
“Yes,” Jasper said finally, the single syllable carrying a weight I hadn’t expected. “I could see it. If I had a good reason to stay.”
Something moved behind my ribs—not quite hope, but adjacent to it. I kept my voice level, eyes on the ceiling rather than his face. “What constitutes a good reason?”
Jasper didn’t answer with words. He tipped his head up and pressed a kiss to the edge of my jaw, the contact brief but deliberate—not a gesture, but a statement. Then he tucked his face back against my chest and closed his eyes, his weight settling more fully against me.
My arm tightened around him without my permission, the moment settling into my chest like a physical thing.
Neither of us said anything else.
The silence between us expanded to fill the space it needed—not empty or awkward, but charged with something I didn’t have a name for yet.
Outside, the ranch was completely still—no traffic sounds, no neighbors’ voices, just the occasional creak of the house settling and the distant call of an owl from the stand of pines to the west.
Sterling was somewhere in the sky above Montana by now, Burke’s call bouncing through whatever secure channels the man used to keep himself unreachable to anyone who wasn’t family.
Seven men would drop from a plane at fifteen thousand feet sometime tonight, descending through the dark with nothing but parachutes and the absolute certainty that Burke wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t serious.
They would land somewhere on the property—not the main yard, not where they could be seen from the road, but close enough that they could reach the house in minutes if they needed to.
Gerald was still out there—patient and funded and certain he was owed something. He had resources most civilians couldn’t begin to access. He had men who moved in a way I recognized from my own time in the service. And he was closer to finding Jasper than he had been twelve hours ago.
But whatever came next—whatever Gerald brought with him when he returned—Jasper wouldn’t face it alone.
He would have the ranch, the people, and the protection that came from belonging somewhere.
He would have Rawley’s resources and Burke’s connections and Macon’s quiet competence.
He would have all of us, standing between him and whatever came next.
And he would have me—not as a handler or an escort or a problem to be solved, but as something closer to what I’d been before: a man who knew exactly what he was protecting and why it mattered.
Jasper’s breathing had evened out again, his weight growing heavier against me as he drifted toward sleep. His hand had gone still on my ribs, thumb finally at rest against my skin.
In the thin light from the window, the bruise on his cheek had darkened to a smear of purple that would take weeks to fade completely.
I kept my arm around him, hand resting at the small of his back, and didn’t move to leave.
The wrongness of what had been done to him—the job loss, the men Gerald sent, the absolute conviction that Jasper was property rather than a person—sat between us, not solved but acknowledged, given a shape we could work with rather than a shadow we had to guess at.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was a start. Whatever came next, we would face it together—not as a problem to be solved or a situation to be managed, but as people who had chosen each other, who had built something worth protecting.
Jasper’s breath was warm against my chest, his weight solid against my side.
I lay there listening to his breathing slow into sleep, and the chapter closed on the dark of the room—the ranch quiet outside, Sterling somewhere in the sky above Montana—and me still awake, holding on, not moving to leave.