7. CHAPTER SEVEN #2
The fire threw her in relief. Copper hair loose around her shoulders now, the knot she’d twisted it into long since come undone, strands of it falling across her forehead where the sweat from working had dampened them.
Her green eyes moved over the bandage, then up to mine, and held there for one beat.
Two. The cabin was quiet except for the pop of the fire and the sound of our breathing, which had synchronized sometime during the bandaging and hadn’t desynchronized, and I could smell the antiseptic on her hands and the herbs from the windowsill and underneath it all the warm, specific scent of her, impossible to catalog.
She rose up on her knees.
One smooth motion, fluid, her body coming forward into the space between us until her knees pressed against the chair between my legs and her hand came up to the side of my jaw.
Her palm was warm against my stubble, her fingers finding the angle of my cheekbone with a certainty that suggested she’d been thinking about doing this for longer than either of us wanted to admit, and then she kissed me.
Not hesitant. Not exploratory. Her mouth pressed against mine with a directness that bypassed every defense I’d built in twenty years of making sure nothing got through that I didn’t authorize, and for one full second I went completely still—my hands on my thighs, my breath caught somewhere behind my ribs where the gauze was already sticking to the sweat on my skin, my entire body locked in the paralysis of a man who’d been expecting a different outcome and hadn’t prepared for this one.
Then the restraint came apart.
My right hand came up to cup the back of her head, fingers tangling in her hair where it fell loose against her neck, and I kissed her back the way a man kisses when he’s been holding a hunger in check for too long and the check has finally failed.
Hard. Thorough. My left hand gripped the arm of the chair beside her hip, the wood creaking under my grip, and I pulled her closer with the hand in her hair and felt her respond—her mouth opening against mine, her free hand finding my bare shoulder where the bruise was spreading purple black and resting there with a gentleness that acknowledged the damage without treating me like I was broken.
The kiss said everything. The week in the cabin, the oatmeal and the stew and the laughter over burned eggs and an onion that had made a grown man cry.
The way she’d hung herbs on my windowsill and fixed my coffee and made this place into a home it had never been before.
The way I’d fixed the skillet handle while she slept and bought her gloves without being asked and sat at the table night after night listening to her hum while she worked because the sound of it had become necessary in a way I couldn’t explain and didn’t want to examine.
All of it was in that kiss, in the pressure of her mouth against mine and the warmth of her hand on my jaw and the fire throwing our shadows against the log wall in a single shape that had no edges between us.
I pulled back.
Not far. My forehead dropped to hers, my hand still in her hair, her breath warm against my mouth where the kiss had left us both breathing harder than we should have been.
I could feel her pulse under my palm where it rested against the side of her neck, fast and steady, and my own was doing something similar against my ribs where the gauze pressed tight with each inhalation.
“I can’t do this.” The words came out rough, unpracticed, my voice carrying a gravel I hadn’t heard in it before. “Not like this. Not here.”
She started to say my name,the name she didn’t know, the one nobody used except the club, the one that wasn’t on any of the IDs I carried,and I shook my head once, slowly.
Her forehead was still against mine. Her hand was still on my jaw.
The fire kept burning behind us, and the cabin held the heat the way it always did, and none of that changed the fact that what I was about to say was the only honorable thing left in a situation that had stopped being honorable the moment I walked through her back door with a gun.
“When this is over.” I kept my voice low.
Steady. Each word measured and placed the way I placed everything that mattered.
“When you’re free to walk out that door and go anywhere you want.
If you still want me then, I’ll be right here.
But I’m not going to let what’s happening between us get tangled up with the fact that you have nowhere else to go. ”
I pulled my hand from her hair. Let it fall to the chair arm beside her hip, and then I leaned back, putting inches between us that felt like the distance between the cabin and the mountain outside—vast, unbridgeable, space that existed because someone had decided it needed to exist and was willing to live with the consequences of that decision.
Hannah stayed where she was. On her knees in front of the chair, her green eyes steady on my face, reading me the way she’d been reading me since the first day: not with fear, not with the wary caution people usually showed when they were trying to figure out if the man in front of them was dangerous.
She was reading for a deeper truth, the one that lived beneath the surface of the words I’d just spoken, and whatever she found there made her expression shift from a question to a look I didn’t have a name for because I’d never seen it directed at me before.
Not hurt. Patient.
She held my gaze for three seconds. Four.
Long enough that the fire popped twice behind us and the shadows jumped across the log walls and neither of us looked away.
Then she stood in one smooth motion, gathered the first aid kit from the floor beside her knees, and carried it back to the sink without a word.
She didn’t look away from me until she had to.
Until the angle of the counter and the distance between us made it physically impossible to keep her eyes on mine while her hands were busy putting the antiseptic back on the shelf above the herbs.
I watched her back—the flannel shirt hanging off one shoulder where it had slipped during the bandaging, her red hair falling loose down her spine, her hands moving with the same economy they brought to everything—and the ache in my ribs wasn’t from the cuts.
It was the door behind her, the one she hadn’t walked through.
I sat by the fire. The gauze pulled tight across my ribs with each breath, the antiseptic burning dull beneath the bandage where the deepest cut was already trying to heal itself.
The cabin was quiet. The wood stove crackled.
Outside, the mountain sat in late afternoon light, pine and fir standing patient on the slopes, and somewhere beyond the tree line the green sedan with Ohio plates was parked or wasn’t, and the client had thirty-six hours left on his deadline, and none of that mattered as much as the fact that Hannah Morgan was twenty feet away washing her hands at my sink and had stayed when she could have left.
I stared at the door. Solid wood, reinforced with iron brackets, the same door I’d shoved through an hour ago with blood on my shirt and a story I wouldn’t tell.
It was closed. Latched. Keeping the cold out and the warmth in, and the woman on the other side of the room was humming again,low, absent, three notes of a melody I almost recognized before they faded back into the sound of water running,and the silence between us was not the silence of damage.
It was the silence of two people waiting.
I pressed my palm against the gauze where it crossed my ribs and felt the ache bloom outward, and I didn’t reach for her.
Not yet.
Not until she was free to choose.