Chapter 6
TINA
I wake up in Marcel Hale's arms at four thirty seven in the morning because his internal alarm doesn't care that he's in my bed instead of his observation tower.
He's already awake. I can tell by his breathing. It's controlled, measured, the kind of breathing a man does when he's assessing his environment and determining whether it's safe. I keep my eyes closed and let him do it because this is who he is and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
His arm is around my waist. Heavy. Warm. His chest is pressed against my back and I can feel the ridge of the scar across his ribs where my shoulder blade meets his skin. His breath moves my hair in slow, even intervals.
We ate the steaks at midnight.
He cooked them perfectly, of course. Medium rare, seared in a cast iron pan he found in my cabinet and seasoned with salt and pepper and rosemary, and we ate sitting on my kitchen floor because neither of us wanted to break the contact long enough to sit at a proper table.
He fed me asparagus with his fingers and I licked the butter off his thumb and he picked me up and set me on the counter and pushed the green dress up around my hips and fucked me again right there, slow and deep, my legs wrapped around him, my back arched against the cabinet, while the potatoes went cold on the stove.
Now it's early Friday morning and the man who hasn't slept in the same bed as another person in years is curled around me like he's been doing it his whole life.
"You're awake," he murmurs against the back of my neck.
"You woke up first."
"Force of habit."
"What time do you usually get up?"
"Four thirty. Give or take." His arm tightens around my waist. Pulls me closer. I feel him hard against my lower back and my entire body responds with a pulse of heat. "In the tower by four forty five. Behind the glass by five."
"Every morning?"
"Every morning."
I turn in his arms. Face him. The early light is filtering through my bedroom curtains, gray and pale, and his face in it is sharp edged and beautiful. Dark skin. Angular cheekbones. The scar from ear to jaw that I traced with my tongue last night until he groaned and pulled me beneath him.
"What do you see through the scope?"
"Elk. Deer. The occasional mountain lion. The sun coming up over the ridge." His hand slides up my spine, slow, mapping the vertebrae. "I don't hunt anymore. I just watch."
"Overwatch."
His eyes sharpen. "Where did you learn that word?"
"I teach eighteen year olds who want to enlist. I've read enough about military operations to understand the basics.
" I press my palm against his chest. Feel his heartbeat, steady and sure.
"Overwatch is when a sniper provides cover for a team moving through dangerous territory.
You're still doing it. You just replaced the team with elk. "
He stares at me for a long moment. Then he does something that makes my chest ache. He presses his forehead against mine and closes his eyes and breathes, just breathes, like a man who has been holding his breath for three years and is finally letting it go.
"Yeah," he says. "That's exactly what I'm doing."
I kiss him. Soft this time. Morning slow.
His hand comes up and cups my face and he kisses me back with a tenderness that is almost more devastating than the intensity of last night because tenderness from Marcel Hale is not a small thing.
It is a man choosing to be gentle when his entire body was designed for force.
We stay in bed until six. Not having sex.
Talking. I tell him about my mother's cancer scare, the way I packed my apartment in Billings in four hours and drove home without stopping.
He tells me about his grandmother's cornbread recipe that he's never been able to replicate because she measured everything by feel and refused to write it down.
I tell him about David Mercer. About the altar. About the two hundred people and the white dress and the best man with the message and the letter that said I was too much.
Marcel's jaw tightens when I tell him. The scar goes white. His hand on my hip grips hard enough to leave fingerprints.
"What was his name again?"
"David Mercer. Why?"
"No reason." His voice is flat and controlled in a way that tells me he has just filed that name in the same mental cabinet where he keeps coordinates and target identifiers, and David Mercer should be very glad he moved to Portland and is nowhere near Grizzly Ridge.
At six thirty, I shower while Marcel makes coffee in my kitchen.
I come out in a towel and find him standing at the counter with two mugs, wearing his jeans from last night and nothing else.
His chest is bare and scarred and carved from something harder than muscle, and the silver at his temples catches the morning light, and he's reading the spines of the books on my kitchen shelf with the focused attention of a man conducting reconnaissance.
"You have three copies of The Sun Also Rises."
"Different editions. Different introductions.
" I take the coffee. Sip it. It's perfect.
Strong and black, the way I like it, which he knows because he's been watching me drink coffee at my desk during his classroom sessions.
"The Scribner 1926 first edition is a reproduction. The other two are annotated."
"Hemingway wrote like a sniper. Short sentences. Clean kills. Every word placed for maximum impact."
"That's what I tell my students."
He looks at me over the rim of his mug. Dark brown eyes warm with something I haven't seen in them before. Not desire, though that's there too. Comfort. The particular ease of a man who has found himself in a space where he fits.
"I need to go back to the cabin," he says. "Check the property. Do the morning walk."
"Your overwatch."
"My overwatch." He sets down the mug. Crosses the kitchen. Takes my face in both hands and kisses me, deep and thorough and claiming, a kiss that says this is not casual and we both know it. "Dinner tonight. My place. I want you to see where I live."
"Your observation tower?"
"Everything. The workshop. The range. The tower. All of it." His thumbs trace my cheekbones. "Nobody's been inside my cabin since I built it. You'll be the first."
The weight of that statement settles over me. This man, this recluse, this ghost who chose forty acres of isolation and filled it with rifles and poetry and a tower where he watches the world from a distance, is opening the door.
"I'll be there at six."
He kisses me once more, quick and hard, and leaves.
I stand in my kitchen in a towel, holding coffee that's already going cold, and I smile so wide that my face aches.
Then I call my mother.
"Mom."
"Tina, honey, it's seven in the morning on a Friday. Are you okay?"
"I'm perfect. I just wanted to hear your voice."
A pause. My mother, Linda Ackley, is a sixty two year old retired librarian who survived cancer and a husband who left when I was twelve and raised me alone on a salary that required creative budgeting.
She knows me better than anyone and she is currently recalibrating everything she thinks she knows based on the tone of my voice.
"Who is he?"
"Mom."
"Tina Marie Ackley, I can hear you glowing through the phone. Who is he?"
I sink into my reading chair, pulling the blanket over my lap. "His name is Marcel Hale. He's a former Marine. He makes custom rifles. He reads Langston Hughes and he cooks and he looks at me like I'm the most important thing in any room I'm standing in."
Silence. Then: "The man who did the school presentations? The sniper?"
Grizzly Ridge. News at the speed of light.
"Yes."
"Hilda told me about him. Said he's been coming to the general store every Tuesday for eleven months and he's never said more than twelve words to her and she's counted." Another pause. "She also said he's the most beautiful man she's ever seen and she's been alive for seventy three years."
"Mom."
"I'm just reporting the data, sweetheart." Her voice softens. "Are you happy?"
The question is simple. The answer fills me from my toes to the crown of my head.
"I'm terrified. And yes. Both of those things at once."
"Good. That's how it's supposed to feel when it's real." She clears her throat. "Bring him to Sunday dinner."
"It's been one night."
"Bring him to Sunday dinner, Tina. I'll make pot roast."
I hang up and sit in my chair and think about Marcel's hands on my face, the way he said nobody's been inside my cabin since I built it, and I think about what it means that he's inviting me in.
The school day passes. I teach. I grade. I meet with Dakota after class to talk about her creative writing portfolio, and she shows me a piece she wrote about watching someone work with their hands and the way concentration looks like prayer, and I know exactly who inspired it.
At four o'clock, I drive home. Change into jeans and a soft blue sweater that makes my eyes look more green than brown. Leave my hair down because Marcel's hands in my hair last night is a sensation I want to recreate. Glasses on.
The drive to Marcel's property takes twelve minutes on a road that narrows to gravel and then to dirt. The land opens up as I climb, the trees thinning, the views expanding, until I crest a ridge and see it.
His cabin sits at the top of a clearing with sight lines in every direction.
Timber and stone, built low and solid, with a wraparound porch and windows positioned for maximum visibility.
To the left, a long, low workshop. Behind it, the shooting range extending down a natural valley.
And above everything, the observation tower.
Wooden ladder, small platform at the top, a roof for weather cover.
He built all of this. With his own hands. This entire compound is a physical manifestation of a man's need to see what's coming and control what he can.
Marcel is on the porch. Leaning against the railing with a mug of something in his hand, watching me drive up with the focused stillness that I'm learning is his default state.
He's wearing a black thermal pushed up at the sleeves and jeans and boots and the evening light catches the silver at his temples and the scar along his jaw.
I park. Get out. Walk toward the porch.
He doesn't move. He watches me cross the distance between my car and his front steps with the same intensity he applies to everything, and by the time I'm at the bottom step my pulse is racing and my skin is flushed and I haven't even touched him yet.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi."
He sets down the mug. Comes down the steps. Stands in front of me in the fading September light with the mountains behind him and the first stars appearing above the tower and cups my face and kisses me like a man who has been counting the hours since this morning.
I melt into him. Grab his forearms, feel the muscle and the tendons and the hair and the warmth of him. He breaks the kiss and takes my hand and leads me inside.
The cabin is sparse and clean and exactly what I expected. Minimal furniture, all of it solid and functional. A stone fireplace. A kitchen that's been stocked with care. Books on shelves, on the coffee table, stacked beside the bed I can see through a half open door at the end of the hallway.
And on the wall above the fireplace, a framed page of poetry. Handwritten. Not printed. Handwritten in ink on cream paper, and I recognize the words instantly because I wrote them.
Still Water. The title poem from my collection. Written out in a hand that is precise and steady and unmistakably Marcel's.
"You copied it," I whisper.
"From memory." He stands behind me. Close enough that his chest brushes my back. "I wanted it where I could see it. I didn't know you were the one who wrote it when I put it up. I just knew the words mattered."
I turn. Look up at him.
This man memorized my poem. He wrote it out by hand and framed it and hung it on his wall before he knew me. Before he touched me. Before he kissed me in my classroom and cooked me dinner and learned the topography of my body with his hands and his mouth.
He loved my words before he loved me.
And he's going to love me. I can see it in his eyes. It's already happening. It's been happening since the first day he walked into room 214 and I was afraid of him and he looked at me like I was worth being afraid for.
"Show me the tower," I say.
He takes my hand and leads me outside. We climb the ladder in the last light. The platform at the top is small, maybe eight by eight, with a railing and a bench and a scope mounted on a tripod.
The view steals my breath. Three hundred and sixty degrees of Montana. Mountains in every direction. The valley below with Grizzly Ridge's lights just beginning to glow. Stars emerging above us in a sky so wide it feels like drowning in the best possible way.
"This is what you see every morning," I say.
"This is what I see." He stands behind me at the railing. Wraps both arms around my waist and pulls me back against his chest. "But it looks different tonight."
"Why?"
"Because you're in it."
I lean my head back against his shoulder. His arms tighten. The stars keep appearing, one by one, and the mountains darken, and the air goes cool and sharp with autumn.
"Marcel."
"Yeah."
"My mother wants you to come to Sunday dinner."
His chest vibrates with a laugh that I feel through my entire body. Low. Warm. Real.
"Pot roast?"
"How did you know?"
"I've met mothers before. They always make pot roast for the man their daughter brings home." He presses his lips against my temple. "Tell her I'll bring wine."
I close my eyes. Let myself feel it. The arms around me. The heartbeat against my back. The man who built a tower to watch the world from a distance and is choosing, right now, to let someone stand beside him.
This could be good.
This could be everything.
I'm going to let it be.