Chapter Ten
SOPHIA
I wake up to sunlight.
Not the pale kind that creeps through my curtains in Vixen Falls. This is different. Bold, golden, and relentless, it floods the room from every angle like it has somewhere to be and isn’t interested in being subtle about it.
For a second, I forget where I am.
And then the desert comes into focus beyond the sliding doors, sand, rock, and endless blue sky, the mountains sitting still and ancient in the distance, and then it all comes back.
Vegas.
Tate’s house.
Last night.
Lying there for a moment, I blink at the ceiling and reach for my phone.
Ten forty-seven.
I stare at the screen for a second.
Lying here in the quiet with the warmth of last night still sitting somewhere in my chest, I find I can’t manufacture the guilt. My body needed this. All of it, the sleep, the stillness, the first night in a long time that didn’t feel like something to survive.
There’s a message from Mom on my screen, a reply to last night’s text, sent early this morning, the way she always does.
Mom: So glad you’re safe, darling. Call me when you’re ready. No rush. Love you. X
Smiling at it, I set the phone down. I’ll call her later when the morning has settled, and I have something real to tell her beyond just waking up and not quite sure what day it is.
I grab my pink cotton dressing gown from the chair, pull it on, and that’s when I smell it.
Coffee.
Real coffee, the kind with actual weight to it, not the weak version I’d been making myself at home for weeks, because getting to the good stuff required a level of effort I hadn’t been able to summon. This smells like the kind of coffee that means it.
Following it out of my room and down the hallway, I find Tate at the kitchen window.
He’s just come back from a run, dressed in gray training shorts and a sleeveless jersey that leaves very little to the imagination, a towel draped around his neck, sweat still catching the morning light on his skin.
He’s standing at the window with a coffee, looking out at the desert, completely unaware of me.
The way he looks in that unguarded moment with his broad shoulders, the tattoos mapping his arms and disappearing under the jersey, and the easy stillness of a man completely at home in his own body makes something flutter low in my stomach that I don’t immediately have a name for.
Then he looks up.
“Morning.”
“Morning.” Stepping into the kitchen, I hope my face isn’t doing anything obvious. “Sorry, I slept in.”
“You needed it.” He slides a mug across the counter toward me.
Wrapping both hands around it, I bring it to my lips.
Oh, that is good coffee.
That is genuinely, unexpectedly, embarrassingly good coffee, and I let myself have a moment with it before I say anything else. “Thank you,” I manage.
He nods once, then turns back toward the window. Tate crosses the kitchen toward me a moment later, and before I have time to react, he leans over and shakes his head directly above me, sweat flying everywhere.
“Tate!” I shriek, jumping back. “That is disgusting.”
He grins, completely unrepentant.
“Go have a shower,” I say, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “Immediately.”
“It’s just sweat,” he says.
“Go.”
He picks up his coffee, still grinning, and disappears down the hall.
I stand there for a second in the kitchen, slightly damp, trying very hard not to smile.
The desert in the morning light is something else entirely.
Last night, it had been dark, vast, and silver, beautiful in that way of things you can sense more than see.
But now, in the full Nevada morning, it is extraordinary.
The sand is lit up in the late morning light, and the mountains are sharp and clear against a sky so blue it almost doesn’t look real.
Smiling into my coffee, I move to the kitchen island and slide onto one of the stools, tucking one leg beneath me, and let the day settle around me properly for the first time.
It’s still in the way Tate’s house always seems to be, not empty still, but full and quiet, the kind that has actual substance to it.
My mind drifts briefly to work, to the branding project sitting in my laptop bag down the hall, the new Veas business looking for a complete graphics overhaul that Trevor had assigned me before I left.
I’d told him I needed a couple of days to settle in before I got back to it, and he’d been completely understanding, but I can feel it sitting there at the edge of my morning, patient and waiting.
Tomorrow maybe.
Or later today if the mood takes me.
For now, though, coffee, sunlight, and desert.
That is enough.
Memphis appears at the sliding door, pressing his nose to the glass, tail moving slowly.
“There he is,” I say to nobody in particular, crossing to let him in.
He pads inside with the unhurried dignity of a dog who has been exactly where he’s meant to be and is only returning now because he has decided to. He sniffs my hand once, then moves to his water bowl and drinks deeply without any particular urgency.
“Where did you go?” I ask him.
He doesn’t answer, which feels about right.
Tate reappears twenty minutes later, hair damp from the shower, wearing dark jeans and a black T-shirt, tattoos visible along his forearms where his sleeves are pushed back. He moves to the coffee machine without a word and refills his mug like the earlier incident never happened.
I look at him innocently over the rim of my mug.
He glances over.
“What are you smiling about?”
“Nothing.”
“Good.”
“Your hair looks nice, though,” I add.
He gives me a look.
“Clean,” I say.
He shakes his head and turns back to the window, but I catch the corner of his mouth moving before he does.
The kitchen settles back into that stillness it always has, warm and full of morning light.
There is something in the way he’d looked standing at that window before he noticed me, before the grin, and before all the rest of it that stays with me longer than I expect.
‘She knows me. The real me. Not the patch.’
I look down at my mug.
Not yet, I tell myself. Don’t start the morning there.
“You hungry?” Tate asks, turning from the counter.
Looking up at him, I smile. “Always.”