Chapter 22
HAZEL
Iwas pretty sure breakfast at the Bradford Inn had never seen this many boots.
Maude’s kitchen—my kitchen, technically, but it would always feel like hers—was full of men built on the same blueprint and then customized by whatever war and weather had sculpted them.
Gideon anchored himself behind my chair, one palm resting on the back like he was prepared to grab it and me at the same time if the world tilted.
Ethan took the far side of the table and somehow made the old chair look child-sized.
Lucas sprawled like he’d been born at farmhouse tables, long legs kicked out, grin sharp and easy.
Elias sat straight-backed, hands loose but ready, blue eyes taking everything in.
The table groaned under Maude’s interpretation of “a little something”: scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits, sliced fruit, grits swimming in butter, cinnamon rolls that made the whole room smell like sugar and nostalgia.
“You boys eat like you mean it,” she said, setting down another plate. “I didn’t haul out the good skillet for you to nibble.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they chorused automatically, like she’d been commanding them since childhood instead of meeting most of them for the first time.
I sat between Gideon and Ethan and tried to remember how to act like a functioning human in front of people who hadn’t watched me faint on the dining room floor the night before.
My body was doing that weird post-shock thing where it wanted to be both ravenous and nauseous.
I compromised by focusing on the biscuit in front of me. It looked harmless.
Gideon leaned down, his breath warm against the shell of my ear. “Eat a little,” he murmured. “You’ll feel better.”
I tore the biscuit in half and took a bite, mostly because he’d asked. It tasted like butter and heaven and the way Maude loved people. My stomach made an interested noise.
“There it is,” Maude said from the stove without turning. “Knew I’d get that appetite back.”
Lucas watched me for a second, eyes crinkling. “So, this is the famous Hazel.”
I choked on crumb. Gideon’s hand slid from the back of my chair to the small of my back, steadying.
“I didn’t know I was famous,” I managed.
“You are now,” Ethan said simply. “You’re important to him.” He nodded toward Gideon like that explained everything. And somehow, it did.
Heat climbed my neck. “He didn’t exactly give me a dossier on all of you either,” I said, trying to sound light. “I just found out ten minutes ago that you exist.”
Lucas’s grin turned downright wicked. “Bet he left out all the good parts.”
“Lucas,” Gideon warned.
“What? I’m just saying—man goes dark for years, next thing we know he’s holed up on an island with a redhead in his hoodie. I have questions.”
“You have a death wish,” Gideon shot back.
Ethan chuckled into his coffee, the sound low and warm. Elias’s mouth curved just enough to count as a smile. Maude beamed like she’d been waiting her whole life for this level of chaos at her table.
“Ask your questions after you’ve had seconds,” she said. “Nobody interrogates my girl on an empty stomach.”
My girl. The words landed in my chest next to Gideon’s my girl from earlier and started building a little nest.
We ate. Or, more accurately, the Danes ate and I did my best to keep up.
Watching them work through Maude’s spread was like watching a well-trained unit clear a room—efficient, focused, strangely graceful for men built like that.
Plates emptied and refilled. Coffee disappeared and reappeared.
Biscuits vanished in a blur of big hands and casual thanks.
For a few minutes, it almost felt normal. Like this was just a big family breakfast after some long-ago holiday instead of a war council.
Then Ethan set his fork down and looked at me, the kindness in his eyes sharpening. “Hazel, we need to talk about your old man,” he said. “But you start. You tell us what you want us to know. We’ll fill in the rest.”
The biscuit in my hand suddenly weighed a hundred pounds.
Gideon’s thumb traced a slow line along my spine. “Only if you’re up for it,” he said.
I took a breath and felt it all the way down. “If I wait until I’m ‘up for it,’ we’ll be dead and buried and he’ll still be out there.” My voice shook, but the words felt right. “So, okay. Sam Jarrow. My father.”
Silence rippled outward from the table like a dropped stone. Maude turned off a burner and came to lean against the counter, arms folded, ready to bear witness.
“He wasn’t in my life, not really,” I said.
“Not the way fathers are supposed to be. He was in and out when I was little. Loud. Charming when he wanted to be. Mean when he didn’t.
” I stared at the coffee swirling in my mug.
“Then one night he wasn’t mean, he was lethal. And my mother didn’t wake up.”
Lucas’s jaw flexed. Ethan’s hands tightened around his mug. Elias’s gaze went flinty cold.
“I testified,” I went on. “I sat in a courtroom and told a jury how he’d been that night. I watched them take him away in handcuffs. I thought that was it.”
“It should’ve been,” Maude muttered.
“I changed my name,” I reminded them. “Moved. Made myself small. Careful. Predictable. I built a life that didn’t leave a forwarding address.”
“And he still found you,” Elias said quietly.
“Yeah.” My throat burned. “Right here. In this house.”
I looked around the kitchen—the nicked countertops, the curtain Maude had hemmed herself, the doorway where Gideon liked to lean and watch us with that half-smile that meant he was home, even if he didn’t know it yet.
“I came down here because my grandmother died and left me this inn,” I said. “I thought it was a mistake at first. We hadn’t talked in years. But she made it very clear—lawyer-reading-a-will clear—that if I stayed a year and didn’t sell, it would be mine. No quitting.”
“Stubborn woman,” Maude said, with all the fondness in the world.
“Genetic,” Gideon murmured.
I nudged him with my elbow. “At first I hated it,” I admitted. “Everything was broken. The porch railing. The roof. I thought I’d have a panic attack every time the house creaked.”
“You hid it well,” Maude said.
“I didn’t want to seem ungrateful,” I said. “But then …” I glanced up at Gideon. “Then someone showed up and asked for a room and made fixing things look like something I might actually be able to learn.”
His hand tightened on my chair.
“I started to like it,” I said, the confession small and huge at the same time.
“The plans. The projects. The idea that maybe this could be more than a year-long sentence. A place that was mine. A place I could make safe. And then last night, my father stood in the dining room and said my name like it belonged to him. And I thought, Okay. Of course. Of course, he ruins this, too.”
My voice cracked on the last word. I stared very hard at my plate.
“Hey.” Gideon’s fingers curled around the back of my neck, warm and firm, thumb stroking just behind my ear. “He didn’t ruin it.”
“He tried,” I said.
Ethan leaned in, forearms braced on the table. “Listen to me, Hazel,” he said, his voice gentle but iron-backed. “We are not going to let Sam Jarrow—or whoever sprung him—run you off your own land.”
“This is your place,” Lucas added. “Your happy little inn on the water.” His mouth tipped up. “You get that, right? That you’re allowed to have something good?”
I swallowed. “It doesn’t always feel like that’s how the math works.”
Elias spoke last, his tone clinical in a way that somehow made it more comforting.
“From a purely tactical standpoint,” he said, “relocating you would give whoever is pulling Jarrow’s strings exactly what they want—proof that they can push you, move you on the board.
Keeping you here, surrounded, defended, sends the opposite message. ”
“What message?” I asked.
“That this house is a fortress now,” he said. “And you’re not to be touched.”
There was no heat in his voice, no bravado. Just absolute certainty.
Gideon dipped his head until his mouth brushed my temple. “They’re right,” he said. “You deserve this place. You deserve to be happy here.”
For a second, the thought of a future in this old, creaky house with these ridiculous, dangerous men dropping in and out of the kitchen like it was the most natural thing in the world felt almost possible.
Almost.
“Okay,” I said quietly. “Then we keep it.”
Maude clapped once, decisive. “That’s settled. We’ll need more bacon.”
Laughter rippled around the table, easing the tightness in my chest.
“Serious talk can wait an hour,” Ethan said. “We just got here and inhaled half your pantry. I need to move or I’m going to fall asleep in my chair.”
Lucas kicked his boot against Gideon’s under the table. “And I, for one, am dying to see your to-do list.”
I made a face. “It’s in a notebook.”
“What’s the next project?” he asked cheerfully.
I hesitated, flipping mental pages. There were so many things wrong with this place it was hard to pick just one.
“The porch,” I said. “The middle step’s soft. Maude keeps warning people, but someone’s going to forget. And the railing leans like it’s trying to escape. Gideon and I worked on it, but there’s more to do. It’s … not exactly safe.”
Ethan’s expression brightened in a way that probably shouldn’t have reassured me as much as it did. “Structural? That I can do.”
Lucas cracked his knuckles. “Exterior work in coastal humidity? My favorite.”
“We’ll need to check the anchoring and the joists underneath,” Elias said, already in planning mode. “See how far the rot goes.”
Gideon brushed his knuckles down my arm. “You up for supervising?”
“Supervising?” I echoed.
“You heard the man.” Lucas winked. “You point. We build.”
I should have protested that it was my house, my responsibility, my project. But the truth was, the idea of watching these men swarm my sad, sagging porch like some kind of tactical home improvement squad was … weirdly appealing.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s fix the porch.”