Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
LYDIA
I wake up to the sound of a man talking to dogs.
Not the clipped commands I've heard Stephen use in training. Something softer. A low, steady murmur drifting from the kitchen, mixed with the click of kibble in metal bowls and the shuffling of paws on hardwood.
"Duke, you're getting the senior blend whether you like it or not. Don't give me that look. Scout, yours is on the right. Yeah, I know you don't live here. Consider it room service."
I press my face into the pillow and smile.
The pillow smells like him. Salt and pine and something warm underneath that I've already started cataloging as specifically Stephen. The sheets are tangled around my waist, and my body aches in places that have nothing to do with yesterday's rescue and everything to do with what happened after.
Pale morning light fills the bedroom. The storm passed overnight, and through the window I can see the mountains washed clean, snowcaps gleaming against a sky so blue it looks digital.
I stretch, feel the pleasant burn in my thighs, my hips, the tender spot on my neck where his stubble scraped during the second time.
Because there was a second time.
Around two a.m., he woke me with his mouth on my shoulder and his hand sliding down my stomach, and we came together in the dark with a slow intensity that was completely different from the first. No urgency.
No desperation. Just his body moving over mine in the quiet, his forehead pressed to mine, his eyes open and locked on my face the entire time like he was trying to memorize me by touch.
I sit up and find my underwear on the floor. Pull them on, then his flannel from the back of the door where he hung it to dry. The shirt swallows me and smells like woodsmoke and laundry detergent and the man himself, and wearing it feels like a claim.
When I walk into the kitchen, Stephen is standing at the stove in low-slung sweatpants and nothing else.
Bare feet, bare chest, his sun-bleached hair going in six directions.
He's scrambling eggs one-handed while pouring coffee with the other, and three dogs sit in a perfect row watching him with the focused attention of creatures who know exactly who controls the food supply.
Scout is sitting between Duke and Ranger like she's been part of this pack her whole life.
Stephen turns at the sound of my footstep. His eyes travel down the flannel, over my bare legs, back up to my face. The look on his expression is not casual. Not distracted. It's a man seeing something he wants in his kitchen wearing his shirt, and every line of his body says mine.
"Morning." His voice is rougher than usual. Sleep and sex and something tender underneath.
"Morning." I cross to the counter and take the coffee he holds out. Our fingers brush during the transfer, and even after last night, even after everything, the contact sends a ripple through me. "You fed Scout."
"She looked hungry."
"She always looks hungry. That's a Malinois survival strategy."
The corner of his mouth lifts. Almost a smile. He's been doing that more in the last twenty-four hours than in the entire time I've known him, and each time I see it, something in my chest expands.
"Eggs?" he asks.
"Please."
He plates the eggs, adds toast, and sets it in front of me at the table.
Then he sits across from me with his own plate and eats like a man who's been up since dawn working.
Which he has. I can see the damp collar of a towel hanging on the bathroom door.
He showered, fed the dogs, started coffee, and didn't wake me.
"How long have you been up?" I ask.
"Five."
"What time did we fall asleep?"
"Three. Maybe three-thirty."
Less than two hours of sleep, and he's already done his morning rounds, showered, and cooked breakfast. The man runs on discipline and adrenaline, and the caretaker in me wants to force him back to bed.
The other part of me wants to go back to bed with him for entirely different reasons.
"Koda's calmer this morning," Stephen says between bites. "I checked his run first thing. He was lying down. Relaxed posture. Didn't start pacing when I approached."
"That's the decompression work from yesterday taking hold. His nervous system got a chance to reset."
"I know." He looks at me over his coffee. Direct. Honest. "You were right. About the threshold mapping. About the cortisol recovery windows. About all of it."
Those five words from this man are worth more than a standing ovation at a conference.
Stephen Nelson doesn't admit he's wrong easily.
He doesn't admit anything easily. And the fact that he's sitting across from me with bed-rumpled hair and an open expression, conceding a professional point without hedging, tells me that last night changed more than just the space between us.
"I want to integrate your protocol," he says. "Full program. Not just Koda. All the dogs."
"That's a significant overhaul."
"I know what it is. I also know that I've been training these dogs the way I was trained, and the way I was trained nearly killed me.
" He sets his fork down. "In the Guard, they push you until you break, and then they push harder.
Maximum pressure, maximum output. It works for the mission. It doesn't work for the person."
"Or the dog."
He reaches across the table. Takes my hand the way he did last night, fingers threading through mine, palm to palm. "Teach me your way. I'm asking."
I squeeze his hand. "I'll need more than three weeks."
Something shifts in his eyes. A flash of want so naked it steals my breath. "Then stay longer."
My phone vibrates on the counter behind me. I ignore it. The phone vibrates again. And again.
Stephen glances past my shoulder. "That's insistent."
I release his hand and reach for the phone.
Three messages from Clara Whitmore, the veterinarian in town. We met briefly at Maggie's Diner two days ago when I stopped for coffee, and she'd been warm and welcoming in the way this entire town seems to be.
Clara Whitmore:
Hope I'm not overstepping but I heard from Ryan that you're working with Stephen's K9 program. I'd love to compare notes on trauma recovery protocols. Coffee? I'm at the clinic until noon.
Also heard you might have spent the night at a certain mountain rescue facility and I want you to know that Grizzly Ridge gossip travels at the speed of light and I'm living for this.
Maggie says hi and also says it's about time someone thawed that boy out. Her words. I'm just the messenger.
Heat floods my face. Stephen reads the expression and raises an eyebrow.
"Clara Whitmore knows I stayed here."
"Clara Whitmore knows everything that happens in a fifty-mile radius because she's married to Dan Whitmore, who works with Logan Creed, who's Sawyer's oldest friend.
Information in this town doesn't travel in a line.
It travels in a web." He sips his coffee, completely unbothered. "Are you embarrassed?"
"Not embarrassed. Surprised. I've been here three days."
"Welcome to Grizzly Ridge. Population eight hundred and fifty, and every single one of them is in your business before you know you have business."
I laugh. A real laugh, loose and full, and the sound surprises me. I haven't laughed like that in months. Maybe longer. Stephen watches me laugh with an expression so raw and exposed that I have to look away before my eyes start stinging.
"Go see Clara," he says. "I'll work Ranger and Duke this morning and start reading your threshold mapping protocol for the afternoon session."
"You don't want me here?"
He stands. Rounds the table. Puts both hands on the arms of my chair and leans down until his face is level with mine, his mouth three inches from my mouth, his sea-green eyes filling my entire field of vision.
"I want you here every minute of every day, and that's exactly why you should go have coffee with Clara. Because if you stay, we're not going to get any work done, and I've got six dogs who need my attention."
His proximity is doing things to my pulse that shouldn't be legal before eight a.m. "Is that right?"
"That's right." He leans in and kisses me. Slow. Thorough. His tongue traces my bottom lip and his hand slides into the hair at the nape of my neck, and when he pulls back, my fingers are gripping the front of the flannel I'm wearing and I've forgotten what coffee is.
"Go," he murmurs. "Come back for dinner."
"And after dinner?"
"After dinner you're staying in my bed and I'm going to make up for every night of sleep I've lost in the last four years."
I drive into town with wet hair and a racing heart and Scout sitting in the passenger seat giving me side-eye that I absolutely deserve.
Grizzly Ridge Veterinary Clinic sits on a side street off Main, a converted ranch house with a professional sign and a parking lot that holds four trucks and a horse trailer.
Clara meets me at the door in scrubs and muck boots, her auburn hair in a practical braid, her smile warm enough to heat the building.
"Come in, come in. Coffee's fresh. Fair warning, everything I'm about to say is going to sound like small-town nosiness, and that's because it is."
I follow her into a clean exam room that doubles as an office. She pours coffee from a French press on the counter and hands me a mug with a cow on it.
"So." Clara leans against the exam table and wraps both hands around her own mug. Deep green eyes sparkling. "Stephen Nelson."
"We're collaborating on his K9 program."
"Uh-huh. Is that what they're calling it now?" She grins. "Honey, Dan got a text from Logan at five-thirty this morning that said, and I quote, 'Nelson's smiling. Something's wrong.' That man hasn't smiled in the entire time he's lived in Grizzly Ridge. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it."
The warmth in my face spreads to my chest. To my stomach. To the place behind my ribs that's been locked tight for years and is currently trying to expand in a way that terrifies me.
"It's complicated," I say.