Chapter 3
GREER
The house is dark when I pull into the drive, and my headlights sweep across a car that has no business being here.
Callum's car sits pulled to the side, parked as though it belongs. Engine off. Windows black.
I cut my lights and sit in the silence of the cooling engine, and the full weight of the day finds me all at once.
My shoulder aches where the seatbelt sawed my collarbone on the pass.
My hands are stiff from hours on the wheel, the knuckles pale and locked, and when I flex my fingers the tendons protest like old rope.
The photograph is still on my phone where I left it, snapped off the keeper's wall before the woman could decide whether she wanted me to have it.
The girl mid-laugh with her eyes catching the light, the eyes I've spent my whole life finding in the mirror and calling my father's.
Three faces across two generations, and the one in the middle belongs to someone I've never heard of, in a frame on the wall of a house my mother sent me to without telling me why.
I close the phone, pocket it, and get out.
The October air has teeth now that the sun is gone. The mountains are a black absence against the sky, the cloud cover too thick for stars, and the house sits in the middle of it all like a held breath. Lavender still comes off the garden beds in faint waves.
The porch step groans under my boot, and the front door of his car opens.
Callum unfolds himself from the driver's seat the way he does everything, with economy and a deliberate patience that makes every step feel like assessment.
He crosses the gravel without hurrying. His coat is the same charcoal he wore the morning he sat in my dining room, laid out documents like cards in a game only he knew the rules to, and offered me the money and the most carefully constructed lie I'd ever been told to my face.
The collar is turned up against the wind, and the sight of him in the dark at my mother's house pulls something low and complicated through the center of my body.
"How long have you been sitting out here?" I ask.
"Long enough." He stops at the bottom of the porch steps and looks up at me, the sharp lines of his jaw, the flat set of his mouth. His hands are in his pockets.
"I didn't invite you."
"Your porch light is on." He's already coming up the steps, his hand reaching past me for the door, and the presumption of it is so perfectly Callum that my irritation and my relief arrive in the same breath.
"My porch light has been on a timer since my mother set it. That's not an invitation. That's a dead woman's habit."
The corner of his mouth moves. "Then consider me uninvited."
"Why are you here?"
"Because somebody tried to put you in the reservoir this morning. You've been gone all day, and I have no idea what you found out there." He sets his jaw. "I need to see your face while you decide how much of that you're going to share with me."
I've spent all day in a car with a photograph and a question, and the question won't resolve at a distance. Up close is where I need him.
I step back from the doorway. "Wipe your feet."
The house takes us in with the dark wood and the stillness it's carried since June stopped filling it. The grandfather clock in the hall reads 3:47, the way it has read 3:47 for as long as I can remember.
I leave the overheads off and turn on the lamp by the sofa. The light pools in a warm circle that makes the rest of the room fall back into shadow. His coat goes on the back of the chair where June used to hang her apron.
"Coffee?" I ask, because I need the distance. A counter, the width of the kitchen, and the time it takes to brew a pot between me and the man standing too close in my mother's house.
"You're stalling."
"I'm being polite. Take the coffee, Callum."
He takes the coffee, black, no sugar, in the plain white mug. I take the blue one. He leans against the counter and I stay by the stove, the width of the kitchen between us.
"You followed the address," he says.
"Of course I followed the address. My mother hid it inside a dead woman's novel and someone tried to kill me for it. What did you think I'd do, Callum, stay home and iron sheets?"
His jaw tightens. "You drove through the pass, alone, after someone tried to put you in the reservoir. You found something out there. And now you're standing in this kitchen deciding whether I'm safe enough to tell."
He sets the mug down too hard. Coffee sloshes over the rim onto the old granite, and he doesn't wipe it up.
"I am not the enemy in the room, Greer."
"Then who is?"
Somewhere in the walls, a pipe knocks once, the old plumbing shifting with the cold the way it has shifted every October I can remember. The house filling the silence the way it fills every silence, with its own small commentary.
"I don't know yet," he says. The words cost him. I can see it in the tension along his forearms, the tendons standing out where his sleeves are pushed to the elbow. He runs his hand across his jaw, a quick, frustrated gesture that belongs to a man who hates the taste of those words.
"That's the first honest thing you've said to me since this morning."
"That's not true." His mouth opens on the next word, then closes. A man who always has the next sentence ready just swallowed one whole.
"Prove it."
He comes around the counter. I don't step back, because stepping back tells him something I'm not willing to tell him yet. He stops close enough that the heat of him reaches me, and his hand finds the edge of the counter beside my hip, his knuckles grazing my jeans.
"I'm not the one who tried to kill you on that pass," he says. "I've spent all day trying to prove that the answer isn't the one I think it is."
"Ward."
He doesn't flinch. He doesn't confirm. The silence does both.
"And you're here," I say. "In my mother's kitchen. Instead of his."
"Yes."
"That's either the bravest thing you've ever done or the dumbest."
"Probably both."
I study him. The lamplight cuts across the planes of his face and leaves the hollows dark. I look for the seam where the performance meets the man, the place where a lie would live if he were carrying one.
He holds still and lets me look. A man with something to hide would fill this silence with reassurance, and Callum gives me nothing except the weight of his attention and the steady, measured rhythm of his breathing.
It isn't enough. Words and silences and the careful composure of his face can all be managed. Callum Aldrich manages things for a living. If I want to know whether the man who laid out a careful lie in my dining room is building me another one now, I need to get past the parts of him he controls.
I curl my fingers into the front of his shirt and pull.
The kiss is not soft. It's not the hallway kiss from the night in the rain, the one that cracked us both open.
This kiss is a negotiation conducted with teeth and breath and his hand closing around the back of my neck, tilting my head where he wants it.
His grip hasn't gentled since the last time he put his hands on me.
His body against mine is coiled with a tension that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with control held past its breaking point.
My back meets the counter. His hands find my waist and lift, and I'm sitting on the old countertop with his hips between my knees before the kiss breaks.
His palms slide up under my shirt, fingers spread wide against bare skin, thumbs tracing the undersides of my breasts through the thin cotton of my bra.
The deliberateness of it, the way he maps terrain before he takes it, makes my breath go shallow.
"Still testing?" he asks against my jaw.
"Still watching."
"Good." His teeth find the tendon below my ear. The bite is controlled and precise. "Watch closely."
He pulls my shirt over my head. His knuckles brush the bruise on my collarbone where the seatbelt dug in this morning, and he pauses.
His thumb traces the edge of the mark, the purple-blue bloom across the skin.
His jaw sets. Then his mouth lowers to the bruise and presses against it, careful, at odds with the way his hands are already reaching behind me for the clasp of my bra.
"Somebody put that on you," he says against my skin. Not a question.
"Somebody put me on a road this morning. The seatbelt did the rest."
His fingers unhook the clasp with the efficient certainty of a man who intends to take his time with what's underneath it. Cool air tightens my nipples, and he looks. That unhurried cataloguing attention that makes me feel mapped and memorized and very specifically wanted.
"You're staring."
"I'm deciding where to start."
His mouth lowers to my breast, and the heat of it after the cold air bows my spine.
His tongue circles the peak with slow, firm pressure while his hand cups the other, thumb sweeping across the nipple in strokes that match the rhythm of his mouth.
When he switches sides, the cool air on wet skin draws a sound from me that I'd rather not have made.
"Don't hold back on my account," he says, and I can feel his mouth curve against my skin.
"Don't flatter yourself."
"I don't have to."
His hands work the button of my jeans with unhurried precision while every nerve I have is lit and demanding and he knows it.
He pulls the denim down my hips, and I lift to help him, and the jeans end up somewhere near the stove.
His hand returns to the bare skin of my thigh, tracing upward, and his fingers find me through the thin cotton of my underwear.
His breathing goes ragged when he feels how wet I am. The sound that escapes him is possessive and unguarded.
"That's not for you," I say, which is a lie so transparent we both let it die where it falls.