Chapter 7 REID
REID
I've been standing outside her door for six minutes.
Owen's chair scrapes across the office floor down the hall, the sound of him settling in before six-thirty. Jace's boots hit the porch, then the rhythmic crack of the axe, splitting wood before breakfast.
And I'm in the hallway, not moving.
The grey-blue light from the window at the end of the corridor has shifted a shade warmer since I stopped here.
The house smells like coffee and split pine.
I have a full day at the rescue center. Two yearling wolves in the acclimation pen that need assessment before the veterinary visit.
I know what my morning looks like. This isn't part of it.
I knock. Too light. Quiet enough that if she's still sleeping she won't hear it, which means I've built myself a way out before I've walked in.
Silence.
Then her voice, soft and rough from sleep, on the other side of the door. "Come in."
Something tightens across the back of my shoulders. I am forty-two years old. I have operated in environments where the consequences of hesitation were permanent. This sensation is familiar from those environments. It made sense there. Not here.
I open the door.
She's sitting up in the bed. Quilt pooled at her waist, back against the headboard, not quite upright, the posture of someone who pulled herself vertical when she heard the knock and is still settling into it.
Eyes not fully open yet. The particular softness that sleep leaves, the guard not yet deployed.
Her hair is loose and dark against the white pillowcase, unruly from sleep, and she's wearing Owen's grey thermal shirt, the collar sliding off one shoulder to expose the line of her collarbone and the pale skin at the base of her throat.
I fixate on the collarbone. The specific angle of it.
The way the morning light finds it. And my brain, without my consent, puts me inside that room but not at the threshold.
Puts my hands in that hair. Puts my mouth on the exposed skin where her shoulder meets her neck, tasting the sleep-warmth there, feeling the shift of her breathing change as she wakes up underneath me instead of alone.
Her back arching off the mattress. The sound she'd make.
The image is precise enough to produce a physical response that I have approximately four seconds to manage before it's visible.
I redirect. I look at the cut above her eye. Swelling, down from last night by half. Color in her face, better. I make the assessment clinical and that routes the blood where it needs to go.
She's watching me from the bed. Her eyes moving across my face with the quality of attention I've come to associate specifically with her. Something at the edges of her expression that might be curiosity.
The curiosity adjusts when I don't speak immediately.
Her shoulders change. Slight, a tightening at the base of her neck, a fraction of an inch's retreat into the headboard.
She's still looking at me but the quality has shifted.
She's not reading me for information anymore. She's reading me for threat.
I know that adjustment. I've seen it in other contexts, in people who learned it from someone specific. The wariness it's about a man in her doorway first thing in the morning when she's vulnerable in bed.
The recognition lands in the center of my chest like a fist. Cold. Precise. The kind of information that files itself away and starts building a case.
I will find out who caused that.
And I will make sure he regrets it.
"Checking on you before I head out," I say. "May I?"
She blinks. The wariness recalibrates, not gone but reclassified. "Yeah. Come in." A beat. "I'm actually feeling pretty good, considering."
I cross the room. I stop at the bedside. She tips her face up slightly to look at me and I can read her clearly from here. Pupils even, responsive. Focus tracking. Color in her cheeks that wasn't there at midnight when I checked on her last.
"How's the headache?"
"Persistent." A pause. "Not unbearable."
I reach for her forehead. Two fingers, light, reading the cut and the tissue around it.
She holds still for it. The effort of that stillness shows in the fine tension along her jaw, a muscle pulling tight.
The wound is clean. The margins of the cut are closed.
She'll have a scar at the hairline, fine enough that most people won't see it.
I pull my hand back.
Then something touches my chest.
Light pressure. A single fingertip, the pad of it warm through the fabric of my shirt, resting on the embroidered wolf's head on my chest pocket.
I go still. The kind of still that has nothing to do with calm. The kind that comes from every system in my body zeroing in on a single point of contact.
She's looking at the logo. The wolf's head, embroidered in grey. She traces the outline of it with one finger, the shape of the jaw, the arc of the ear.
"Is that where you work?" she says.
My heart is approximately eight inches from her hand and I am not going to think about that.
I nod.
Her finger pauses at the text beneath the logo. "Wolf rescue center."
"Yeah."
Every word of it is true. I work there six days a week. I know every animal in the facility by name and behavior and history.
It's not the whole truth. The truth is I built the entire operation. That the facility and the land it sits on belongs to me. That the funding comes from a source only Owen and Jace and I know about.
She looks up from the logo. Her finger still on my chest. Her eyes find mine and the wariness has stepped aside for something else, something genuinely curious.
Nobody has looked at me that way in a very long time. Like I'm something to be understood rather than relied upon. The distinction is one I didn't know existed until she made it.
"I'd like to see it sometime," she says.
She means it. I can read the difference between courtesy and intention, and this is intention.
"When you're back on your feet," I say. "I'll take you."
She holds my gaze for a moment and I hold it back and the room is quiet except for the low sound of the fire in the grate and the distant crack of Jace's axe carrying through the walls.
I step back. Her finger drops from my chest. The absence of contact registers in the specific spot she was touching, a small warmth where the pressure was. Fading.
"You need to rest today," I say. "I'll bring breakfast before I head out."
"I'd rather get up."
"You have a sprained ankle."
"I can hop." She tilts her head. I can see amusement in her expression. A challenge dressed up as a joke, and underneath both of those is the real thing: a woman who does not accept being managed, even when it’s the best for her.
"I'll be fine."
"You'll stay in the bed."
Her expression shifts. Running the calculation of whether to push or defer. "You're not my doctor."
"No." I hold her gaze. "I'm the person who found you in the snow with your head bleeding."
She goes quiet for a moment.
"I'll bring breakfast," I say. "You'll eat it here."
"Reid."
"Maya."
She opens her mouth and I know from the set of her jaw and the light in her eyes exactly what's coming. The push, the refusal, the warm stubbornness that keeps surfacing.
I move before she finishes the first word.
My hand closes around her chin. Two fingers and my thumb, firm, tilting her face up toward mine. Not hard.
She goes still.
Completely, immediately still, the argument stopped mid-syllable, her lips parted around the word she didn't finish.
Her eyes lock on mine and they are very wide and very green in the morning light and I am close enough to see the ring of grey at the edges of the iris and the slight dilation at the center that is not a fear response. I know fear responses. This is not one.
I hold her there.
Her face warm under my fingers, the line of her jaw fitting the shape of my hand, and I can feel her pulse through the skin beneath her ear, fast and getting faster.
"I'll bring you breakfast," I say. Even. Unhurried. Certain. "You'll eat it."
I let that land. Then, quieter:
"And you will stay in this bed."
I hold her gaze one more second. Long enough to feel the rhythm at her throat quicken under my thumb. Long enough to know she feels it too.
Then I let go.