Chapter Ten
Ava
The cabin is quiet in the late morning light—too quiet, honestly.
Violet is curled up on the guest bed with her Chromebook and a blanket tucked around her legs, doing online assignments with the kind of focus she only ever musters when she’s still recovering.
She has color back in her cheeks, thank God, and she keeps insisting she feels “normal-ish,” which is Violet code for not perfect, but don’t freak out about it.
I kiss the top of her head and force myself not to hover like a hummingbird with maternal anxiety issues.
“I’ll be in the living room if you need anything.”
She glances up, gives me that patient teenage smile—half affection, half seriously, Mom? “I’m good. Go breathe or something.”
So I do. I step out into the hallway and let out a long exhale.
The cabin smells like coffee and pine and faint woodsmoke.
It’s warm, cozy in a way that shouldn’t surprise me but somehow does.
When I imagined Jax’s home—this man I dragged out of a snowbank with my bare hands—I pictured something like a cave: cold, unfriendly, all sharp corners and sharper silence.
But this… This feels lived in. Not by a family, but by someone who once remembered how.
On the far wall near the kitchen is a narrow door. I haven’t seen inside it yet. Everything else he showed us last night—the guest room, the bathroom, the kitchen—was spotless, organized to an almost unnerving degree.
The door stands slightly ajar now.
I shouldn’t look. It’s none of my business. I’ve already overstepped with this man by… well, saving him, for one.
But curiosity is a stubborn flame, and it’s been burning since the moment I saw him last night in the ranger station: eyes like winter stormwater, grief carved deep in the lines around his mouth, an anger that wasn’t really aimed outward so much as inward.
I nudge the door open with one finger.
Inside is a workshop.
Small, but meticulously arranged—tools lined up with surgical precision, screws sorted by size into glass jars, notebooks stacked on a shelf in an order only he would understand. There’s a radio, old and dented, sitting silent on a table littered with wires and circuitry.
And in the center of the workbench is a spiral notebook flipped open.
The writing inside stops me cold.
Equations. Schematics. Detailed notes on avalanche activity and pressure sensors. Pages of calculations I barely understand, but know enough to recognize as not ordinary.
This isn’t the hobby of a mountain hermit tinkering with broken radios. This is engineering. Real engineering. Advanced.
A soft chill races through me.
If the sensor he was adjusting yesterday—the one that almost cost him his life—was his design…
Who is he?
Before I can think better of it, I reach for the notebook, scanning another page. More data. More designs. A partially sketched device that looks a lot like the one clipped to his pack last night.
“Don’t touch that.”
His voice hits me like a door slamming shut.
I turn sharply. He fills the doorway, broad-shouldered and silent as a shadow. His hair is damp from a shower, the ends brushing the collar of a dark T-shirt that fits a little too well, revealing muscles he absolutely should not be allowed to have considering how irritating he is.
His expression is carved from ice.
I lift my hands slightly, palms open. “I wasn’t going to break it.”
“You shouldn’t be in here at all.”
The words slice, clean and cold.
The defensive part of me flares. “Your door wasn’t closed.”
“That doesn’t make it an invitation.”
Ouch.
Heat rises in my cheeks—not embarrassment, but irritation. “I’m sorry for looking. I was just—curious. That’s all.”
“Well, don’t be.” He steps past me, shutting the notebook with a quiet but definitive snap. “Curiosity gets people hurt.”
“Is that what happened to you?” The question leaps out before I can stop it.
He goes utterly still.
The silence stretches, taut and ugly, before he says, “You don’t know anything about what happened to me.”
“No,” I admit. “I don’t. But you’re living on top of a mountain like you’re hiding from the world. And after the other night, I’d say I have a right to wonder.”
His gaze snaps to mine—sharp, wounded, furious.
“Saving my life once doesn’t give you a license to interrogate me,” he says. “You did your job. That’s it.”
My heart lurches in my chest, equal parts hurt and exasperation. “I wasn’t interrogating you. I was trying to understand why someone with this”—I gesture toward the schematics—“was out in an avalanche zone alone. You could’ve died.”
He steps closer.
I should back away, but I don’t.
His breath ghosts across my cheek, warm against the cool air of the workshop. “Maybe that wouldn’t have been the worst thing.” The words are soft, but they knock something inside me sideways. Pain flickers behind his eyes, raw and unguarded for a single heartbeat before he shutters himself again.
“Don’t say that,” I whisper.
“Why?” His voice drops lower. “You barely know me.”
“That doesn’t mean your life doesn’t matter.”
Something cracks between us. It’s not loud. It’s not obvious. It’s a shift—like snow groaning under weight right before it slides.
He’s close. Too close. Close enough that I catch the faint scent of cedar on his shirt, the warmth of his skin, the tension lining every muscle in his jaw.
For a moment—just a breath—his gaze drops to my mouth.
And I feel it. God, I feel it. A pull like gravity, like the mountain tilting under our feet.
He leans in and my heartbeat stutters. I see his hand twitches at his side.
But then… He pulls back. Sharp. Abrupt. Like he touched a live wire.
“This was a mistake,” he says tightly.
I swallow hard. “What was?”
“Letting you stay here.”
The words hit harder than they should. “We didn’t exactly have a list of choices.”
He turns his back to me, shoulders rigid. “Stay out of my workshop.”
The dismissal is clear.
Fine. If he wants walls, he can have them. I’ve spent my whole life working around storms—literal and human. And Jax Taylor is both.
I step out of the room without another word, closing the door behind me with a calmness I don’t feel.
But as I walk back toward the guest room, my pulse still racing, one thing is impossible to ignore:
For one unguarded second—he almost kissed me.
And worse? I almost let him.