14. Colt
Colt
I watch Nora by the fire, her body relaxed against me after a day that started with sunlight and ended with a shattered car window and a boot print that doesn’t belong to anybody either of us can name yet.
The worry’s still there, sitting low in the room like the last flakes of a storm that has not quite finished falling.
But she feels good against me anyway, warm and soft through the flannel, her head tucked into the curve of my shoulder like it was built to fit there.
The connection between us has done nothing but grow since the moment I pulled her out of that wreck.
Every laugh on the snowmobile, every quiet hour by this fire, every hard conversation we have had to have has tied another knot in whatever this is between us, and tonight, with the fear from the boot print still fresh and both of us needing something to hold onto besides the danger, I am done pretending I do not want her the way I have wanted her since that first night.
There is a version of tonight where I talk myself out of this.
Where I remind myself that a woman three days removed from watching a man die does not need a marshal twice her size deciding tonight is the night, that whatever this is between us should wait until the Pertrosyans are behind bars and the roads are clear and none of this is happening under the strange gravity of fear and a shared blizzard.
I have run that argument in my head more than once since I carried her in here.
It has not won a single time, and looking at her now, calm and certain and looking back at me like she has already made up her own mind without needing my permission to get there, I do not think it is going to start winning tonight either.
I stand and lift her into my arms, careful of ribs that are healing but not fully healed, and she goes easily, wrapping her arms around my neck, her breath warm against my throat. “Colt,” she says, soft, and there is a question folded into the way she says my name, one I intend to answer plainly.
“I want you,” I tell her, because she deserves the truth of it said out loud instead of just felt. “If you want the same thing. Tonight, and not because of the window, or the fear, or anything except that I have wanted this since before I had any business wanting it.”
“I want the same thing.” Her voice does not shake at all when she says it, which tells me everything about how sure she is.
I carry her back to the bed, the floorboards creaking familiar under my boots, the fire throwing warm moving light across the room and across her face when I lay her down against the furs.
She looks up at me, a little nervous, mostly certain, and I kiss her slow, giving both of us time, my hand cupping her jaw while her fingers curl into my shirt.
“Easy, darlin',” I murmur against her mouth when we break for air. “We go slow tonight. I know this is your first time. I am going to take care of you the whole way through.”
She nods, and I lose myself for a long while in nothing but her, the sound of her breath catching, the warmth of her skin under my palms, the way she says my name low and then, once, quiet and a little shy like she is testing whether the word belongs in her mouth, Daddy, and something in my chest goes fierce and possessive and entirely undone all at once.
I take my time with her. I have waited long enough, through a blizzard and a murder and a mountain full of reasons to hold back, that rushing any part of this feels like the one mistake I am not willing to make tonight.
I learn the small things first, the way her breath changes when I find something she likes, the way her hands go from careful to certain the longer I stay patient, the particular hitch in her voice right before she says my name like it is the only word she has left.
Every fear the day put in her, the shattered window, the print in the snow, the whole unresolved question of what is still out there hunting her, gets set down somewhere outside this bed for a while, and I make it my whole purpose to keep it there.
The rest of that night belongs to the two of us alone, the fire burning low and gold across the room, her trust in my hands as real and as carefully kept as anything I have ever been given.
I am patient with her. Thorough. Some part of me that has been quiet a very long time wakes all the way up and does not want to go back to sleep, and I let it, because for the first time in longer than I can easily count, keeping somebody safe and wanting somebody badly turn out to be exactly the same instinct instead of two separate things pulling in opposite directions.
Later, much later, with the fire burned down to coals and the storm outside fully, finally gone, I hold her against my chest, her breath slowing into something even and trusting, her hand splayed flat over my heart like she is checking it is still there.
“That was,” she starts, and stops, like she cannot quite find the shape of the sentence.
“Yeah.” I press a kiss to the top of her head. “That was.”
She laughs, quiet and a little disbelieving, the sound vibrating against my skin. “I had a whole life plan that did not involve falling for a mountain marshal with a beard and a genuinely concerning number of traps. This was not on the itinerary.”
“Sorry to disrupt the itinerary.”
“I am not.” She tilts her head up to look at me, and whatever she sees on my face makes something soften further in hers. “I am really not, Colt.”
I do not say anything to that right away, mostly because I am not sure my voice will hold steady if I try. Instead I pull her closer, tucking her head under my chin, and let the quiet sit between us a while, easy instead of heavy for the first time all day.
“Can I ask you something,” she says eventually, her fingers tracing idle patterns on my chest.
“Always.”
“The Daddy thing.” She says it careful, like she is checking whether the word is safe to bring back out into the light of ordinary conversation.
“Is that just, I do not know, a bedroom thing, or is that actually you? Because I liked it. A lot. I just want to understand what I am asking for if I ask for more of it.”
The question lands honest and a little vulnerable, and I give it the same honesty back instead of deflecting the way I might have a week ago.
“It is actually me. Has been as long as I can remember, long before I ever had a word for it or anybody worth trying it out with. Protecting. Taking care of. Making sure the person in my care is fed and warm and looked after down to the smallest detail, and getting something real out of doing it, not just doing it because it is expected.” I trace a slow line down her spine, feeling her shiver under my palm.
“With you it is more than that, though. It is not just an instinct I have got. It is specifically about you. I do not know how else to put that without it sounding bigger than two days should allow, but there it is.”
“Two days and a blizzard and a murder and one extremely stressful boot print,” she says, but her voice has gone soft, and she presses closer instead of pulling away from the weight of what I just told her. “I think that might count for more than normal days do.”
“Might,” I agree. “I am inclined to think it does.”
“For what it is worth,” she says after a moment, quieter now, “I think I like being taken care of. I have spent so long being the one who handles everything, deadlines and rent and my own scraped knees, metaphorically and otherwise. Nobody has ever made me feel like it was safe to put some of that down.”
“You can put it down here.” I mean it plainer than anything I have said all night. “Any of it. All of it. That is not an offer with an expiration date.”
Her breath catches, and she does not answer right away, but the way she burrows in closer says more than words would anyway.
We lie there a long while after that, trading smaller things back and forth, her laugh returning easy and frequent, my own voice looser than it has been in years around anybody who was not already family.
She asks about the first thing I ever trapped, badly, at nine years old, and I tell her the humiliating truth of it.
I ask what her first cartoon strip was about, and she groans and buries her face in my chest rather than answer, which only makes me more determined to get it out of her eventually.
Her breathing slows further, and I think she has drifted off until she speaks again, quieter now, into the dark. “Colt. When they do come for me. The Marshals, I mean. Will you tell them about tonight?”
The question catches me somewhere unguarded. “I do not have any plans to hide it,” I say honestly. “Why?”
“I just do not want it filed away as some kind of complication in a report. Like it was a mistake somebody has to note and correct.” Her voice has gone smaller, more uncertain than it has been all night. “I want it to have been real. Whatever happens after.”
I tilt her chin up so she is looking at me instead of the dark.
“It was real. It still is, right now, and it is going to keep being real regardless of what any report says about it or what any Marshal thinks he is allowed to have an opinion on. You are not a complication, Nora. You are the first thing in years I have wanted to keep instead of just protect.”
She exhales slow, some of the tension leaving her shoulders. “Okay. Good. I needed to hear that out loud, apparently, at midnight, right after.”
“Anytime.” I press my lips to her temple. “I mean that too. Not just tonight.”
Outside, the last of the wind finally goes still against the logs, and for the length of one whole night I let myself believe that whatever is out there with a boot print and a grudge can wait until morning to be my problem again.
“Stay right here,” she murmurs, already half asleep against my chest.
“Not planning on going anywhere,” I tell her, and mean it more than I have meant almost anything in years.