Chapter 7 – Harper
Rosa is on her feet before I fully reach the table.
"You good?" she asks, scanning me quickly, professionally, the PT in her never fully off-duty.
"I'm good."
She sits back down slowly, watching my face. "Ronan got you out fast."
"He did."
A pause. She picks up her drink, takes a sip, eyes still on me.
"You want to talk about it?" she asks carefully.
"Not really." I sit down. Pick up my own drink. My hand is steady. That's good. "But thank you."
She nods. Doesn't push. That's why I love her—she knows when to ask and when to just sit with silence.
But her eyes are smiling, just slightly, like she knows exactly what happened in that hallway even if I'm not saying it.
We sit there for a moment, the bar settling back into its normal rhythm around us. The fight's over—Blaze is at the bar grinning like he won the lottery, Stone's back on his stool like he never moved, and the three men who started it are nowhere to be seen.
That's when my phone lights up.
The name on the screen stops my heart for exactly two seconds.
Derek.
My blood goes cold in the specific way it does when something you thought you outran catches up behind you. I turn the phone face-down on the table.
It lights up again.
"You okay?" Rosa asks.
I flip the phone over and show her the screen. Just the name. That's enough, Rosa knows pieces of my history, enough to understand what that name on a screen means.
Her expression changes immediately. "Go," she says. "Take it outside. I'll be here."
I push back from the table and head for the door.
The air hits me cold and sharp. The bar door swings shut behind me, cutting the noise to a dull pulse, and I step to the side of the building and answer before I can talk myself out of it.
"What do you want, Derek."
Not a question. I stopped asking him questions a long time ago. Questions gave him room to maneuver.
"Just checking in." His voice is the same as always—smooth, unhurried, like he's doing me a favor by calling. "Copper Ridge. That's where you landed?"
My stomach drops.
"How do you know that."
"You're not as hard to find as you think, Harper." A pause. The kind he uses like a tool. "I'm not angry. I just want to talk."
"There's nothing to talk about."
"I think there is." The smoothness shifts, just slightly, just enough. The version of Derek that existed beneath the polished surface, the one I learned too late. "You don't just get to disappear."
"Watch me," I say, and hang up.
My hand is shaking.
I press it against my thigh and breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth, the way I teach patients to manage pain. This is manageable. It's a phone call. He's three states away and he doesn't know exactly—
He said Copper Ridge.
He knows exactly.
I close my eyes.
"Hey."
I spin around.
Ronan is standing five feet from me, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed like he's been there a while.
He must have followed me out the second I stood up.
I didn't hear him, the man moves like he was trained to, which he was, and right now I'm equal parts startled and grateful and not ready to admit to either.
"How long have you been standing there?" I ask.
"Long enough."
I straighten. Pull myself together with both hands, metaphorically speaking. "I'm fine."
"You're shaking."
"It's cold."
He looks at me for a long moment, jaw tight, the scar cutting clean through the shadows the bar light throws on his face.
He doesn't ask who called. He doesn't push.
He just watches me hold myself very still and breathe through something I don't want to explain, and then he pushes off the wall and walks to his bike without a word.
He pulls the spare helmet off the sissy bar and holds it out.
I pull out my phone and type fast to Rosa: Heading out. I'm okay. Don't wait up. Three seconds later her reply comes back, a single thumbs up and nothing else. Rosa always knows when not to ask questions.
I pocket the phone and take the helmet.
He takes the mountain road.
I don't know if he planned to or if the bike just knows the way at this point. I sit behind him and hold on and let the wind tear through whatever Derek left on my skin, that crawling, cold feeling of being watched, of being known by someone who used that knowledge to hurt me.
The speed helps. The altitude helps. His back in front of me, solid and immovable, helps more than I want to admit.
By the time he pulls off at the overlook, I can breathe again. He cuts the engine, and the mountain settles into silence—wind, pine, the valley below, Copper Ridge glowing faint in the dark.
I take off the helmet, step to the edge, and stare out. He knows where I am. Fourteen months, and he still thinks I belong to him.
I hear Ronan behind me. Not touching. Just there. Solid, steady, a wall at my back that doesn't require anything from me.
"You keep watching me," I say quietly. To the valley. To myself as much as him.
A pause. The gravel shifts.
"Maybe I like what I see."
I turn.
He's closer than I expected. Always closer than I expect, and still somehow not close enough, and the almost and not-quite and his hands on my waist in that corridor are all right there in the space between us.
"Or maybe," I say, "you're deciding something."
His hands find my waist.
There's nothing tentative about it. Both hands, firm, pulling me in, not rushing it but not hesitating either, like a decision he made a long time ago and is only now executing. I feel the span of his hands through my jacket. The heat of them. Every nerve I own goes very, very awake.
"Already did," he says.
He kisses me.
It’s not soft. It’s not a kiss that asks—it states, direct and certain, the way he does everything. Firm, warm, and when I react, something in his control slips. His hands pull me flush against him and I feel all of him—leather, muscle, restrained strength.
My hands find his chest. Grip the lapels of his jacket.
His hands stay careful on my waist even while his mouth isn't careful at all.
He pulls back just enough to look at me—dark eyes, steady, checking, like he's still giving me a choice even if he already knows where this is going, and when I look straight back at him without flinching, he kisses me again like the answer mattered to him.
My back meets the bike. His body follows. The cold metal at my back and the heat of him at my front and the mountain wind pulling at both of us.
When we finally break, the valley is still there below us, indifferent and beautiful.
He doesn't move away. His forehead drops to mine. He exhales once, slow and controlled, like a man getting everything back under command.
"That call," he says. Low. Not asking.
"Old problem," I say.
His jaw tightens. I feel it rather than see it, the shift in the muscles beneath the scar. His hands haven't left my waist.
"Old problem got a name?"
I look up at him.
"Not tonight," I say quietly.
He holds my gaze for a long moment. A shift moves through his expression, not soft, exactly, but with weight to it. He nods once.
He doesn't push.
But he doesn't let go of me either, and we stand like that at the edge of the overlook with the valley below and Derek's voice still faint in my memory, and for the first time since that phone lit up, the cold feeling starts to lose ground.