Chapter Six #2
She does not belong to any category I know how to manage cleanly, and that is beginning to irritate me in ways I do not enjoy examining too closely.
Most people become legible with time. They bend toward one weakness or another if you apply the right pressure.
Fear. Greed. Loneliness. Vanity. Desire.
Even the guarded ones usually reveal themselves in pieces.
But Leona Vale resists easy reading. She is too self-contained for seduction to work on its own, too intelligent for intimidation alone to pin her where I want her, and too close to a situation she does not understand for me to permit even the smallest amount of personal interest to interfere.
She should be simple, a woman standing at the edge of something ugly, nothing more.
Instead she has become increasingly difficult to place, and difficulty has a way of fixing itself in my mind when it should be discarded.
That alone should be enough to end it. It should make distance easy.
It should remind me that a complication is still a complication, no matter how beautiful it is when it bares its teeth.
I know what appetite does to judgment when a man lets it grow unchecked.
I learned that lesson long ago, and I learned it well.
Leona is too near an active breach in my world, too stubborn to predict cleanly, and too quick to provoke interest for me to treat carelessly.
Every instinct shaped by discipline should be forcing this into a narrow, practical line.
Resolve the threat. Secure the perimeter. Control the variables. Move on.
Instead, the problem sharpens.
The more I learn about her, the less willing I become to reduce her to a name in a file and be done with it.
I can still see her in the rain, chin lifted, hand locked around the fence post, anger bright in her eyes even as caution moved beneath it.
She did not plead. Did not perform fear for sympathy.
Did not pretend softness where there was none.
Even her defiance had structure. It was not reckless.
It was rooted, the kind that grows deep before anyone thinks to rip it out.
That is dangerous. Not only because a woman like that is harder to control, but because something in me responds to it with immediate, concentrated interest. Not passing attraction.
Not the shallow pull of a pretty face. Something meaner than that.
Something more possessive. The instinct to close a hand around what resists and see whether it fights harder or finally goes still.
I do not particularly like that thought. I like even less that it keeps returning.
At six twenty, Willem appears in the doorway. He does not need to announce himself. Men around me learn early that unnecessary noise is rarely rewarded.
“She’s back at the farm,” he says.
I lift my eyes from the open file. “Alone?”
“Yes.”
“Anything unusual?”
“A county patrol drove past twenty minutes ago but did not stop.”
So. She either said nothing, or she said too little to matter.
Neither surprises me. Leona does not strike me as a woman inclined to hand her fear over to another man and trust him to carry it properly.
She would hold it close first. Test its edges.
Try to survive it alone before admitting she might not be able to.
Something about that thought darkens my mood instead of easing it.
“Pull Ellis too,” I say.
Willem inclines his head once. “Understood.”
When he leaves, the house settles into evening silence.
Night comes slowly, pressing itself against the windows in layers until the glass turns black and reflective.
By eleven, I am back in the study with Briar Hollow spread across satellite images on the desk.
I study the perimeter first. Fence lines.
Tree cover. Access points. Blind stretches of road.
Places a vehicle could stop without being seen too quickly.
Places a man could watch from. Places he could hide.
Then my attention shifts to the house. I imagine a light burning in an upstairs room.
Her awake. Restless. Moving through that old farmhouse with tension under her skin, checking locks she already checked once, listening for tires on gravel, standing at the window in thin lamplight and staring out into the dark as if she might catch sight of what is waiting there.
The image settles low in my body with immediate force.
Mine to watch, some uglier part of me thinks.
Mine to protect.
Mine to ruin, if I chose badly enough.
I go still.
That is the truth beneath the problem, and truth is only useful if a man is willing to look directly at it.
Leona has crossed into my thoughts with an intimacy she has not earned and I have not allowed.
I do not like the shape of it. The possessiveness of it.
The sheer violence buried inside the instinct to put men around her, to lock down the roads near her land, to decide without asking what danger is permitted to reach her and what never will.
She is not mine.
But the moment another man steps onto her property, some part of me will behave as if she is.
I could go there now.
The thought lands hard enough to feel like impact.
Not strategy. Temptation. And not the soft kind.
Not curiosity. Not even lust at its simplest. Something more territorial than that.
The urge to return to Briar Hollow, walk back into her space, watch that anger light in her face again, and make it clear that whatever else she refuses to understand, she will not mistake this.
She has my attention now. She is inside the circle of things I watch, and that alone changes the terms.
I dismiss the thought because I have to. Tomorrow will be clean. Tactical. Controlled. I will move when movement serves a purpose. I will keep the line where it belongs. I will not let a woman with defiance in her spine and rain on her skin distort the shape of what needs to be done.
I believe that for almost three seconds.
Then my phone buzzes against the desk.
“Movement at Briar Hollow.”
Everything in me goes still.
I pick up the phone. “What kind?”
“Not ours.”
My chair is already moving back beneath me. “Tell me.”
“Unknown vehicle at the outer fence line. Lights off. Two men.”
A cold, immediate fury opens in my chest. Not because of the breach. Because they are there. At her fence. On her land. In the dark.
I am on my feet before he finishes speaking.