Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
ZAC
The steak hits the cast iron and I don’t turn around. She’s behind me — sitting at the table, watching my hands work the pan.
The sizzle is loud. Good. It fills the silence between us since I carried her bags into the cabin and gave her the tour like a realtor instead of a man with his insides liquidizing.
Bedroom. Bathroom. Kitchen. Couch. Everything she needs to live here for thirty days without asking for anything.
I can do this. I’m good at this — managing spaces, providing, making sure everyone around me has what they require.
What I’m not good at is standing this close to her and keeping my hands on the skillet instead of on her.
The potatoes are already roasting in the oven.
I’ve got the vegetables prepped — carrots, onions, asparagus — because I cook methodical, everything in its place, everything timed to come together when it’s supposed to.
The steak is perfect marble, too good for a random Thursday, but I went to town yesterday and bought the best cut, the one I usually save for clients paying fifty thousand dollars for a guided elk hunt.
I bought it for her, though I didn’t admit that to myself until I was driving back and realized I was planning a meal for a woman I hadn’t seen in two years.
“So what are the rules?” She sounds nervous.
Rambling, the way she does when she’s unsettled.
“I mean, there have to be rules, right? Like, for the thirty days? House rules? Relationship rules? Or are we just figuring it out as we go because that sounds like a disaster but I’m also not good at structure when there’s too much of it because my brothers have structured me into a corner and I came here to get out of structure but I guess that’s different than deciding on rules together which is probably mature and healthy or whatever. ”
I flip the steak. Flip the asparagus. I’ve done this ten thousand times. Cook. Serve. Make sure they eat. It’s the one thing I know without thinking.
“You get the bedroom,” I say. My voice is rough.
I clear it and try again. “I’ll take the couch.
You can use the bathroom whenever you need it.
I shower in the evening. You can do mornings.
We split the cooking — you take what you want to take, I’ll handle the rest. No guests.
No leaving the property without telling me where you’re going.
And we don’t touch. This is a trial period. Clean break if it doesn’t work out.”
“No touching,” she repeats. There’s something in her voice that sounds like hurt, and that’s worse than if she’d argued.
The vegetables are done. I plate the steak, slide the asparagus beside it, arrange the potatoes in a way that no man living alone would bother with. I catch myself doing it and don’t stop. This is what I do when I can’t say things out loud — I feed people.
I set the plate in front of her. She’s looking up at me with those blue eyes, and I look away because the question there will break me.
The one asking if I signed up for this service because I actually wanted a wife, or if I’m doing this as obligation, some kind of Nate-approved transaction where I pretend to keep his baby sister safe while she stays on this mountain for thirty days before heading back to her real life in the valley.
“Are these rules for me or for you?” she asks.
I don’t answer. I go back to the kitchen.
I’m not actually hungry, but I plate something anyway — half the steak, some vegetables, a roll of bread I made yesterday because apparently that’s also something I do now.
I sit down across from her instead of beside her because that feels safer, and nothing about this is safe.
She’s eating. Actually putting the food in her mouth and chewing, which means she’s braver than me. I’m pushing potatoes around my plate and not tasting anything.
“Because,” she continues, and she talks faster when she’s uncomfortable, “if these are rules for me — like, if you’re worried I’m going to cheat or throw myself at you or whatever — that’s insulting.
But if they’re rules for you, if you’re trying to protect yourself because you’re scared of something, then we have a different problem. ”
My jaw locks. “They’re practical.”
“They’re a wall.” She sets her fork down. It clatters against the plate. “They’re you treating me exactly like my brothers treat me. Like I’m something that needs managing. Like my existence is a threat you have to defend against.”
“That’s not?—“
“It is.” She’s still looking at me, and there’s anger under the nervousness now, the way her voice goes flat.
“I left home to get away from four men who decided what I could do and where I could go and who I could see. I came here because I thought you were different. I thought you actually saw me. But you’re just doing the same thing, and I don’t know how to exist if the only way anyone will keep me around is if I make myself small. ”
The anger lands somewhere deep. I look at her — really look at her — size eighteen in a sundress that moves when she breathes, hair falling over her shoulder, blue eyes fierce and frightened and absolutely done with bullshit.
She’s asking me to see her as someone who gets to make choices about her own body, her own life, her own risk.
“I’m not your brother,” I say. “And if I let myself touch you, I won’t stop. I don’t have it in me to be gentle about this.” I pause. “About you.”
Her breath catches. I watch her eyes drop to my mouth, then snap back up.
“Then don’t be gentle,” she says quietly. “But don’t pretend I’m not here. Don’t treat me like I’m made of glass. That’s what they do. That’s why I came here in the first place.”
I set my fork down. The meal I put so much care into is sitting there uneaten, cooling.
I spent hours thinking about what she’d want, and the whole time I was protecting her from myself instead of giving her what she actually asked for — which is to be treated like an adult woman who can make her own decisions, including the one to stay.
“Thirty days,” I say. “You get treated like an adult. You want to leave, you leave. But I’m going to provide for you — that’s not something I can turn off. I’m going to take care of you because that’s how I’m built. That’s not control. That’s just who I am.”
She considers this. “That’s fair.”
“No touching unless you ask. And you can ask. If you want to.” It costs me something to say this out loud.
It costs me a lot of things to sit here across from her and admit that the rules were for me, that the walls were for me, that I would burn this cabin down if it meant keeping my hands off her skin for a full thirty days.
She leans forward. Not much — just enough that I can smell the cocoa butter on her skin, and my hands grip the edge of the table.
“So let me get this straight.” Her voice is steady now, steadier than mine. “You just told me you won’t be gentle. You just told me you can’t stop once you start. And your solution is to put me in charge of the detonator?”
My throat works. “Yes.”
“That’s not a rule, Zac. That’s a dare.” She holds my gaze for a beat longer than she needs to, then reaches across the table and runs one fingertip along the ridge of my knuckles. Light. Slow. Deliberate.
Every muscle in my body locks. I don’t breathe. I don’t move. She traces the rope-burn scar on my left forearm like she’s memorizing it, and my vision narrows to the point where her skin meets mine.
Then she pulls back, picks up her fork, and takes a bite like she didn’t just rewrite every rule I laid down. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
The tension doesn’t leave the room. It settles into a different shape — less brittle, more electric.
She eats. I watch. My hand is still on the table where she touched it, and I can feel the path her finger took like a brand.
I’m supposed to be the caretaker here, the provider, the one with all the answers — and I’ve been approaching this backwards.
She doesn’t need protecting. She needs choosing. She needs a man who looks at her and doesn’t flinch from the hunger.
I think about Nate’s barbecues last summer.
The way she’d show up in those sundresses and laugh too loud and never once look at me directly — but I felt it.
Every time. That pull at the edge of my vision, like she was circling the same gravity I was.
I told myself I was imagining it. Told myself she was Nate’s baby sister and I was a thirty-seven-year-old man with no business noticing.
But Etta matched us. Out of every name in that service, Etta looked at her and looked at me and decided we belonged in the same cabin for thirty days.
And Alana didn’t walk away when she found out it was me.
She’s here. And I’m sitting here pretending the rules are about protecting her when they’re really about protecting myself from the truth: she’s mine to claim, and I’m not strong enough to keep pretending she isn’t.