17. Hadley #2
The equipment shed smells like diesel fuel and cold metal.
Banks stands at a workbench with his back to the door, cleaning a rifle with the focused precision of a man performing surgery.
Each component laid out in order. Bolt carrier group.
Charging handle. Firing pin. His hands move without looking, muscle memory so deep it lives in his bones.
He doesn't turn around when the door bangs shut behind me. He heard me coming. Of course he heard me coming. I was wearing camp sandals on gravel. A deaf man could have tracked my approach.
"Flight leaves at fourteen hundred. Shelly's pulling your bags now."
I cross the concrete floor. My sandals slap against the cold surface.
The shed is dim, lit by a single overhead fluorescent that buzzes and flickers and casts everything in a sickly yellow wash.
Banks fills the space the way he fills every space.
Too big for the workbench. Too broad for the narrow aisle between equipment racks.
His shadow eats half the wall behind him.
He slots the firing pin back into place. Smooth. Precise. Click.
"I deleted the email."
His hands stop. Not a dramatic freeze. Just a pause, mid-motion, the bolt carrier group suspended between his thumb and forefinger. Three seconds. Then his hands resume, sliding the component home.
"Don't be stupid."
"Too late for that. Deleted it about ninety seconds ago."
He sets the rifle down. Flat on the bench. Controlled. He turns around.
Those gray eyes hit me like ice water. His jaw is granite.
The butterfly strips above his brow pull tight as his forehead creases into something between fury and confusion.
He looks me over. His oversized jacket drowning my frame.
My wrecked hiking pants. Camp sandals on feet that still carry frostbite blisters.
The fading pink streak in my unwashed hair hanging across my face.
"That was a million dollars."
"I know what it was."
"You're broke, Hadley."
"I know what I am."
He takes a step toward me. Not threatening.
Searching. Those calculating eyes running the same assessment he runs on avalanche conditions and bullet trajectories and wind speed, trying to find the variable that doesn't fit.
The piece that would explain why a woman drowning in debt just torched her lifeline.
"They'll pull the offer."
"I know."
"You won't get it back."
"I don't want it back."
His jaw works. The muscle in his cheek flexes and releases. He grips the edge of the workbench behind him with both hands and the wood groans under the pressure.
"Why."
Not a question. A demand. One word, bitten off at the edge.
I close the distance between us. Four steps. His body stiffens with each one. By the time I'm standing in front of him, close enough to see the pulse jumping in his throat, he has gone completely rigid. A wall of muscle and restraint and refusal to hope for something he won't let himself name.
I grab his tactical vest with both fists. The ballistic nylon is rough against my palms. I can feel the ceramic plate inserts underneath, the webbing, the hard edges of the gear that keeps him alive. I twist the fabric tight in my grip and I pull.
He doesn't budge. Of course he doesn't. He is six foot three and two hundred twenty pounds of dense, stubborn, immovable mountain man and I am a five-six city girl in borrowed sandals.
So I climb him instead. I yank myself up by the vest, plant my good foot on the toe of his boot, and I crush my mouth against his.
His lips are dry. Warm. Unmoving for one terrible heartbeat. Two.
Then his hand comes up and grabs the back of my skull and he opens his mouth against mine and the sound that comes out of him isn't a groan. It's surrender. Raw. Torn from somewhere behind his ribs that he keeps locked and guarded and walled off from everyone and everything except, apparently, me.
I break the kiss. Just enough to breathe. His forehead moves against mine. Hot skin on hot skin. His breath comes ragged against my lips.
"I don't want the deal," I whisper. "I don't want Manhattan. I don't want a TV crew turning you into a character or a publicist teaching me how to describe the worst and best two days of my life in brand-friendly sound bites."
His fingers tighten in my hair.
"I want to stay. In Alaska. I want to write about this place. Real survival. Real stories. Not sponsored content. Not algorithms." I pull back far enough to look into those gray eyes. They are wide open. Unguarded. Wrecked. "I want to write about real love, Banks. I want to write about you."
Something breaks behind his face. I see it happen. The mask doesn't crack. It dissolves. All at once, like ice calving off a glacier, and underneath is a man who has been alone so long he forgot that someone choosing him was even possible.
He peers at me for five full seconds. His pulse hammers against the thumb I've set on his collarbone.
Then he moves.
He reaches past me and grabs a heavy Carhartt coat off the wall hook, swinging it over my shoulders in one decisive motion. The weight of it nearly buckles my knees. He grabs his keys from the workbench. His truck keys. The ones attached to a black carabiner with the SAR insignia.
"Get in the truck."
"What? Where are we?—"
He takes my elbow and steers me toward the shed door. Not rough. Not gentle. Urgent. His long stride forces me into a half-jog to keep pace.
"Banks."
He shoves the door open. Cold Alaskan morning floods the shed. The compound stretches out under a sky so blue and sharp it looks fake, the mountains rising behind it like a cathedral.
"Banks, where are we going?"
He walks me to the passenger side of a mud-caked black truck. Opens the door. Lifts me onto the seat with one arm like I weigh nothing. Buckles my seatbelt. His face is six inches from mine and the look in those gray eyes pins me to the leather.
He doesn't answer.
He closes the door, rounds the hood, and the engine roars to life.