Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
WOLFE
She said she'd stay.
But I watched her face when she said it. Saw the doubt still lingering behind her eyes. The fear she couldn't quite shake.
She's staying because I asked her to. Not because she believes we can work.
I need to fix that.
The morning after our fight, I leave her sleeping and drive to the Guardian Peak compound. Mace is in the main lodge, reviewing security footage on his laptop, a mug of coffee steaming beside him.
"Wolfe." He looks up, eyebrows rising. "You're out early. Everything okay with your girl?"
My girl. The words settle somewhere warm in my chest. "She's fine. I need a favor."
"Another trace?"
"No. I need to borrow the satellite internet setup. The portable one."
Mace leans back in his chair, studying me. "For what?"
"Sadie's a content creator. Social media. Her whole career depends on being connected, and my cabin has garbage signal." I force the next words out, even though they scrape against every instinct I have. "If she's going to stay, she needs to be able to work."
A slow smile spreads across Mace's face. "You're setting up internet in your cabin. For her."
"Don't make it weird."
"Wolfe Hendrix, the man who built his cabin three miles from civilization specifically to avoid technology, is installing satellite internet for a woman he's known for a week." Mace's grin widens. "This is absolutely weird. This is the best kind of weird."
"Do you have the equipment or not?"
"I do. But I want you to know that I'm going to tell everyone about this. Deck, Cade, Hayes. Everyone."
"Fine."
"And I'm going to enjoy every second of their reactions."
"Are you done?"
Mace laughs and pushes back from the table. "Come on. Let's get you set up."
An hour later, I'm driving back to my cabin with a portable satellite dish, a router, and detailed instructions that Mace made me repeat back three times to make sure I understood.
Technology isn't my strength. I can field-strip a rifle in thirty seconds and track a target through dense forest for days, but wifi configurations make my head hurt.
Sadie is worth the headache.
She's awake when I get back, sitting by the fire with her phone in her hands, scrolling through what I assume are the screenshots she's accumulated. She looks up when I come in, her expression cautious.
"You left again."
"Had to pick something up." I set the equipment on the table. "For you."
She stares at the satellite dish, then at me, then back at the dish. "Is that what I think it is?"
"Portable satellite internet. Should give you enough bandwidth to post content, check your accounts, whatever you need." I start unpacking the components, not looking at her. "Mace says the signal's strong enough for video calls too, if you need to talk to your manager or your brand people."
Silence.
I glance up. She's crying. Not sobbing, just silent tears tracking down her cheeks, her hand pressed over her mouth.
"Sadie." I abandon the equipment and cross to her. "What's wrong? If you don't want it, I can take it back. I just thought—"
"You got me internet." Her voice is thick. "You went to your secret mountain man headquarters and borrowed equipment and you're going to install wifi in your off-grid cabin because I need it for work."
"Yes."
"Wolfe." She laughs through her tears. "You hate technology. You told me you chose this cabin specifically because it was disconnected."
"I did."
"So why would you do this?"
I crouch in front of her, taking her hands in mine. "Because you said you have a life in San Diego. A career. Responsibilities. And I realized I was asking you to give all that up without offering anything in return."
"You offered yourself. That's not nothing."
"It's not enough." I squeeze her hands. "I don't want you to choose between your life and me. I want to find a way to have both. This is me trying."
She stares at me for a long moment. Then she's out of the chair and in my lap, her arms around my neck, her face buried against my shoulder. I catch her automatically, pulling her close, breathing in the scent of her hair.
"You impossible man." The words are muffled against my shirt. "You ridiculous, perfect, impossible man."
"Is that a yes?"
"To what?"
"To staying. Really staying, not just because I asked you to."
She pulls back to look at me. Her eyes are still wet, but she's smiling. "You're going to install satellite internet in your hermit cabin so I can post pictures of hiking trails and talk to brand managers about energy bar sponsorships."
"Yes."
"And you're not going to complain when I video call my brother and talk for two hours?"
"I'll survive."
"And you're okay with me working from here? Creating content? Being loud and chaotic and extremely online?"
"Sadie." I cup her face in my hands. "I want you to be exactly who you are. All of it. The talking, the chaos, the algorithms I don't understand. I spent three years in silence thinking it was what I needed. Turns out what I needed was someone to fill that silence with something worth hearing."
Her breath catches. "Wolfe."
"I'm not good with words. You know that.
But I need you to understand something." I hold her gaze, making sure she hears every word.
"I'm not asking you to shrink. I'm not asking you to be quieter or smaller or less yourself.
I'm asking you to let me build a life that has room for both of us. Whatever that looks like."
"You really mean that."
"I really mean that."
She kisses me. Soft and slow, her hands sliding into my hair, her body warm against mine. When she pulls back, her eyes are bright.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay?"
"Okay, I'll stay. Really stay. Not because I'm scared to leave, but because I want to be here. With you." She grins. "And your fancy new internet."
"It's not fancy. Mace said the upload speeds are mediocre at best."
"Wolfe Hendrix, making jokes about upload speeds." She shakes her head, laughing. "Who are you and what have you done with my grumpy mountain man?"
My grumpy mountain man. I file that away, letting it warm me from the inside.
"Come on." I stand, bringing her with me. "Help me figure out where to put this thing. Mace said it needs a clear line of sight to the southern sky."
We spend the next two hours installing the satellite dish.
Or rather, I install it while Sadie provides commentary, suggestions, and increasingly creative profanity when things don't work the way they're supposed to.
By the time the router lights up green and her phone pings with a signal, we're both sweaty and frustrated and covered in a light dusting of snow from the roof.
"It works." She's staring at her phone like it's a miracle. "Wolfe, it actually works."
"You sound surprised."
"I mean, a little bit? No offense, but you looked like you wanted to throw that router into the forest at least three times."
"Four. But I controlled myself."
She laughs and launches herself at me again, her phone forgotten. I catch her, lifting her off her feet, and she wraps her legs around my waist.
"Thank you." She kisses my cheek, my jaw, the corner of my mouth. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
"You're welcome."
"I'm going to post so much content about this. My followers are going to lose their minds."
I tense slightly. "About the cabin?"
"About the location. The mountains. The snow. The whole aesthetic." She must see something in my face because she softens, running her fingers through my hair. "Not about you. Not if you don't want. I know you're private. I would never share anything without your permission."
The tension drains out of me. "I don't mind being in the background. Just not my face. Not my name."
"Mysterious mountain man it is." She grins. "My followers have been speculating anyway. Someone called you 'hot flannel shadow' based on the corner of your shoulder in one of my photos."
"Hot flannel shadow."
"It's a compliment."
"It's ridiculous."
"It's accurate." She kisses me again, deeper this time, and I stop thinking about upload speeds and follower counts.
Later, after dinner, after I've cleaned up the installation mess and she's posted her first piece of content from the cabin, we sit on the couch watching the fire. Her head is on my shoulder, her hand in mine, her breathing slow and content.
"Wolfe?"
"Yeah?"
"What was it like? Before me?" She shifts to look up at me. "Three years alone up here. What did you do?"
The question catches me off guard. I don't talk about those years. Don't like to think about them.
But she's asking. And I promised myself I'd try.
"Quiet," I say finally. "It was quiet. I'd wake up, check the perimeter, hunt or fish, maintain the cabin. Read. Train. Run the trails until my body gave out." I pause. "I thought I was healing. Turns out I was just hiding."
"Healing from what?"
My jaw tightens. The face flashes in my mind, the one I try not to see. J, grinning at me in the Afghanistan sun, thirty seconds before the world exploded.
"I lost someone. On my last deployment. My spotter." I force the words out, one at a time. "We'd been partners for six years. He was the closest thing I had to a brother. And I watched him die because I missed something. Because I didn't see the threat in time."
Sadie's hand tightens on mine. She doesn't speak. Just waits.
"After that, I couldn't... I couldn't be around people. Every face was his face. Every conversation was one I should have been having with him. So I came here. Built the cabin. Told myself I'd stay until I didn't feel broken anymore."
"Did it work?"
"No." I look down at her. "Nothing worked until you. You were the first thing that made me want to come back. To feel something other than empty."
Her eyes are wet. "Wolfe."
"I don't tell you this for sympathy. I tell you because you asked me what my life was before you, and the answer is that it wasn't a life. It was just survival." I bring her hand to my lips, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. "You gave me a reason to do more than survive."
She climbs into my lap, straddling me, her hands on my face. "I'm so sorry about your friend. About J."
Hearing his name from her lips cracks open a door I've kept locked for three years.
"He would have liked you." The words surprise me. "He was loud too. Talked constantly. Drove me crazy."
"Sounds like good taste runs in your found family."
I almost smile. "Yeah. Maybe it does."
She kisses me, soft and sweet, and I let myself feel it. All of it. The grief I've been running from and the hope she's brought me and everything in between.
"Stay with me," I murmur against her lips. "Tonight. Tomorrow. Every day you're willing to give me."
"I'm not going anywhere." She pulls back to meet my eyes. "I promise. You're stuck with me now, Wolfe Hendrix."
"Good." I pull her closer. "That's exactly where I want to be."
She's quiet for a moment, her fingers tracing patterns on my chest. Then she looks up at me, and her expression makes my heart stutter.
"Wolfe?"
"Yeah?"
"I love you."
The words land in my chest and crack something open. We haven't said it yet. We've shown it in a hundred ways, but neither of us has spoken it aloud.
I pull back just enough to see her face. She's watching me with those brown eyes, vulnerable and brave and everything I never knew I needed.
"I love you too." No hesitation. No qualification. "I've loved you since you organized my woodpile and told me it was art."
A laugh escapes her, wet and surprised. "That's when you knew?"
"That's when I knew I was in trouble." I brush hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear. "The love came later. Somewhere between teaching you to shoot and watching you tell Derek exactly what kind of man he is."
"Very specific."
"I pay attention."
"I've noticed." She pulls me down for a kiss, soft and slow. "I love you, Wolfe Hendrix. Even though you wake up at ungodly hours and speak in single sentences and keep dead animals in your kitchen."
"I love you, Sadie Chen." My mouth curves against hers. "Even though you never stop talking and you've reorganized my entire cabin and your woodpile system makes no practical sense."
"It's aesthetically pleasing."
"It's ridiculous." I kiss her again, deeper this time. "You're ridiculous. And you're mine."
"Yours," she agrees. "For as long as you want me."
"Forever, then."
Her smile is sunrise. "Forever works for me."
I lift her off her feet, and she wraps her legs around my waist as I carry her toward the bedroom. The dead rabbit is still on the table. The coffee is still cold. None of it matters.
She came to Nevada to escape Valentine's Day.
Instead, she found something worth celebrating.
And so did I.