Chapter 12
MAGS
I wake up because someone is in my kitchen.
My body registers it before my brain does. The ache comes first: thighs, hips, a deep soreness between my legs that is a very complete record of last night. My inner thighs feel like I've been on horseback for eight hours.
There is a faint burn along my jaw and throat where stubble worked against skin, and when I close my eyes I am immediately back at my own kitchen table with his face between my legs and his jaw moving against me with the same deliberate patience he applies to everything, and I have to open my eyes again because I have field work in two hours.
I lie still and smell and listen.
Coffee. The sound of my cabinet closing with a different hand than mine.
I pull on underwear and the oversized wildlife service shirt from my bedpost and walk out.
Luke is standing at my counter in yesterday's jeans, no shirt, his dark hair messy, reading the laminated wolf corridor map taped to my cabinet door like it's a stock report.
He hears me. Turns. The look on his face is not the one he wears at the gate or in the south pasture mud. It's quieter than that, and it does something to my chest I have no business feeling before coffee.
"Morning," he says, and his voice is low and aimed directly at me, and I feel it the same place I felt it last night.
"Morning."
He holds my gaze one beat longer than necessary. Then he turns back to the map.
"East ridge elevation marker is wrong."
I reach past him for the mug he's already poured me. He shifts to let me pass and his hand settles briefly at the small of my back, not grabbing, just there, a whole sentence in the gesture, and then it's gone.
"I filed from the county survey data," I say.
"County survey data is from 1987. That ridge had a slide in 2018. Took the top off."
"You've got it at seventy-one hundred. It's closer to sixty-eight."
I look at him over the mug. He looks at the map.
"You're correcting my field data before I've finished my coffee."
"The data is wrong before you've finished your coffee." He turns. His eyes move over me once, unhurried, and land on my face.
I take a sip. Dark, one sugar, the exact amount of cream I use. I set the mug down and look at him.
He looks at the map.
I take my coffee to the window. Copper River is doing what it does in early July, light off the mountains at an angle that makes the whole valley look staged, like someone wanted to make a point about beauty and did not hold back.
Below, The Rolling Pin's back door is still shut.
Willa won't open the side entrance for another forty minutes.
I do the math without meaning to, and when I turn back, Luke is already doing it too.
"I'll go," he says.
"You don't have to."
"Before the morning rush." No apology in it. Not retreat, something else. The same logic as moving the fence at 4 a.m. because the land required it, not because anyone asked.
I watch him pick up his shirt from the floor. He shakes it out and pulls it over his head. Gets his boots from beside my door.
"Luke."
He looks up.
I went to find something sharp and came up empty, which is not a thing that happens to me. I can demolish a methodology argument at 6 a.m. in a mud pasture. I cannot apparently finish a sentence with him in my kitchen.
He waits. He is very good at it. I've known this about him for one month exactly and I am still not prepared for how much ground a patient man covers by holding still.
"The east ridge," I say. "I'll pull the original survey."
Something moves in his face. He crosses to me before I see it coming and cups my face in both hands, warm and calloused and unhurried, and presses his mouth to my forehead.
Not a kiss that goes anywhere. Just that.
He holds it for a moment, then pulls back and looks at me from close range, dark eyes steady, and says quietly, "You did good work out there, Mags. All of it."
He doesn't mean last night.
Then he picks up his hat from the table, settles it, and gets his hand under my hair at the back of my neck and tips my head back and kisses me the way he does everything.
Unhurried. Thorough. Then he pulls back just far enough, his mouth at my ear: "Come by the ranch tonight.
" Not a question. His thumb traces my jaw once on his way out.
The door closes.
I stand at my window and watch his truck start in the alley below The Rolling Pin. Left turn onto Main Street, south toward the McAllister land, gone before anyone else on this block is awake.
My legs ache. I am smiling at an empty alley. I have field work in ninety minutes.
I finish my coffee.
I'm on the county road at seven-thirty, window cracked, the east ridge coordinates pulled up on my phone mount, when Viv calls.
"Morning," she says.
"Morning."
A pause. She's listening to something in my voice she is not going to name out loud.
"Early start," she says.
The granite ridgeline comes up over the tree line ahead of me, jagged teeth against the bluebird sky, and I watch it and say nothing.
"Mags."
"Late night," I say.
I can hear her not asking. It is a specific skill, the not-asking, and she is very good at it.
"I called to ask if you want to ride out to my north fence line tomorrow," she says. "I found boot prints near the cattle guard that don't match anyone from the Rocking C."
My attention sharpens. "What kind of boots?"
"Wide-set, deep lug tread. Work boot, not a hiker. Same as your east ridge description."
I set my hand flat on the wheel. "What time tomorrow?"
"Seven. Bring your camera."
"I'll be there at six-fifty."
"I know." A beat. "Get some sleep tonight."
She hangs up before I can decide if that's advice or a joke.
Probably both. Viv Sanders arrived in this valley credentialed and underestimated and built something anyway, and she has never once needed a room full of men to believe her first. I filed that about her the night we met over Willa's wine and I have been filing things about her since.
She receives information and stays with it.
I did not know how much I'd needed that until I had it.
The ridgeline holds the morning light. I drive.
I'm back at the apartment by noon, collar checks logged, east ridge coordinates flagged, a documentation cross-reference half-finished on the table.
Willa left pastries at my back door while I was out.
I eat one standing at the counter because I haven't had a real meal since Luke brought me a burger last night.
I sit down at the field laptop to cross-reference Gina's fence-cut measurements against the collar site boot impressions. Files open, overlays loading, comparison grid queued, and then the alert banner drops from the top of the screen.
Small. Red. Official letterhead.
Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks — Corridor Permit Review Filed by: D. Cutter, Copper River Livestock Association Status: Formal Objection Received — Response Required Within 14 Days
I look at the timestamp.
7:04 a.m.
The same time as the methodology review. The same time as the morning after Luke moved the fence.
I don't know if he picks it deliberately or if it's simply when he gets to his desk. I don't know which possibility is worse.
I close the alert. Open it again. Read the full filing header through twice.
Fourteen days.
I pull up my documentation folder, the one I opened the night Gina told me to start a paper trail, and I create a new file. Date. Filing time. Case number. Formal Objection: coordinated timestamp, reference fence cut June 8, collar tamper, methodology review. Pattern active.
Then I open a new message and type three words to Luke's number: He filed again.
The reply comes back in under two minutes.
I know. Come by the ranch.
The same words he said against my ear this morning. I sit with that for a moment, the corridor map on the cabinet door with the elevation error circled in red, the fourteen-day clock running in the corner of my screen, his truck already back on McAllister land doing the work that never stops.
I close the laptop and start packing my field bag.