Chapter 15
Bottleneck
JULIETTE
Heat stayed trapped in the cabin even after Nick killed the engine, thick and stagnant, the peppery bite of thorn scrub sealed behind the glass. In the back seat, Owen’s heavy breathing filled the quiet while he lifted his phone toward the sun, searching for a bar that didn’t exist.
“Nothing,” Owen muttered, as if the phone had personally failed him. “We were supposed to have satellite backup for this leg.”
Nick didn’t turn. He stayed angled over the wheel, his shoulders blocking a significant portion of the windshield. The cabin seemed to organize itself around him.Owen’s phone drama received none of his attention. The dead signal indicator on the dash did.
Or my breathing did, and he was pretending otherwise.
“The ridge drops signal without warning,” Nick said, his voice low enough to settle at the base of my spine. “That’s why we stop here instead of pretending the dead zone doesn’t exist.”
He inhaled through his nose, the kind of restrained breath men took when they were counting to ten. “I told you that at the lodge.”
“You said spotty,” Naomi added, her voice tight with the specific brand of anxiety that comes from being disconnected from the rest of civilization. “You didn’t say prehistoric.”
I didn't join the post-mortem. I sat perfectly still, my hands resting on my knees, watching the pulse in Nick’s forearm where it rested behind me. He wasn't touching me—there were two inches of heated air between his skin and my shoulder.
Nick shifted. The fabric of his sleeve brushed my arm, one brief drag of friction that made my fingers curl against my knees. He didn’t pull away.
“Wilder,” he said, his voice dropping an octave. “Center box. Black Leica. Camera.”
It wasn’t a request.
His arm lifted from the console and stretched along the back of my seat, a practical adjustment that made absolutely nothing more practical.
I reached for the latch between us.
The Leica case was tucked inside beside a folded map and a coil of radio cable. I pulled it free, and my shoulder brushed the hard line of his chest as I sat back.
Excellent. My nervous system had apparently resigned over a camera, a storage box, and one inconvenient shoulder brush.
He stayed exactly where he was, infuriatingly calm, while the two people in the back seat continued arguing about a world that had temporarily stopped answering.
He let them argue for another second before his voice cut through the back seat.
“Out.”
Owen blinked. “Sorry, what?”
Nick opened his door. “Brief leg-stretch and a photo op. Phones stay in the vehicle unless you’re using them for photos. Nobody goes past the marker stones. Nobody tests the edge for a better signal. Nobody wanders.”
His head angled toward Owen in the rearview mirror. “Especially not you.”
Naomi made a quiet sound that might have been amusement. Owen gripped his phone tighter, affronted by the radical suggestion that he not wander toward an edge for better reception.
Nick didn’t wait for a response. His door swung open, and heat rushed into the cabin, dry and immediate, carrying the sharp green bite of crushed brush.
I stepped down onto the packed dirt, the ground holding the morning’s warmth firm under my boots.
Fine dust lifted at the edge of my step, caught in the harsh, vertical light of the midday sun.
Of course, Ranger Protocol had already engaged. He rounded the front of the vehicle, counting people before scenery.
Owen hovered near the hood with his phone raised like a divining rod. Naomi had stepped toward the marker stones, her camera lifted to the ridge but her feet exactly where Nick had told her to keep them.
His attention moved over Owen near the vehicle, Naomi inside the boundary, and the clean line back to the driver’s door if either of them got creative.
It was infuriating, really, watching a man make sure everyone was safe with that much quiet precision and having my body treat it like flirtation.
I followed him toward the rail, the Leica strap looped around my wrist. Behind us, Owen muttered something about one bar and corporate negligence. Naomi told him to stop trying to negotiate with satellites.
The overlook wasn’t dramatic in the way luxury brochures liked to promise.
No one had softened it for consumption with champagne, architectural seating, or an infinity pool engineered for social media.
A timber rail marked the safe line, marker stones held the boundary, and beyond them, the ridge fell away into a vast sweep of gold grass, low brush, and hard light.
The road we’d climbed narrowed behind us, one pale scar cut through the land until it vanished into heat shimmer.
A bottleneck. One way in, one way out, and nowhere useful to hide.
Nick stopped beside me, close enough for his shadow to touch my boots. His attention cut back over the overlook in one quick sweep: Owen by the hood, Naomi inside the marker line, the vehicle angled for an easy departure.
Only after that did his attention return to me.
“You do that constantly,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Count exits. Count people. Count ways everything can go wrong.”
His mouth barely moved. “You don’t?”
Annoying, accurate, and devastatingly inconvenient.
I lifted the Leica. “Is this for the view, or are you about to make a point?”
“Both.”
“Efficient.”
“Necessary.”
He stepped behind me, not touching, but close enough that the heat of him altered the air at my back. “Look through it.”
I raised the camera to my eye.
The world narrowed. The ridge collapsed into frame, the lens dragging the far distance close. The lodge became a pale geometry tucked into the trees. The road behind us looked thinner than it had from the jeep. The valley spread wide and indifferent beneath a sky bleached almost white by noon.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“A view.”
“No.” His voice was low at my shoulder. “Try again.”
My finger stilled against the camera body.
“Are you seeing it, or solving it?”
Rude. Also correct.
I adjusted the focus ring, more for something to do than because the image needed sharpening. “I like understanding what I’m looking at.”
“You like knowing what changes if you let it in.”
The Leica felt suddenly heavier in my hands.
Behind us, Owen had given up on reception and was now staring at the horizon like it owed him inner peace.
Naomi angled her lens toward him, apparently deciding his spiritual crisis deserved archival evidence.
She laughed under her breath. The sound should have made the moment less intimate.
It didn’t.
Nick’s attention kept moving: vehicle, Naomi, then back to me. He never stopped doing his job. Somehow, standing this close, that made the man harder to ignore. “This ridge makes people uncomfortable,” he said. “No signal. Narrow road. Too much sky. People think the view is the point.”
“It isn’t?”
“The point is what happens when they stop being reachable.”
My fingers tightened around the Leica. I lowered the camera. “That sounds dangerously close to a metaphor.”
“It’s terrain.”
“Of course it is.”
He reached past me, his hand closing gently over the lens to angle it a fraction to the left.
The adjustment was small, almost nothing, and somehow worse than if he’d taken over.
His knuckles brushed mine, brief and controlled, and every sensible thought in my head stepped directly off the overlook.
“Don’t chase the whole horizon,” he said. “Pick one point and hold it.”
I looked through the Leica again. This time, the frame caught the road where it tightened between two shoulders of rock before dropping toward the lower plain. A clean pinch point where movement had to choose a direction. “A bottleneck,” I said.
“Yes.”
The word sat between us, too precise to be innocent.
“One way through,” he said. “Everyone thinks they’ll have options until the land removes them.”
I kept the camera to my eye because lowering it felt dangerous. “And then?”
His voice dropped closer. “Then you find out whether they waste time resisting or move with what’s in front of them.”
The ridge stayed quiet around us, except for the dry scratch of grass and the occasional hard call from the Acacia grove.
Behind us, Owen and Naomi remained exactly where Nick had placed them, safely bored and uselessly disconnected.
Nick didn’t stop monitoring them. Not once.
The attention he kept on me felt sharper for being rationed.
“You brought me here because the signal drops,” I said.
“No.”
“No?”
He turned slightly, enough that the line of his shoulder blocked the glare. “I brought everyone here because it’s part of the tour. I brought you to this side of the rail because you needed to see what happens when the noise stops.”
My throat tightened. I hated that he could do that, say something quiet and practical and still find the tender place. “I function perfectly well without noise.”
“You function perfectly well while managing it.”
“That’s not the same thing?”
“No.”
A single syllable. Flat. Certain. Obnoxious.
The Leica strap slipped against my wrist. I tightened my grip before it could fall.
“You can run a company from anywhere with signal,” he said.
“And without one?”
His face angled toward mine behind the dark lenses. “Then you have to decide who you are when no one is asking you for an answer.”
He stepped closer, leaving me room and taking up all of it anyway.
I should have stayed in the lodge bar with a very large gin and tonic. This is how perfectly respectable women lose the plot.
“You’re overthinking the frame again, Wilder.”
I lowered the Leica. “I am assessing the composition, Nick. It’s what civilized people call looking.”
“No.”
“You’ve become very fond of that word.”
“You keep needing it.”
My pulse kicked once, hard and deeply unhelpful. “And what am I doing wrong this time?”
His expression stayed unreadable behind the dark lenses of his Oakleys. The certainty in his voice did the damage. “You’re trying to include everything so you don’t have to choose what matters.”
My grip tightened on the Leica strap. I looked away first, which was unacceptable on several levels. “That's a lot of psychological violence for a scenic overlook.”
His mouth almost moved. Not a smile. A controlled shift at the corner, gone before it could become anything merciful. “You asked what I was looking for.”
“And?”
“I’m still deciding what to do with it.”
His hand came close enough to make my pulse misbehave, then caught the Leica strap twisted against my wrist.
Practical. Professional. Completely reasonable.
His fingers slid beneath the leather and turned it flat against my skin. A small correction. A meaningless adjustment.
Apparently, I was one practical correction away from becoming a cautionary tale at a scenic overlook.
I stayed still. His expression shifted by fractions, the professional restraint thinning until the man beneath it showed through.
“The other two are right there,” I managed, though the words felt like they belonged to a woman with far better judgment.
Nick’s head turned slightly, the dark lenses cutting past me. Owen by the hood. Naomi near the marker stones. Both safe. Both deeply invested in their own irritation.
“They’re inside the boundary,” he said, his gaze cutting past me once more. “And I’m still watching.”
His hand moved from the strap to the back of my neck. His palm was hot, his grip firm enough to make the rest of the ridge go strangely quiet, but his thumb brushed once beneath my hairline, careful enough to undo me.
He didn’t pull me closer. He simply held me there. On a ridge where nothing could reach me except him.
This was where the map stopped helping, and inconveniently, the view was fucking spectacular.
"Juliette."
He said my name like it was a confession, stripped of every title I knew how to hide behind.
Game over.
He knew exactly what he was doing. Worse, he knew I was going to let him.
"Nick," I whispered.
The space between us became the only thing in the world.
He didn’t lean in.
He waited for me to close it.
And when I did, when my hands found the rough fabric of his shirt and my mouth found his, restraint became someone else’s problem.
He tasted like heat and mint, like the bitter edge of restraint finally losing its grip. His hand tightened at the back of my neck, not pulling, only holding, and my fingers fisted in his shirt hard enough to leave a wrinkle.
Every tidy explanation I’d built for this fell apart under his mouth.
The relief scared me more than the wanting.
Wanting him was inconvenient.
Irritatingly physical.
The relief was worse.
Relief meant trust.
Nick pulled back, his thumb tracing the line of my lower lip for one lingering, insanely lethal second.
Somewhere behind us, Owen’s voice rose over the ridge, indignant and completely unaware he had just saved me from making several poor choices near a safety rail.
Nick’s hand left my skin.
His face stayed angled toward mine for one beat longer than professionalism allowed. Then his attention cut past me. Owen. Naomi. Vehicle. All accounted for.
“We’re moving,” he called over his shoulder, his voice steady enough to pass inspection.
I straightened my shirt, my fingers trembling as I gripped the Leica. The place where his thumb had touched my mouth still burned. My internal compass lurched, searching for north and finding nothing steady.
"Coming," I said, my voice surprisingly clear.
I turned back toward the jeep, toward the noise and the logistics and the five sisters who were currently thousands of miles away, blissfully unaware that the woman who always knew the next move had just run out of marked road.
My spine straightened before I could stop it. Sleeves adjusted. Hair smoothed. A polite, neutral expression settled into place, the kind that said nothing to see here and meant absolutely none of it.
Steady. Functional. Breathe. Get it back, Juliette.
I turned back toward the jeep. By the time my boot hit the gravel, the mask had settled.
Then Nick glanced back, and the performance caught at the seams.
The ridge hadn’t taken anything from me.
It had only removed the noise long enough for me to hear what I wanted.