Chapter Nine
~ Caleb ~
I stood outside Sterling’s bedroom door with my arms loose at my sides and my heart doing something complicated behind my ribs. The hallway was dim, just the single bulb at the far end throwing enough light to navigate by and not enough to feel exposed.
My face gave away nothing because I’d been practicing my expression in bathroom mirrors for approximately three weeks, and practice, in my experience, was the difference between wanting something and getting it.
The bunkhouse creaked. Wood stove ticking in the main room, holding the night’s chill at bay with the steady patience of something that had been doing its job longer than I’d been alive.
Sterling came down the hall from the direction of the bathroom. His stride was long, unhurried, the particular gait of a man who covered ground at a pace that still surprised me no matter how many times I’d watched him do it. His boots were quiet on the hardwood.
The gun on his hip caught the low light, metal dark and serious, and the sight of it did something to my chest that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the man wearing it.
He stopped three feet from his door. Looked at me. One dark eyebrow lifted, the crease beside his left eye deepening into the expression I’d been collecting since approximately week two: Sterling Callahan registering something unexpected and deciding whether it deserved his full attention.
It did. I could see it in his face before he said anything, the way his jaw settled, the way his eyes—dark green, registering everything, giving back nothing—did their full read of the situation: Caleb Pruitt, strawberry-blond hair still damp from the shower, flannel shirt, bare feet, standing outside his bedroom door at an hour when reasonable people were in bed.
“Problem?” Sterling said.
“No problem,” I said.
He waited. Sterling’s patience was not the passive kind.
It was the patience of a man who had decided that silence was a more efficient interrogation technique than questions, and he was willing to outlast whatever resistance he encountered, which in my case was approximately forty-five seconds of standing in a hallway trying not to blush.
“Tonight you get me. Tomorrow you get Mitch. If you’re very lucky, you get both of us the night after that.” I let it sit in the air between us for a moment. “That’s the offer.”
I delivered it flat and certain, the way Sterling liked things. Direct. No hedging. Words spent carefully because they cost something.
Sterling’s face didn’t change. His eyes didn’t change. But something shifted behind them—a recalibration, and I watched it happen with the specific fascination of someone who had spent weeks trying to read this face and was finally getting good at it.
The silence stretched. Long enough that I started doing the math in my head, running the probabilities, the way Sterling would—because Sterling did everything the way Sterling would, and that was the thing about him that made my chest do something complicated whenever he was in the room.
He thought in contingencies. He assessed risk the way other people assessed weather. And right now, standing in a dim hallway with my heart loud behind my ribs, I was a contingency he hadn’t fully planned for, and watching him realize it was its own kind of heat.
Then Sterling reached past me and opened his bedroom door. The hinges didn’t make a sound, because Sterling’s door, unlike Mitch’s, was maintained.
He stepped aside, one hand on the door frame, his body angled to give me a clean path through, and I went in before he could reconsider because reconsideration was Sterling’s native language and I didn’t have time for it tonight.
The room was small and warm. Lamplight low on the nightstand, throwing amber across the pine walls. The wood stove’s glow reached the east-facing window, glass gone black with night, the pasture and the ridge beyond it invisible in the dark.
The bed was unmade—blanket pulled up to the pillow, Sterling’s version of housekeeping—and the chest of drawers sat against the far wall with nothing on it except a leather belt and a pocket knife, arranged with the precision of a man who believed that surfaces should be functional or empty, and there was no middle ground.
Sterling closed the door. The latch clicked, soft and final. He turned around, and his attention landed on me with the full weight of what it was—focused, unhurried, as if Sterling Callahan had decided that something deserved his complete focus, and that something, improbably, was me.
“How does this work?” he asked. Low. Direct. “The two of you being brothers and all.”
I gave him the honest answer because Sterling and honesty had an arrangement that predated me, and pretending otherwise would have been an insult to both of us.
“Mitch and I are twins. We’ve been close our whole lives.
” I kept my voice level. Warm, but level.
“But not like that. Nothing like that. No attraction between us. We grew up sharing everything because we had to, and we kept doing it because it worked.” I took a breath.
Held his eyes. “The idea of sharing you with him excites me. Plain fact. No apology.”
Sterling’s jaw shifted. The stubble there caught the lamplight, dark and rough, and I watched the muscle in his cheek tighten once and release. He didn’t deny it. Didn’t deflect. Didn’t do any of the things Sterling Callahan did when he encountered something he wasn’t prepared to want.
That was answer enough.
He crossed the room without rushing. Three long strides, unhurried, covering the distance between us with the same efficiency he brought to everything.
One hand came up, big and warm and scarred across the knuckles, and cupped my jaw.
His thumb traced the line of my cheekbone, rough callus against skin, and he tilted my face up to his and kissed me.
Not like the hallway kiss from weeks ago. That had been warmth and patience and the quality of something still deciding what it was.
This kiss had decided.
Sterling kissed like a man who had been arguing with himself for months and had finally, irrevocably, lost: thorough, unhurried, consuming.
His mouth was hot, his stubble rough against my jaw, and one hand slid into my hair and gripped, fingers threading through the damp strands with a certainty that made my knees do something they hadn’t planned on.
I made a sound. Short, involuntary, the kind of noise that comes from somewhere behind your sternum when you’ve stopped censoring yourself, and Sterling swallowed it and kissed me harder.
His tongue found mine, slow and deliberate, and the taste of him—coffee and something darker, something that was just Sterling—hit the back of my throat and stayed there.
My hands found his chest. The scars, the tattoos, the hard planes of muscle I’d been thinking about with embarrassing frequency since approximately the first week, when I’d walked past the bathroom and caught him shirtless and hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it for three consecutive days.
The heat of him came through the thin cotton of his Henley, and I grabbed the hem and pulled.
Sterling broke the kiss just long enough to let me drag the shirt over his head, one arm, then the other, the fabric catching on his shoulders and then releasing.
My shirt was next, and then we were skin to skin at the chest, my palms flat against the warm map of him—the eight-pack, the slick muscle, the occasional scar that had a story attached to it that he would never tell and I had stopped asking about.
He looked down at me. Really looked. His eyes dark in the low light, the green nearly black, and something in his face was not the careful blankness he carried through the world.
It was the thing underneath the blankness, open and a little wrecked, like a door that had been kept shut for so long the hinges had rusted, and now it was open and the draft was colder than he’d expected.
“You can touch me,” I said.
“I know,” Sterling said.
Then his hands were everywhere. Sterling mapped me the way he mapped topographic terrain—focused, methodical, with the specific attention of a man who intended to remember every detail.
His thumbs dragged across my nipples, rough calluses against sensitive skin, and my breath hitched before I could stop it.
He did it again. Deliberate. Watching my face with those dark green eyes that registered everything and gave back nothing except the quiet satisfaction of a man who had just confirmed a hypothesis.
“There,” Sterling said. Quiet. Like he was filing it away.
“You’re going to be insufferable about this,” I said.
“Probably,” he said, and kissed me before I could respond, his mouth warm and certain against mine, one hand still on my chest, thumb circling with a precision that made my hips shift without permission.
He walked me backward to the bed. Not rushed.
Not hurried. Sterling didn’t hurry; he moved with the long, unhurried stride that covered ground at a pace that still surprised me, and now that stride was directed at getting me horizontal, and I was entirely on board with the plan.
His hands on my shoulders were firm, guiding, the care in them not softening the intent behind them one bit.
He laid me down. The sheets were cool against my back, the mattress firm underneath—Sterling’s bed, built for one person who didn’t believe in luxury, and now holding two, which was exactly the kind of arithmetic I’d been hoping for.
Sterling stood at the edge of the mattress and looked at me. Just looked me, slim and slight against the sheets, flannel shirt open, skin warm in the lamplight.
Sterling Callahan, six-three and broad-shouldered and scarred, standing perfectly still, was looking at me like I was the only thing in the room. Like he had been looking at this room for a long time and had only just been allowed inside.
“You’re allowed to keep going,” I said.
“I’m aware,” Sterling said.