Chapter Thirteen
~ Sterling ~
I sat at the long table with the maps spread in front of me and the wood stove ticking its slow, metronomic pulse behind my left shoulder.
The light had shifted. Morning was long gone.
The pale gold through the east window had deepened to something amber, thick with dust motes, and the pine smoke from the stove carried the particular smell of a building settling into its bones for the evening.
The cut fence waited on the eastern perimeter.
I’d marked it in pencil, a clean X where the steel cable lay coiled beside the post. The boot prints were circled in red, the diamond tread pattern crisp on the page, and I traced the contour lines with my fingertip for the seventeenth time since lunch, looking for angles I’d missed.
There were no angles I’d missed. I’d checked. Rechecked. The camera was in place on the cottonwood downstream, thermal and motion-activated, covering the river approach and the northeast corner in one shot. Cruz was on overnight. The bait was set. The play was running.
None of which explained why my focus kept sliding.
The tension sat in the room like something with mass.
Mitch’s gaze from the couch was steady, unhurried, direct in a way that cut through every defense I’d built and landed somewhere behind my sternum.
Caleb’s flour-dusted forearm brushed the doorway as he passed, and the contact—brief, warm, deliberate—registered on my skin like a brand.
The bunkhouse felt impossibly small. The ceiling beams pressed down.
The pine walls closed in. The air between us carried the weight of something that had been building since morning, since yesterday, since the first time Mitch had looked at me across a fence post and I’d felt something crack open behind my ribs that I hadn’t authorized.
My chest was tight. My jaw set so hard the muscle in my cheek jumped. The operational part of my brain—the part that handled threats, that mapped perimeters, that kept me alive in nineteen countries under conditions ranging from inconvenient to lethal—was offline. Completely.
What was online was simpler and more dangerous: want, plain and certain.
Mitch watched me from the couch. His magazine was forgotten on his lap, right side up finally, and his eyes held mine with that warm, unhurried focus that said he’d been patient long enough and the patience had run its course.
His thigh shifted. Boots crossed at the ankle.
The casual sprawl of a man who had decided, without consultation, that the space he occupied was his by right.
Caleb hummed from the kitchen. The sound carried over the scrape of a bowl against countertop, low and warm, and his flour-dusted hands worked dough with a rhythm that was steady and certain and entirely its own thing.
He brushed the doorway again as he passed. Deliberate this time. His forearm left a pale streak on the wood, and I tracked it with my eyes before I could stop myself.
The pencil broke.
I hadn’t meant for it to break. My grip had tightened without permission, and the graphite snapped clean between my fingers, and the sound was sharp in the quiet—a small, definitive crack that might as well have been a gunshot.
I slammed the map down on the table. The paper crinkled.
Pencils rolled. The ruler slid to the edge and caught there, trembling, and the sound of it filled the bunkhouse and died just as quickly, swallowed by the wood stove’s steady tick and the low hum from the kitchen and Mitch’s breathing from the couch, which I could hear now, which I had no business hearing.
I looked up. Met Mitch’s gaze first. His eyes—hazel, shifting toward gold in the amber light—held mine across the room with that direct, unhurried focus that cut through everything. Then Caleb’s.
Caleb had stopped humming. He stood in the kitchen doorway with flour on his forearms and his apron streaked with something golden, and his expression was warm and certain and entirely, devastatingly present.
“Fine,” I said.
One word. Rough. My voice dropped that particular half-octave, the one that happened when the control slipped, and the sound of it hung in the air between us like something I’d spent carefully and had no regrets about.
My pulse hammered. My hands were steady. The contradiction was pure Sterling—the body betraying what the face refused to show, and both of them happening at once with a precision that would have been impressive if it hadn’t been so completely dismantling.
Mitch’s grin went wide. Unrepentant. The grin of a man watching a specific outcome arrive exactly on schedule, and the schedule, apparently, had been his all along.
He set the magazine aside and stood up in one smooth motion, boots heavy on the hardwood, and crossed the room in three strides that covered ground at a pace that still surprised me.
He dropped into the chair beside me. Close. Our thighs touched—Mitch’s warm and solid against mine, the denim rough, the heat of him radiating through the fabric—and he didn’t adjust. Didn’t create distance. Sat there like the contact was expected, earned, non-negotiable.
From behind me, Caleb’s hand settled on my shoulder. Warm. Certain. His fingers curled into the muscle there, flour dust transferring from his skin to my shirt, and the weight of his palm anchored me to the chair in a way that felt like surrender and something warmer underneath.
They exchanged a look over my head. That twin thing.
Silent communication that required no words and carried the weight of absolute certainty, and I watched it happen from the middle—Mitch’s grin widening, Caleb’s mouth doing that thing at the corner, the precursor to a smile—and the coordination of it was so perfect it bordered on offensive.
“You have no idea how long we’ve been waiting for that word,” Mitch said. His voice was low. Rough with something that wasn’t patience anymore. “Months. Literal months. I’ve had a count going. Caleb knows the number. Don’t you, Caleb?”
“Seventeen weeks,” Caleb said from behind me. His hand squeezed my shoulder once, warm and certain. “Four days. Approximately nine hours. The timeline gets fuzzy around the hallway incident.”
“You’ve been counting,” I said. Flat. Not a question.
“We’ve been counting,” Mitch corrected. He leaned in, close enough that his breath warmed my ear, and his voice dropped to something that lived in the space between a promise and a threat.
“And now that we’ve got it, I’m going to take you apart.
Slowly. Thoroughly. The way you’ve been wanting since approximately the second week we met, and don’t give me that look, I know exactly what week two looked like on your face. ”
My jaw worked. The muscle in my cheek jumped hard, and Mitch’s grin widened because he’d seen it, of course he’d seen it. He saw everything especially the things people weren’t saying.
Caleb’s hand slid from my shoulder to the back of my neck. His fingers threaded into my hair, warm and deliberate, and his thumb traced the line of my jaw from behind, callus rough against stubble, and his voice was softer but no less devastating when it came.
“I’m going to have you,” Caleb said. Practical.
Measured. Like he was describing a crop rotation plan rather than the specific, detailed way he intended to fuck me.
“Mitch first. Then me. Or both at once if you can take it, and I think you can. I’ve been thinking about it.
The way your cock looks when you’re hard.
The way your voice drops when you’re close.
I want all of it. Every sound. Every shake. ”
The words landed everywhere at once. My chest. My gut. Lower, much lower, my cock hardening against my jeans with an urgency that was embarrassing and unavoidable and entirely, completely theirs.
Mitch’s thigh pressed harder against mine.
His hand found my knee under the table, fingers digging in with a grip that was firm and possessive and left no room for debate.
“And after Caleb’s done with you,” he said, low against my ear, “I’m going to bend you over that desk and fuck you until you forget your own name. How’s that sound, sweetheart?”
I closed my eyes. Breathed. The wood stove ticked.
The amber light held. The maps were scattered across the table, forgotten, the cut fence and the boot prints and the eastern perimeter rendered completely irrelevant by the weight of Mitch’s hand on my knee and Caleb’s fingers in my hair and the particular warmth of two men who had decided, without debate, that I was theirs.
I opened my eyes. Looked between them—Mitch beside me with his grin and his certainty, Caleb behind me with his flour-dusted hands and his quiet focus—and felt something crack open behind my sternum that had been building since morning, since yesterday, since the first time I’d walked into this bunkhouse and decided, incorrectly, that it was mine alone.
Whatever happened next, I was in.
Completely.
Irrevocably.
Fine.
I followed them down the hallway because following was easier than leading, and leading required decisions I wasn’t prepared to make.
The bunkhouse floor creaked under our weight—Mitch first, boots heavy on the treads, then Caleb with his lighter step, then me bringing up the rear like a man walking toward something I’d been circling for months and had finally decided to approach directly.
My bedroom door stood open. Lamplight spilled into the hallway in a warm amber puddle that caught Mitch’s boots as he crossed the threshold, and Caleb followed, his flour-dusted apron exchanged for a clean flannel, his hair still damp from the shower he’d taken after dinner.
I stood in the doorway and watched them inhabit a space I’d convinced myself was mine alone, and the contradiction of it—them here, in my room, the bed unmade from this morning, the window gone black with night—landed in my chest with a warmth that had nothing to do with the wood stove.