CHAPTER 7 #2
Heat radiated from him anyway. He was broad and alive and infuriatingly steady.
For a while, they listened to the storm.
The silence stopped being empty. Clara drank the broth. Rian watched the windows and the laptop without turning his head too far toward her.
The ache in her side dulled from a bright line to a heavy pulse. Her shivering eased.
“Do you ever get tired of owning every room you enter?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She had expected denial. “That was too honest.”
“You asked while wounded. I am making allowances.”
“Careful. I might exploit that.”
“I am counting on it.”
There it was again, the dry edge of humor where she had expected stone. Clara turned her head. He was already looking at her.
Close now. Not touching. Close well enough to see a small nick on his lower lip, the dark stubble along his jaw, the faint shadows under his eyes from a day spent managing a storm, a dying drive, and her.
Her body wanted stupid things. A hand in his sweater. Her mouth against that cut on his lip.
The solid heat of him without wool and arguments between them.
Her mind supplied the rest: blood loss, pain tablets, a locked lodge, a man with all the keys.
Clara set the mug down with care.
“I want you,” she said, because the truth deserved daylight even at night. “That does not mean I trust you.”
Rian went very still.
“I know,” he said.
“And wanting you does not mean I am well enough to make every choice my body is suggesting.”
“I know that too.”
“Do you?”
His eyes held hers. “Yes.”
No speech. No wounded pride. No attempt to turn restraint into another kind of power.
Clara nodded once, more to herself than to him. “Then this is where we stop.”
He breathed out slowly. “All right.”
She hated the relief in her chest. Hated the disappointment beneath it. Hated most that he did exactly what she asked and stayed beside her without turning the moment into punishment.
Rian reached for the laptop only after she gave a small tilt of her chin.
“Show me the partition map again,” she said.
He opened the screen and angled it toward her. “We have roughly forty-eight minutes before the next check.”
“Then we work.”
They worked by stove light, his shoulder near hers, the blanket pooled between them like a border both of them had agreed not to cross. Clara found two false directories and one checksum irregularity that made Rian's brows draw down. He found a buried access marker that made her stomach go cold.
Outside, the storm shifted.
At first she thought it was only wind. Then the security panel in the study gave three soft beeps.
Rian was on his feet before the third one finished. The gentleness vanished from him so completely Clara felt the loss as temperature.
“Stay here,” he said, already moving.
She grabbed the side of the table and pushed herself upright. “Try again.”
He stopped at the study threshold. A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Please stay by the stove while I see who just tried the ridge gate code.”
The words went through her colder than the room.
“The ridge gate is outside the property line,” Clara said.
“Yes.”
“And someone knows the code.”
Rian looked back at the black windows, then at her borrowed clothes, her blanket, her laptop glowing with the paused remains of the drive.
Forty-eight minutes became thirty-nine.
Clara used the back of the custody note because the paper was already part of the chain and because Rian's face did something faintly pained when she wrote in the margin. Good. Annoyance kept both of them awake.
She marked the false directories with short labels, then drew a line between the checksum irregularity and the buried access marker Rian had found.
“That marker is not Greer's style,” she said.
“You know his style after one contract?”
“I know a man who buys expertise and hides liability. This is someone who expects systems to answer politely.”
Rian looked at the string of characters on the damaged screen. “Internal.”
“Or stolen internal.”
“You are giving my company charity.”
“I am giving myself room not to be wrong twice in one week.”
His gaze shifted to her, and the stove heat seemed to collect in the narrow space between them. Clara kept her eyes on the page. Safer.
Less useful.
The lodge settled around them with the tired groan of old timber taking punishment from the storm.
Beyond the windows, snow threw itself against the glass and slid down in shining streaks.
Inside, the world had reduced itself to firelight, battery glow, wool against Clara's knees, the salt-warm taste of broth still on her tongue, and Rian's shoulder close so she could feel heat through the border of blanket between them.
She wanted to lean. She did not.
“Mara needs the checksum first,” Clara said. “If the radio window opens, I give her enough to prove continuity without giving her the drive contents.”
“She will know what to do with it?”
“She will complain about my formatting and do exactly what needs doing.”
“Good.”
The simple approval lodged in a place Clara had not armored properly. She wrote the next number too hard and nearly tore the page.
Rian noticed. He always noticed. This time he said nothing, which was a mercy with teeth.
The pain tablets had taken the sharpest edge off her side and left everything else too clear. The weight of his coat over her shoulders earlier. The exact second he had stopped looking at her mouth because she told him the moment ended.
The absence of punishment afterward. Men revealed themselves most clearly when refused. Rian had revealed restraint, frustration, and want disciplined into stillness.
That was not trust.
It was evidence.
Clara added one more line to the note: Mara checksum contact pending storm window.
“You are smiling,” Rian said.
“I am documenting.”
“With violence.”
“My handwriting has strong opinions.”
“So does the rest of you.”
She looked up then, which was a mistake. His face was half-shadowed, tired and intent, the controlled mouth, the scar near his jaw, the eyes that made no promise they had not earned. Her body remembered wanting him with irritating clarity.
“Back to work,” she said.
His voice lowered. “Yes.”
He turned the laptop slightly, giving her the better view again.
“Someone,” he said, “just tried to come in.”