Chapter 12
The stables smelled of sweet hay, leather, and horse.
Sarah stood at the door for a second longer than she needed to, breathing it in, and made herself stop thinking about the last time that smell had meant something other than work.
Hudson was already there.
He had Captain saddled. Bridle on, girth checked, the whole job done. Captain, for his part, looked entirely unbothered by the stranger, which told her more than she wanted it to. Captain didn’t tolerate fools.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said, even though she was, annoyingly, pleased.
He looked up and smiled. “Good morning.” He ran a hand over Captain’s flank. “I had time. Besides, Captain looked like he was judging me for standing around.”
Captain flicked an ear.
Traitor.
“And you were running late.”
“I was not.”
“You were two minutes from running late and your left boot isn’t fully laced.” He checked the girth one more time, an excuse not to look at her while he said it. “I split the difference.”
She glanced down. Damn, he was right.
She decided not to dignify his observation with an answer and led Captain out into the yard, where the cold hit different than it had inside—cleaner, carrying the Alaskan bite of a morning that had frozen everything overnight.
Wyatt’s horse was in the next stall, head already swinging toward the door like he knew exactly what was coming.
“Bon Jovi’s yours,” she said, and watched Hudson’s face do something complicated.
“Wyatt named his horse Bon Jovi?”
“Wyatt named his gelding Bon Jovi. Said he had the right swagger. Don’t ask him about the playlist he made for grooming. It’s extensive.”
“I’m almost afraid to.”
“You should be.” She frowned. “Where’s your jacket?”
Hudson looked down at himself. “I’m wearing one.”
Sarah stared at him. “That’s a city jacket.”
“It keeps the wind off.”
“For the walk between your rental and the diner, maybe.” She disappeared into the tack room before he could argue.
“Sarah—”
She came back carrying a heavy waxed ranch jacket with a shearling collar and tossed it at him.
He caught it one-handed.
“Wear it.”
Hudson looked from the jacket to her. “You’re serious.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Hudson, right now you’re dressed for optimism.”
For the first time that morning, he laughed. He shrugged into the jacket. The sleeves were a fraction short, but the shoulders fit just right. Sarah pretended not to notice that it suited him better than it had ever suited her brother.
“Don’t get attached,” she said, turning away before her brain wandered anywhere unhelpful. “It’s Wyatt’s.”
He saddled Bon Jovi. Fifteen years ago there would have been a little showmanship in it—a grin thrown back over his shoulder, a glance to see if she’d noticed, the easy performance of a nineteen-year-old who liked being watched.
There was nothing like that now. Once Bon Jovi was ready, Hudson mounted, one clean, economical movement, weight settling into the saddle like his body had never once forgotten how.
She swung up onto Captain and gathered the reins. It was unfair, honestly. A man wasn’t supposed to leave for fifteen years and come back better at the one thing she’d always beaten him at.
“You’re better than you used to be.”
“At riding?”
“At everything you used to be flashy about.” She nudged Captain forward, toward the gate. “It’s annoying.”
“Noted.” He beamed and didn’t sound sorry at all.
They rode out into a morning that looked like it had been carved.
Snow lay clean and unbroken across the ground, catching the early light, making the whole world look deceptively gentle.
The only sounds were small ones—the jingle of bits, the soft percussive crunch of hooves breaking snow crust, their breath fogging out and disappearing.
“Forest Service road’s about forty minutes out,” Sarah said, mostly to fill the quiet, mostly because it was easier to talk about the route than anything else. “Then it’s horseback or nothing the last mile. Nora’s directions said the turn isn’t marked.”
“I’ll watch for it.”
“You don’t know what you’re watching for.”
“I’ll watch for the place where the road looks like it isn’t a road.” He said it without inflection, eyes on the trail ahead. “Worked for me in places with worse roads than this one.”
He glanced over his shoulder, a smile in his eyes.
The trail began to climb. The horses worked harder into it, breath coming heavier, the cold biting at any exposed skin with real intent. Sarah leaned forward, weight following Captain’s effort up the grade.
“Take the inside line,” Hudson said.
“Why?”
“Because that patch ahead is glazed.”
“You can see that from here?”
“No.” He grinned. “Captain can.”
She huffed a breath, but he waited until she moved before following.
They rode on and Hudson cleared his throat once.
She glanced over. Nothing in his face. He was watching the trail the same as before, hands easy on the reins, posture unbothered.
But his breathing had gone careful. An easy ride shouldn't have changed it. She tucked it away as a mental note. The sheriff in her insisted that was all she was doing. It didn’t have to mean anything.
“Wyatt swears Bon Jovi’s the smartest horse he’s ever owned,” she said, once the grade leveled and talking didn’t cost either of them as much.
“Wyatt thinks that about everyone who agrees with him.”
That got an actual laugh out of her—short, surprised, gone almost as fast as it arrived. “That’s disturbingly accurate.”
“I’ve had years to think about Wyatt’s personality from a distance. Gives you clarity.”
“Did you think about it a lot? From a distance?”
“More than I expected to.”
She didn’t push on that, even though some part of her wanted to. “Tell me something about him I don’t know. Something from when you two were off being idiots and I wasn’t there to supervise.”
Hudson was quiet for a second, as if he was deciding how much of the file to declassify.
“BUD/S,” he said finally. “Second week. We’re both half-dead from the cold, sleep-deprived, the instructors doing everything they can think of to make us quit.
” A small breath that might have been the start of a laugh.
“And somehow Wyatt decides the appropriate response to total physical collapse is to start singing.”
“No.”
“Livin’ on a Prayer. Full volume. While we’re doing flutter kicks in surf that wanted to kill us.”
“He did not.”
“He absolutely did. Got the whole class doing it, eventually. Even the instructors couldn’t yell over it properly, they were too busy looking confused.
” Hudson shook his head slightly, eyes on the trail, the corner of his mouth doing something that wasn’t quite a smile but close.
“Funny, the things you remember. Grown men, hypothermic, half-convinced they’re going to die, screaming Bon Jovi into the Pacific because Wyatt Meyer refused to suffer quietly. ”
Sarah laughed, loud enough that Captain’s ears flicked back at her.
“That’s the most Wyatt thing I’ve ever heard, and I grew up with him.”
“I’m guessing that’s how the horse got his name.”
“Obviously.” She didn’t even have to think about it. “Mom banned Bon Jovi from family road trips in 2008.”
They rode another stretch in something that had gone easy between them without her quite tracking when it had happened—Hudson telling another piece of some story she’d never have gotten otherwise, her laughing again, smaller this time but real.
The cold, the case, and everything waiting at the end of this trail somehow wasn’t as loud as it had been an hour ago.
She’d been relaxed around him for twenty minutes straight.
This was comfortable. And comfortable was so much more dangerous than wanting, because wanting she knew how to survive. She’d done it for fifteen years on a diet of nothing.
Captain’s hoof skidded briefly on hidden ice. Hudson’s head came around before the horse had fully recovered. “You okay?”
“I’m on a horse, not falling off a cliff.”
His gaze stayed on her for another second. “Sure.”
She straightened in the saddle. Pulled her voice back into something more level. “How much further to the turn?”
Hudson glanced at her, and whatever he saw in her face, he let it go without comment.
“Quarter mile, if Nora’s directions hold.”
“Good.”
The fishing cabin finally came into view through a break in the spruce—small, weathered, smokeless, a structure that looked like it had been built to be forgotten about for most of the year. The lake was frozen and smooth, visible beyond it.
Hudson slowed, scanning the approach. The man she’d spent the last hour laughing with disappeared somewhere behind his eyes.
“Did you ever think you’d come back here?” she asked. “Aurora Cove. Any of it.”
Hudson looked ahead for a second too long, avoiding eye contact. “No.”
Just that. No elaboration or softening, nothing that invited a follow-up question. But there was something underneath the word that didn’t sit flush with it—a gap between what he’d said and what she suspected was actually true.
She let it go. For now.
They rode the last stretch toward the cabin in silence, and the morning’s ease folded itself away somewhere behind them, replaced by the more familiar weight of the job.
Which was probably for the best.
Sarah wasn’t entirely sure she would’ve remembered to keep her distance if it had remained.