Chapter 22
Hudson was standing by the water cooler, cup in hand, barely listening to Statton talk about something that wasn’t landing. He couldn’t have repeated a word of it if she’d asked.
The station door opened.
Sarah.
Sunglasses pushed up into her hair, badge catching the pale afternoon light. Hudson was vaguely aware of his pulse refusing to treat this as a woman walking across a room in a department-issue jacket.
She spoke to Walter, something Hudson couldn’t track because all his attention had narrowed down to the fact that she was there. Walter peeled off to brief two other deputies.
Sarah smiled at Statton on her way past. She didn’t so much as glance in Hudson’s direction. Her office door closed behind her.
Hudson stood there a second too long, cup still in his hand, watching a door that had nothing more to show him.
He’d spent years measuring success by exactly one thing. Finish the mission. Go home. Now, some part of him wanted this one to last a little longer.
Because finding Cord meant finishing it. And finishing it meant there’d be nothing left tying him to Aurora Cove.
And that meant leaving Sarah.
The thought blindsided him, and he had no idea what to do with it.
He went back to the desk she’d cleared for him in the corner of the bullpen and made himself work.
There wasn’t much choice in it. The search grid waited—logging roads still unchecked, properties within a day’s walk of the cabin nobody had visited yet, the patient, unglamorous work of narrowing a search one square mile at a time.
He pulled the map toward him and forced his focus onto it, pencil in hand, marking off what they’d covered and what remained.
The station emptied out slowly as evening drew in. Statton left with a wave. Walter stayed somewhere in the back—after the shooting, nobody left the station alone after dark. Sarah’s office door stayed shut the whole time.
Hudson couldn’t stop looking at it, regardless.
It was a stupid thing—as if some part of his attention had gotten permanently tuned to the sound of her moving around in the next room. The soft scrape of her chair. The rhythm of her footsteps when she crossed to the filing cabinet. He wanted to keep hearing it.
He’d worked in dozens of empty offices in dozens of empty towns and never once registered the quiet as anything other than quiet. Tonight it felt like something was missing. Finally, he shook his head and gathered the maps.
What the hell, Kane?
He squared his notebook. Tomorrow he’d check the last two locations suggested by Cord’s known patterns, then move on to the logging roads they hadn’t covered.
Work. That was the job. That was always supposed to be enough.
He stood, shrugged his jacket back on, and let himself out into the early dark.
The parking lot held the blue hush of an Alaskan evening, the last of the daylight slipping behind the mountains while the first stars fought their way into the sky.
Frost had already started silvering the edges of the cruisers, and every breath hung briefly in the air before disappearing.
He crossed to his rental, dug his keys out of his pocket, and took a slow breath.
Footsteps behind him.
He turned.
Sarah headed toward him, hands in her jacket pockets. She stopped a few feet away, close enough her face was clear in the dying light, far enough that nothing about her stance suggested she’d come to do anything more than talk.
She met his gaze. “Yesterday doesn’t change the job.”
“No.”
“Good.” As if she’d needed to say it as much as she’d needed him to hear it. “I needed you to know that.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
She held his gaze for another heartbeat, as though checking he’d understood. Then she turned toward the station.
Hudson released a breath.
That was it.
She’d said what she’d come to say.
Tomorrow would be work.
Whatever this thing between them was, it would stay unnamed.
His shoulders sagged, bracing for the disappointment of watching her leave.
She made it three paces, then stopped. Loose hair at her temple stirred in the breeze. With her back still to him, her shoulders rose on a slow breath. She stood there for so long Hudson almost spoke. Then she turned, her hands coming out of her pockets.
She looked at him for the longest second, then closed the distance between them, her hand coming up to cup his jaw. There was no danger here, no excuse. Nothing but her choosing this deliberately, her eyes never leaving his.
She kissed him.
Her mouth warm.
Gentle.
For one impossible second the world shrank to the pressure of her mouth against his, the cold air tangled in her hair, laced with the clean scent of citrus.
Fifteen years of distance collapsed.
She stepped back before he could do anything at all. Before his hands, hanging useless and stunned at his sides, even thought about reaching for her.
He stared at her. He had absolutely nothing. No words, no plan, no careful response prepared, the entire architecture of his self-control gone.
Sarah’s mouth curved, the small smile reaching her blue eyes. “That one was my decision.”
She turned and walked back toward the station, her boots crunching on the ice, and didn’t look back once.
Hudson stood exactly where she’d left him.
The station door closed behind her. The sound was impossibly ordinary. As though the world hadn’t just shifted beneath his feet.
The freezing night pressed in around him, and somewhere distant a truck engine idled, then pulled away. He drew in a breath. His lungs protested, and he couldn’t tell whether it was the cold or her.
He stood there long enough that his hands were numb before some functioning part of his brain reminded him he was still holding his keys.
He’d forgotten they were there. Hudson unlocked the rental and opened the driver’s door.
He stalled.
Fifteen years ago he’d sat in a truck because he’d kissed Sarah Meyer.
Tonight she’d kissed him.
Both versions had left him incapable of driving.