Page 133 of At First Spark
“You need to know something.”
I turn toward him.
“If this gets worse,” he says, “I’m not going to be good at pretending I’m calm about it.”
A smile touches the corner of my mouth before I can stop it. “That’s your warning.”
“That’s me being honest.”
I look at him fully then, at the steadiness in his face and the strain underneath it, at all the ways he’s trying to stay careful while already half over the line.
“Okay,” I say. “Then here’s mine.”
He waits as I step closer. Close enough that my hands can find his shirt without reaching.
“If this gets worse,” I say, “I’m not leaving.”
The words land between us like something final. His hand comes to my waist slowly, almost reverently, like he knows exactly how much of me that sentence cost. Then he kisses me. Just deep and certain and full of all the things we don’t know how to solve yet.
It doesn’t fix anything.
Kenzie is still out there. The fire still happened. My mother still believes control is love dressed up properly. The inn still needs more money and more work and more faith than I can guarantee. But when Holt kisses me in the dim warmth of the barn with Tabby purring quietly behind us and Rook finally, blissfully, not interrupting…
None of it gets to be the whole story.
Chapter Twenty-four – Holt
My house has always been quiet in a way the main farmhouse never is. That used to be the point. A little place tucked off the side of Otter Creek property, close enough to the family land that I could walk to the barn in under two minutes, far enough that I could shut the door and hear my own thoughts for once. When I first moved into it, I told everyone it was about independence. Space. Growing up.
The truth was simpler than that. I wanted one place that belonged entirely to me.
No brothers walking in without knocking. No Hadley sprawled across my couch, eating my food and pretending that wasn’t theft because she shared blood with me. No Mom opening the fridge, sighing at the lack of produce, and reappearing the next day with enough groceries to feed a minor league baseball team. No version of myself reflected back in people who had known me too long to let me hide behind whatever mood I happened to be wearing that day.
Now the place is quieter than it’s ever been, and somehow it no longer feels like peace.
I unlock the front door just after sunrise and step inside to the faint smell of coffee grounds and clean laundry soap, to the shape of a life that still looks mostly the same if I don’t examine it too closely. My boots hit the floorboards with the same old sound. My keys land in the dish by the door. My duffel drops onto the chair in the living room where it always does after shift.
But all I can think about is the inn. About Kenzie walking into that front hall like she had every right in the world to stand there. About the way Lark’s voice had sharpened when she toldme and then gone quiet again the second she realized just how much it got under my skin. About the promise she made in the barn with her hands curled in my shirt and that look in her eyes that said she wasn’t bluffing when she told me she wasn’t leaving.
The house should feel warmer with that memory in it. Instead, it makes everything else sharper.
I move through the kitchen on instinct, opening the fridge, staring into it without seeing much beyond eggs, leftovers, mustard, and the pie Mom shoved in there two nights ago, as if she expected emotional distress and planned for it with sugar.
There’s a note on top of the pie container in her handwriting.
Eat something green today.
I close my eyes for half a second and laugh softly into the quiet. The sound stills almost immediately when I hear a car crunch over gravel outside.
Not Mom’s SUV. Hadley’s Jeep.
Because apparently, none of the women in my life have any regard for reasonable boundaries anymore.
I don’t bother opening the door before she does it herself.
“Holt,” she calls as she lets herself in, “before you say anything, I brought breakfast and gossip, and one of those is for your own good.”
I lean one shoulder against the fridge and watch her come in, carrying two paper bags and a drink tray, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, a grin already threatening at the corners of her mouth.
