Page 70 of Claimed on the Ridge

"But it'll probably be someone I recognize." She taps the pen on the page. "Gary doesn't hire strangers. He hires people who owe him. The name on that card is someone who did business with his consulting firm and came out the other side with a debt that doesn't show up on a balance sheet."

"How many people like that does he have?"

"Enough that two of them showed up at your door late last night." She looks at the diagram on the page. "Gary doesn't waste resources. If he sent two men to Sawyer's Ridge, he already knows I'm in the area. This wasn't a search. This was a confirmation."

"You said that last night."

"I'm saying it again because you're looking at me like you're about to lock me in a room for my own protection." She meets my gaze. "Don't."

I lean forward. The diagram on her notepad is more detailed than I expected. She's drawn lines between names I don't recognize, annotated with dates and locations. Some of the handwriting is from last night, the letters tight and controlled. Some is from just now, looser, the pen moving faster as connections surface.

"What's the timeline on his next move?" I ask.

"Depends on what his men tell him. If they report a lodge with a family living in it and no sign of a woman matching my description, he moves on to the next lead. He has resources,but he's not wasteful." She taps a node on the diagram. "If they report anything that makes him curious, a truck that shouldn't be there, a man who answered too smoothly, a number of vehicles that doesn't match a family operation, he'll send someone with the photo. Or he'll come himself."

"And if he comes himself?"

She stops writing. The pen rests on the page. When she looks up, her face carries the particular stillness of a woman who has already answered this question for herself and doesn't like what she found.

"Then we'll know, because Gary doesn't confirm from a distance. He walks in the front door."

The fire pops. A log shifts in the grate, sending a scatter of embers across the hearthstone.

She goes back to the diagram. Her pen moves across the page, and I watch her hand, the way her fingers wrap the pen, the ink-stain on the pad of her thumb. The flannel has slipped off one shoulder again. The skin underneath is marked from last night, a faint shadow along the collarbone where I gripped too hard on the couch. She hasn't mentioned it. She hasn't covered it.

The adrenaline from last night hasn't burned off. It's changed form, turned from the cold operational focus I needed at the door into something hotter, lower, harder to control. Every time she looks up from the page, every time her eyes find mine with that sharp, tired, fearless focus, the tension at the base of my spine winds another turn.

She was in the dark kitchen while those men stood on my porch and described her. She stayed silent, stayed hidden, and let me handle the door because she trusted me to hold the line. The trust cracked a place open in me that I don't have a name for. What I have a name for is the heat that moves throughmy body when a woman I want looks at me like she's already decided what she wants and is waiting for me to catch up.

"You're staring again," she says.

"I'm aware."

"It's still distracting."

"Good."

Her pen stops. She looks at me. The space between the chair and the arm where I'm sitting is the width of a fist. Neither of us has moved since I sat down. The air in that space has been getting heavier since the conversation stopped.

I reach for her face. My hand finds her jaw and tilts her head back. The notepad slides off her knee and lands on the floor.

"I'm done watching you from across the room," I say.

Her breath catches. The catch is small, barely there, and the fact that I hear it anyway tells me how quiet the lodge is and how close my mouth is to hers. She grips my wrist, not pulling me away, holding me where I am.

"Alex."

"I know."

I kiss her. My hand tightens in her hair. My mouth takes hers like a man who spent the night watching the door with a rifle beside him, the woman he wants sitting across the room, alive and whole and fierce. The sun is coming up. The door stayed closed. Everything I was ready to kill for is sitting in my flannel shirt mapping the enemy's network with a notepad on the floor between us.

Her mouth opens under mine. Her hand tightens on my wrist and then releases, both hands coming up to the sides of my face, pulling me down into her. The angle from the arm of the chair is wrong, too high, too far, and I solve it by standing and pulling her up with me.

She comes up into me, her palms on my chest, her fingers spreading across the bare skin like she's measuring what she'sgot. The flannel rides up on her thighs. I walk her backward until her shoulders hit the wall beside the fireplace. The impact is solid, the breath leaving her body on contact.

"Here?" she says against my mouth. The main room. The common space. My brothers are on the road, the overlook, the east side. Nobody is walking through that door.

"Here."