Page 80 of Breaking His Exile

“Rainey.”

“I wasn’t. I was just— listening. She mentioned the trips. She mentioned how long she’d known you. She mentioned that you understood the silence out there and most people didn’t.” She turned around. Her face was careful, which meant she was working on something she didn’t want to show yet. “And you talked about her. At the cabin. You don’t talk about people much.”

He waited.

“You talked about her the way you don’t talk about people,” she said. “Like she was someone you trusted. And I—” Her jaw tightened. She looked at the guitar case in the corner rather than at him. “I noticed. That’s all.”

“You were jealous.”

“I said I noticed.”

“Rainey.”

She looked at him. Her chin was up, and the color in her face was slightly higher than the room temperature explained.

“Yes,” she said. Flat. Committed. “Fine. Yes. I heard you mention her and I registered it more than I should have, and then when she showed up here this morning being competent and warm and completely not threatened by me, I felt—” She stopped. “Stupid. I felt stupid.”

Evander sat with that.

He turned it over. Looked at it from all sides. He had spent eight years building a life with exactly two things in it that he trusted — Tilly and the backcountry, and Greta by extension because Greta was part of the backcountry. And Rainey, who had been inside his life for eight days and most of them had involved someone trying to kill her, had registered Greta’s place in it and been afraid.

Afraid that someone had already claimed the place she wanted.

The idea of it — that Rainey wanted a place in his life, that she’d looked at what little he had and wanted to be in it enough to be jealous of it — sat somewhere under his sternum and didn’t move.

“Greta is the person I call when a trail washes out,” he said. “She’s the person who shows up with rope when I’m stuck on a rock face and the person who will tell me if my plan is stupid. She’s never been anything else.” He looked at Rainey directly. “There was no space for anything else. There was no space for anyone.”

Rainey held his gaze.

“Until eight days ago,” he said.

She crossed the room and kissed him.

Slower than the cabin. No urgency in it, no desperation, just her mouth warm against his and her hand at his jaw, and he reached for her and his ribs pulled and he made a sound against her lips that was not his best moment.

She drew back. “How bad.”

“Fine.”

“Evander.”

“Manageable.”

She pulled back enough to look at him, and whatever she read in his face settled something. She didn’t retreat. She moved onto the bed beside him and turned toward him, her hand on his chest, and kissed him again with the same unhurried care. His ribs were a problem. He was concussed. The stab wound would pull if he moved wrong. He catalogued all of it and found he was still here, still present, still reaching for her with his good arm.

“Tell me what you can’t do,” she said against his mouth.

“I’m fine.”

“You keep saying that.” She leaned back. “Tell me. Or I walk back to my room and you spend the next twenty-four hours alone.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw.

She waited.

“Left side,” he said. “Weight on the ribs. And I can’t—” He stopped. “The angle from the cabin won’t work.”

She nodded. No drama in it. She reached for the hem of his shirt, careful, and he let her pull it over his head without doing the thing where he tried to help and made it worse. The bandage on his ribs was still solid — she’d done good work with it in the dark on a mountain. She pressed two fingers alongside it, checking, not hard enough to hurt.