Page 38 of Forbidden Protector

"I was going to mention your hair's in my stitches."

She glances at my arm. At her hair caught in the gauze. Then at me, and I watch her put the whole night behind a lock I will spend the rest of the week trying to pick.

She doesn't reach for her shirt.

That's the tell I shouldn't read and can't unread. A woman putting the wall back up goes for her clothes. A woman climbing back over it goes for something else.

Her hand lands flat on my chest and pushes, and there is nothing soft in the push. I go down because I want to and because whatever she is about to prove will prove the opposite.

She finds my jeans on the floor before she finds me. The foil packet comes out of the back pocket, the last one, and she tears it with her teeth, same as I did last night. She’s watching me the whole time, daring me to say a word about it.

She rolls it on with one hand and the efficiency of a woman who has decided this is evidence processing, not intimacy.

This time is hers. Fast, no talking, her knees on either side of me and her jaw set like she's closing a case. She takes me in one hard slide and holds, and the breath goes out of both of us.

Last night we took our time. This morning she is making a point, and the point requires speed.

I put my thumb to the base of her throat where the pulse is doing something her face will not admit to. She knocks it away and I let her, and she comes with her teeth in her lip and fury running under everything.

I follow with my hands on her hips and nothing in my mouth but her name, said once, at the ceiling, where she can pretend she didn't hear it.

She is off me and reaching for her shirt before either of us has a full breath back.

"That was..."

"If you say interesting, I will find my sidearm."

"I was going to say fast."

Every button a perimeter re-established and she does them all, collar to hem, without looking at me. By the time she turns around, Agent Tatum is back in the room and the woman who used my chest as a proving ground sixty seconds ago has been reassigned to a room neither of us is going to open in daylight.

"The truck's in a ditch."

"Noticed."

"Do you have a plan, or is this the part where we walk five miles?"

"Knox runs the line shacks after a storm. He'll be here before light."

"And he'll see us."

"He's already done the math. Knox always does the math."

"How reassuring."

I find the tin pot and the propane burner and put coffee on, because the alternative is standing in a twelve-foot room watching a woman who just disproved her own thesis pretend she didn't. The cup I hand her is black, no cream like the way she took it at Nell's. She drinks it anyway.

The Chinook hits while we wait.

No warning. One minute the air is still and fifteen degrees and the frost on the window is holding. The next, the whole shack bucks on its foundation and the wind is screaming through every seam in the old logs, warm air replacing cold so fast I can feel the pressure change in my ears.

The temperature jumps thirty degrees in the time it takes to cross the room. Icicles on the eave crack off and shatter on the frozen ground, and the snow on the south slope goes from solid white to running meltwater while I watch.

March on the Rocky Mountain Front. Chinooks that eat a foot of snow in an afternoon, then freeze what's left by midnight.

Knox's diesel comes up the fence road in the dark, headlights bouncing off the ruts. He gets out leaning into the wind, hat clamped with one hand. He looks at the shack and does not knock.

"Tried your phone twice. Tried the radio. Checked the barn at four-thirty and your truck's not in it." He lets that sit for exactly one second. "So I drove down here."