Page 119 of Nikolay

He laughed softly at that, and the sound did something inconveniently pleasant to the air between us.

By the time the cabin came into view, I had begun to think the ride itself was the destination. Then the trees parted around a small clearing, and there it sat: stone chimney, weathered wood siding, smoke lifting thin from the roofline as if the place had been waiting all morning to prove itself picturesque.

“Oh, come on,” I said before I could stop myself.

Sage turned in the saddle. “A terrible offense?”

“You brought me to a romance novel.”

That actually brought a fuller smile from him. “If I had, there would be fewer blankets and significantly worse weather.”

He dismounted first and came around to take my mare’s reins while I swung down. My legs felt pleasantly worked from the ride, my face cold enough to appreciate what the cabin promised from twenty feet away. He tied both horses to the rail beneath the overhang, checked each cinch with automatic care, then held the door for me.

Warmth spilled out.

Not faintly. Fully. A fire already roared in the stone hearth at the far end of the single large room, oak logs collapsed into a bed of flame and red coal. A table near the window had been laid with bread still wrapped in linen, sliced meats, cheeses, fruit, a little dish of mustard, and a bottle of dark red wine already open beside two glasses.

I stopped just inside the threshold.

“You had this arranged.”

He took my gloves from me one by one. “I did.”

There was no apology in it. No embarrassment either. Simply fact. Men like Sage curate experiences the way other people set out cutlery.

The cabin was rustic in all the correct ways and comfortable in all the expensive ones. A heavy wool throw folded over the back of a small sofa. Two deep chairs angled toward the hearth. Thick rugs over wide-planked floors. Windows framing nothing but trees. It felt remote without being rough, and that, perhaps, was what disarmed me most. There had been no visible effort in the arrangement. Which meant the effort had happened long before I arrived.

Sage poured wine while I stood with my hands out to the fire.

“You planned all this for me?” I asked.

“For us,” he said, handing me a glass. “But yes.”

I accepted it. “That should probably alarm me more than it does.”

“Should it?”

I looked at him over the rim. “You tell me.”

His gaze held mine a beat, unreadable. “I prefer making guests comfortable.”

There were at least six things I could have said to that, and none of them felt likely to improve my footing. So I drank instead. The wine was velvety and darker than the one from last night, with some blackberry notes under the oak that made it dangerously easy to like.

Conversation moved lightly at first—Texas weather, Pennsylvania hills, horses, the difference between wide-open land and old woods. He was a good listener when he chose to be. Better than that, he asked questions that did not feel like traps until after I had already answered them.

That was what unsettled me. Not a single remark on its own. The flow of it. How little strain there seemed to be. How quickly I forgot to guard every sentence and then remembered, with irritation, that forgetting had happened.

I had just set down my glass after telling him a story about Bronc throwing me into a stock tank at fourteen because I had stolen his truck keys, when Sage studied me for a quiet moment and said, “You looked as though you’d had a restless night when you came down this morning.”

There it was.

Not accusatory. Not even especially intimate on the surface. Just observant.

“Maybe a little.”

The fire crackled behind us.

Sage leaned back in his chair, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee. “Dreams can feel awfully real when we’re under stress.”