Page 2 of Surrendering To The Forbidden Mountain Man

Kyle shuts up.

Mira stands, brushing dirt off her knees. She doesn't look at me right away, and that alone is new. Usually she's watching before I even get out of the truck. Today she finishes what she's doing first. Checks her phone, taps a note into what looks like a patient file, slides the phone into her back pocket.

Then she turns.

"Morning, Reid."

Two words. Polite. Even.

"Mira."

"Kyle's gonna need someone to drive him home. He shouldn't be gripping a steering wheel with those ribs."

"I'll handle it."

She nods. Wipes her hands on her jeans. Starts walking toward her car, a dusty white Subaru with a dented rear bumper and a nursing school parking sticker she never peeled off.

That should be the end of it. She came, she treated Kyle, she's leaving. Clean. Professional. Exactly the distance I need.

Except she stops.

Three feet from her car door, she turns back. Morning sun catches her face at an angle that turns her hair almost white at the temples. Those eyes. God help me, those eyes haven't changed since she was fourteen and watched me from the porch while Ben and I tore down an engine in the driveway.

"You've been avoiding me."

My jaw tightens. "I've been busy."

"You've been avoiding me for six weeks. Before that, you avoided me for three years. And before that—" She pauses. The composure cracks, just for a second, and underneath it is something raw. Something that makes my chest seize up. "Before that, twelve years, Reid. I can do the math."

"Mira."

"Don't." Her hand comes up, palm flat. "Don't use that voice on me. The one you use on Kyle, on Jasper's ranch hands, on anyone you want to stop talking. I'm not one of your soldiers."

No. She isn't. A soldier would back off when commanded. A soldier would read the authority in my posture and step down. Mira Cross reads all of that, absorbs it, and walks straight through it.

"Your brother⁠—"

"Ben knows I'm a grown woman."

"You're his little sister."

"And you're his best friend. And you're forty-four. And I'm thirty. And we've done this math already, Reid." She doesn't blink. "Every excuse you're about to list? I've heard them all. From you, in the way you stare at your fork at dinner instead of at me."

She's not yelling. That's what guts me. She's standing three feet from her car in the early morning cold with her arms crossed over her chest and her eyes steady, and she's not raising her voice even a fraction. She's delivering this the way she delivers a diagnosis. Calm, factual, certain.

"I'm not asking you to do anything right now," she says. "I'm telling you I'm done pretending I don't notice you leaving every room I walk into. Done sitting across the table from you while you study the wallpaper. And I'm done being eighteen in your head when I haven't been eighteen in twelve years."

My hands are fists at my sides. Not from anger. From the effort it takes to stand still when everything in me is screaming to close the three feet between us.

Because she's right. Every word. She's been right about me since she was old enough to see through the surface, and she's right now, standing in a field at six in the morning with mud on her boots and Kyle's ibuprofen still in her jacket pocket.

She's not a kid.

She's a woman who spent six years putting shattered people back together in Denver. Who came home when her father got sick because that's who she is. Who started a practice in a town that needed one because she saw the gap and filled it without asking permission.

And she's looking at me the same way she looked at me when she was eighteen. The same way she looked at me when she was twenty-two and I was home on leave for three days and she walked into Hank's bar in a red dress that made me grip my beer so hard the glass cracked. The same way she looked at me at Christmas two years ago when Ben invited me for dinner and she sat next to me on the couch and her thigh pressed against mine for forty-five minutes and I didn't move, didn't breathe, didn't acknowledge it because acknowledging it meant admitting that I'd been wanting my best friend's little sister since the day she stopped being little.

"I hear you," I say.