Page 87 of Devoured By the Forbidden Mountain Man

Gavin looked at me as if I might be willing to arbitrate. I wasn’t.

“That was logistics.”

“It was a four-day logistics conversation.”

I laughed, and Piper smiled at me fully for the first time.

The resemblance between Gavin and me had always been obvious, but I had never seen my brother through the eyes of somebody who loved the adult man he had become. Piper’s attention moved toward him even while she was talking to me, instinctive and familiar.

Whatever the last month had required from them, they had come through it together.

Inside, the introductions unfolded without anyone turning Gavin into the center of the room. Annette hugged him briefly because she had known the twenty-five-year-old version too, then stepped back and looked at him with the same practical scrutiny she gave a stack of bad paperwork.

“You look better than you did the last time Rex had your file open.”

Gavin rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “That’s a low standard.”

“It still counts.”

Her attention shifted to Piper, and the conversation moved with it.

I took the pie from her and brought it into the kitchen while Earl asked Gavin about the drive. By the time I returned, Rex had taken their coats and Piper was standing beside the dining table listening to Annette explain why Earl had been forbidden from transporting anything with liquid gravy.

Nobody asked Gavin about the courthouse, and nobody needed to. The past month had contained enough legal language to last all of us through several holidays.

Meredith had given her complete statement with counsel. Her account had been accepted as self-defense, she had been cleared, and she was back home with her husband and children, teaching third grade and preparing for the baby due in January. The homicide case against Gavin had been cleared too.

His decision to disappear had remained a separate problem, but that had been resolved without pretending those seven years had never happened. His bail-jumping matter ended in a negotiated noncustodial resolution that allowed him to go back to Alder Creek and start rebuilding the life he had spent years keeping deliberately small.

The financial piece had been the strangest for me. Clearing the homicide case hadn’t erased the old post-forfeiture reimbursement balance, and Rex had never offered to make it disappear. I would have hated it if he had.

Gavin had taken care of it himself. He formally assumed the remaining obligation and settled it, ending the payment I had built into my life for years. I had stared at the final paperwork longer than I should have, then gone to work at the Lantern House the next morning and deposited my entire paycheck into my own account. The relief had been quieter than I expected, and it had lasted.

Gavin came into the kitchen while I was moving the pie to make room.

“Where do you want this?” He held a second covered dish Piper had apparently handed him.

“Anywhere that isn’t the stove. We’ve reached the stage where flat surfaces are valuable.”

He looked around the kitchen, taking in the recipe notebook, my cardigan over the chair, and Rex’s hand towel hanging beside the one I preferred.

“You really moved in.”

There was no teasing in his voice.

I glanced at him. “I said I was going to.”

“I believed you. It’s different seeing it.”

He set the dish where I pointed and leaned one hip against the end of the counter without getting in my way. For a moment he watched Rex at the sink rinsing the potato bowl while Annette and Piper talked near the table.

A month ago, Gavin and Rex had stood in a back hallway with Rex’s hand locked around his forearm.

Now Rex passed behind him carrying the clean bowl and said, “Move six inches unless you want Georgia to put you to work.”

Gavin shifted automatically.

“She’s been doing that since she was twelve.”