Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
“Savannah,” he says, like a warning. Or a plea.
I turn toward him fully. “What?”
His jaw works. “I’m not… good at pretending nothing’s happening.”
“No,” I say, breathless and honest. “You’re not.”
He exhales like relief hurts. “You feel it.”
It’s not a question.
I lift my chin. “You know I do.”
Silence crackles between us, hot and cold at once. He reaches up and tugs his beanie off, drags a hand through his hair, then braces that hand against the back of my headrest without touching me.
“Tell me to stop,” he says. Voice low. Rough. “And I will.”
I don’t tell him anything.
I just sit there, painfully still, heartbeat in my mouth, while he looks at me like I’m the first sunrise he’s seen in a decade.
He leans in—a fraction, then another—then doesn’t. He arrests the motion with a quiet, savage sound, head tipping back to the ceiling like he’s wrestling himself to the floor of the ring.
“I can’t screw this up,” he says, not to me, not really. “I won’t.”
“Then don’t,” I whisper.
He laughs once, broken. “Right. Simple.”
We don’t kiss. He doesn’t touch me. We sit and breathe and burn until my skin tingles and my spine refuses to hold me upright.
He starts the truck with a rough twist. The world widens again.
He drives me the one minute back to my cabin. Leaves the engine running. Walks me to the porch like we’re eighty and etiquette is life and death. Stands one step below me, hands in his jacket pockets so he can’t do anything we’ll both regret.
“Your light’s steady,” he says.
“Thank you for defeating dirt.”
“You’re welcome.”
I look up at him, snow lacing his hair. He stares back down, an entire conversation locked in his eyes.
“You going to drive by again?” I ask.
He considers lying. He doesn’t bother. “Yeah.”
My mouth curves. “Okay.”
The admission puts a raw, unguarded satisfaction on his face that is pure trouble for a woman trying not to fall back into a fire she barely crawled out of once.
“Good night, Ax,” I say, soft.
His eyes flare at the name. He steps up one tread, close enough that the heat rolls off him, not close enough to do anything about it. His hand lifts like it has its own mind, hovers an inch from my cheek, then falls.
“Night, Savannah.”
I unlock my door and slip inside before I test my own restraint to failure. I lock it. Put my forehead to the wood. Breathe.
Through the peephole, I watch him walk back to the truck. He pauses at the end of my path, looks up at the porch light one last time, then at the bedroom window like he can see straight through the curtains to the pulse in my throat. He shakes his head at himself, a tiny, disbelieving smile breaking like dawn across his mouth.
Then he gets in and drives away.
Ten minutes later, the truck rolls by again. Slower. A little cocky this time, like we’ve both stopped pretending we don’t know what we’re doing.
I let myself smile in the dark.
The porch light stays steady all night.
Chapter Seven
Axel
Sun on fresh snow always looks too bright, too pure, a white sheet thrown over a mess and called beautiful. The peaks cut hard against an impossible blue sky, and Devil’s Peak wears last night’s storm like new armor. Cold slides under my collar; the air tastes like metal and pine.
I’m signing off a maintenance log when I feel her.
Savannah steps out of the side entrance with a coffee the size of my fist and cheeks flushed from the walk from her rental. She stops on the top step, scanning the valley like she’s measuring it, then pushes her hair back with a gloved knuckle and looks straight at me.
There’s a split second where everything goes silent—no engines, no banter, no clatter of tools. The world tightens to her breath in the cold and the way sunlight threads her hair gold.
Then the past moves.
Not walking. Not running.
Arriving. All at once.
I see a girl with paint on her fingers because we were making signs for the winter carnival—hers neat, mine a disaster—and she told me it didn’t matter if the letters were crooked because crooked looks charming. I see a boy with blood on his knee because he tried to jump the river from the wrong rock and she pressed gauze to the scrape with the focus of a surgeon, telling me to hold still while she blew my hair out of my eyes. I hear her laugh from a sled, hear her mother singing badly to carols while cinnamon burned in the oven, hear my mother and hers at the table debating whether tinsel was tacky or classic until we fell asleep under a quilt that smelled like cedar.
My throat locks.
I set the clipboard on the bumper before I drop it.
She comes down the steps slowly, like she’s remembering how to walk in a place where the ground used to move under us. Frost squeaks under her boots. The sun glances off her cheekbones. When she reaches the bottom step, she pauses, a breath catching, eyes flaring the way they do when she’s about to push through something sharp.