“Mack—”
“It’s not a debate.” He picked up the satellite phone again, already moving on, already three steps ahead in whatever calculation was running behind his eyes. “There’s an extra blanket on the shelf in the closet. The lock on the bedroom door works.”
The lock on the bedroom door works.
He’d said it like the previous statements—informationally—but it landed unexpectedly. He was telling her she could lock him out if she wanted to. That he understood this was his space and she was a reluctant guest in it. She didn’t have to trust him with her proximity any more than the circumstances demanded.
Two years ago, she’d slept beside this man without a second thought, and here he was telling her she would lock him out.
Don’t, she warned herself. “Thank you,” she said, and she took the damn bedroom.
She lay in his bed, in his clothes, staring at a ceiling she couldn’t see in the dark, and listened hard for any telltale signs of him moving through the cabin.
He’d always been almost supernaturally quiet—sniper training, she’d understood later, though when she first met him, she’d assumed he’d just been born without the gene that made normal people scuff their feet and announce their presence.
She heard the front door open briefly, then close. He was checking the perimeter, no doubt. He returned shortly, and then she heard the soft creak of the floorboards in the kitchen. The sound of the satellite phone being set on a hard surface.
Sleep felt impossible. Her body was running on fumes and crashing adrenaline, and the migraine medication was doing its job, dulling the sharp edge of the pain to something livable. She should close her eyes, let her nervous system recover, and be ready for whatever tomorrow might bring.
Instead, she lay in the dark and mentally drew him since she’d left her sketchbook on the kitchen table, and she wasn’t getting up to retrieve it. When he was deployed, and she couldn’t sleep, she’d lie in bed, close her eyes, and keep him present the only way she could. She’d catalogue him piece by piece.
The line of his jaw, always sharper than she expected when she hadn’t seen him in a while. The way his mouth sat—serious at rest, transformed entirely when he was actually amused, which was rare enough that she’d always felt it like a small prize when she earned it.
The scar on his hand.
The two quarters on the counter that she should not have any feelings about whatsoever.
She was almost asleep—genuinely almost under, the medication pulling her down—when the satellite phone buzzed in the other room.
She heard him answer in a low, controlled voice. She couldn’t make out the words, just the tone—the serious-information tone, the receiving-a-briefing tone. She knew his vocal registers the way she knew her own. She’d mapped them over years of paying close attention to a person she loved, and this one made her stomach tighten.
Then silence.
She waited for him to speak again. To say something, to end the call, to move.
The silence stretched.
One minute. Maybe more.
She heard him set the phone down. Heard him not move. He seemed to be holding still in the dark, absorbing something he hadn’t expected.
Something’s happened.
She knew it because of the quality of the silence. The length of it. The way he’d gone absolutely still in the way he only did when something had shifted, and he was deciding how to respond.
She should get up. Walk out there. Ask him what was wrong.
Was it Blake? Rob Thorne? Had one of them been hurt?
Why hadn’t Blake called her? Maybe she didn’t want to know.
She lay in the dark, unmoving. She wasn’t sure she was ready. She wasn’t sure she could absorb one more thing tonight—one more revelation, one more dimension of the disaster her evening had become. She couldn’t take even one more piece of evidence that the life she’d been carefully building was coming apart.
Tomorrow, she told herself. Ask him tomorrow.
Outside, the blizzard howled against the cabin walls, relentless.
Mack didn’t come to wake her up. Whatever it was, it could wait.