Like he hadn’t learned his lesson the first time.
He didn’t answer.
The next few minutes were a war against the blizzard. The cabin appeared through the snow like a ghost—small, solid, buried in drifts. Mack pulled the SUV as close as he could and killed the engine.
He looked at her one more time before he got out. She was watching him with those eyes that still haunted his dreams, still broke his heart.
"Wait here,” he said, and trudged through the howling wind to her side. When he opened her door, the storm tried to rip it from his hands. He reached for her. "I've got you."
He scooped her up out of the passenger seat, and she buried her head in his chest as the blizzard raged at them.
The walk to the front door took three times as long as usual. Once he finally got her inside, he set her on her feet, closed the door, and set the security system.
She shook snow off herself. “Whose cabin is this?”
He took her coat and hung it up, then brushed snow from his own hair. “Welcome to my home,” he said.
He'd never thought she'd be here. Never wanted her here. Except that was a lie, wasn't it?
He headed to the kitchen before she could see his face. “Make yourself at home.”
CHAPTER TWO
The cabin was exactly what Alyssa would have expected from Mack. Spare. Functional. Military-neat in a way that went beyond habit into something that resembled control.
A kitchen with clean counters and a coffee maker that had definitely been put to use. A living area with a couch, a chair, and a fireplace someone had laid but not lit. No throw pillows. No artwork on the walls. No photographs anywhere.
Alyssa stood in the middle of it, dripping melted snow onto the hardwood floor, and did what she always did when she needed to understand something.
She studied her environment.
He’d always gravitated to slate blue, like a November sky right before snow. Now he and this interior were darker, heavier.
Everything in the cabin was chosen for purpose, nothing for comfort. The furniture was good but impersonal, the kind of pieces you bought because you needed somewhere to sit, not because you wanted a home. There were books on a shelf—military history, tactical manuals, one battered paperback with a broken spine she couldn’t read from this spot. That one, at least, had been read for pleasure.
It was the portrait of a man who had stopped letting himself want things.
She knew whose fault that was.
You’re fine, Bennett, she told herself. You’re alive, you’re semi-warm, and the guilt spiral is not helpful right now. Save it for when you’re not dripping on the man’s floor.
Mack moved through the space behind her like she wasn’t there. She tracked him in her peripheral vision the same way she used to track him across crowded rooms. He checked the window locks, tested the deadbolt on the front door, and pulled out his phone, scanning something she couldn’t see.
His suit jacket was gone, tossed somewhere between the door and the kitchen, and his dress shirt was untucked, the sleeves rolled to the elbows. The scar on his left hand caught the lamplight.
She looked away.
On the kitchen counter, beside the coffee maker, sat two quarters. He’d emptied his pockets when he came in. She recognized them—the worn gleam of them, the way they sat slightly overlapping—familiar as a fingerprint.
She’d given him those quarters. His grandfather’s, re-engraved with their initials and their first date, pressed into his palm before his first deployment as a Scout Sniper. Bring them home to me, she’d said.
He had. And then she’d sent him away a few years later.
She turned her back to the counter.
“Here.” Mack appeared at her elbow—she’d always been in awe of how quietly he moved for a man his size—and held out a folded stack of clothing. Dark gray sweatpants, a navy henley. “Bathroom’s down the hall. You can get out of the wet dress.”
“Thank you,” she said automatically.