I blink. "See what?"
"The thing that changes you,” he says simply.
There's a story there, written in the careful way he holds himself and the quiet authority in his voice. Something made him run to the safety and solitude of this mountain—but what?
"What changed you?" I ask before I can stop myself.
His jaw tightens. He looks out the window again, watching the trees bend in the rising wind. "There’s so much senseless violence in the world. As an EMT, I saw it every single day. One day, there was a mass shooting… there were so many I couldn’t save… and I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
"Oh, Boone. I'm so sorry."
“It was a long time ago."
"But it’s not something a person gets over.”
He shakes his head. "I guess not."
I don't know what to say to that. Don't know how to respond to that kind of honesty about loss. So I say the only thing that feels true.
"I'm glad you were there to save me today."
His gaze slides back to me, and there’s heat in his eyes. I feel the intensity of his gaze straight into my soul.
"Yeah," he says softly, voice rough around the edges. "Me too."
Chapter 6
Boone
Fatdropletsofraintap against the windows, barely loud enough to cover the sound of my pulse hammering in my ears. The air has changed—charged with electricity that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
Stacia's curled on the couch once again, legs tucked under her like a cat, but there's nothing relaxed about the way she's watching me. Her dark eyes follow every movement as I close the windows against the approaching storm, track the flex of muscle in my forearms as I adjust the latches with more attention than they need.
The shirt skims her curvy figure, and knowing she's naked underneath does something primal to the part of my brain that's been dormant for three years.
I can’t think straight anymore. All I know is this:
She's here, in my cabin, in my clothes, looking at me like she's hungry for something only I can give her.
And I’m hit with a sudden realization. I don’t want her to just spend the night. I want her tostay. Forever.
The storm rolls closer now, thunder cracking loud overhead, followed by flashes of lightning. Then she looks at me, and I feel her gaze like a physical touch.
"Do you ever get lonely out here?" she asks.
I lean against the wall, arms crossed, studying her face in the warm glow of the table lamp. The light catches the auburn highlights in her dark hair, turns her skin golden. "Sometimes."
It's an understatement. Before today, lonely was my default setting. The silence that used to heal me had started to feel like a weight, pressing down until some days I could barely breathe.
Her tongue darts out to wet her lips—a quick, nervous gesture that sends heat straight to my gut. "I didn't think I was lonely," she says, voice barely above a whisper, "until today."
The words hang between us like lightning waiting to strike.
I push off the wall and step closer, close enough to catch the faint scent of her—something floral and expensive layered over the clean smell of lake water. Close enough to see the way her breath catches, the subtle rise and fall of her chest.
She stands too, the movement fluid and deliberate, and suddenly we're sharing the same air, the same space, the same gravitational pull that's been building between us all day.
The cabin feels smaller now, intimate in a way that has nothing to do with its actual square footage. The storm presses against the windows, wrapping us in our own private world where nothing exists except this moment, this choice, thiswoman who stumbled into my life like a gift I didn't know I needed.
