Page 68 of Wild Thorns

"He's been trying to." Callum's jaw tightened. "He's been watching you. We've been watching him."

"That's—" I didn't know what that was. Terrifying. Reassuring. Overwhelming.

The rational part of me noted that we have resources and we've been watching him were not things ordinary people said. That the ease with which three men assembling intelligence on a stalker within days of his arrival, before I'd even confirmed he was here, was not a thing ordinary families did. I filed it in the folder that was getting very full, the one labeled things I'm not ready to name yet.

"We're handling it," Eli said. "He won't get close to you."

"One: you can't promise that, no one can. And two: Why wasn’t I informed Marcus was in town?."

"We saw no reason to disturb your peace." Callum pushed off from the window, moving toward me with that predatory grace. He crossed the kitchen and stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to hold his gaze. Close enough that I could smell him, cedar and something earthier that I was starting to recognize as simply him. The kitchen felt smaller. My pulse did something it had no business doing.

Jasper, I thought, deliberately, like pressing a thumb to a bruise. Jasper is eight feet away.

It helped for about four seconds. Which was exactly how long it took Callum to meet my eyes and hold them, and I felt that pull, that gravitational draw I kept noticing and couldn't explain. Like a mooring line, it drew taut between us as if he were keeping me from being lost at sea.

"Whatever this man thinks he's going to accomplish here, he's wrong. He doesn't know what he's dealing with," his voice was quiet and deadly.

There was something in his tone, something dark, ancient and certain, that made me believe him.

"Okay," I said again. It seemed to be the only word I had left. "Okay."

They had a plan. Of course, they had a plan.

Eli walked me through it at the counter while Jasper refilled my coffee without being asked; my order, exactly right, the same way they both always seemed to know these things without being told. Callum returned to the window. He stood with his back to the room, watching the treeline, and I found my gaze returning to him despite every reasonable effort to the contrary.

The breadth of his shoulders. The particular stillness of him when he was focused on something. The way the morning light caught the line of his jaw.

I looked away. I looked at Eli, who was precise, measured, and explaining Marcus's likely patterns with the confidence of someone who understood both strategy and human behavior. I tried to focus on the words. Reminding myself that I was an adult.

"He'll return to the studio," Eli said. "It's where he found traction. People who operate the way Marcus operates go back to their last point of contact." He adjusted his glasses. "We want him comfortable. Comfortable people make predictable moves."

"And when he makes his next move?"

Eli's expression didn't change, exactly, but something behind it did. Something cool and certain that didn't match the button-down and the careful voice. "We'll be there first."

I looked at the three of them, this improbable, deliberate triangle of protection, and felt something crack open in my chest that had nothing to do with fear. Gratitude, maybe. Or something larger than gratitude, something I didn't have a name for yet.

"Thank you," I said. "All of you."

Jasper's mouth curved. Not the full grin, something quieter, more real. "You don’t need to thank us."

"I want to."

He looked at me across the kitchen, and there was something in his eyes: steadiness and that particular quality of attention he'd always given me, the kind that made me feel like the most important thing in whatever room we shared. My chest ached with it; with how much I didn't want to do anything to lose that.

And yet.

I made myself stop the thought before it finished.

* * *

In the week after, I noticed Callum was around more.

Not obviously, he was too subtle for obvious. But he was there. Parked outside the studio when I left late, his truck a familiar silhouette in the evening light. Walking past the coffee shop at the same time I was inside, or in the general vicinity of whatever errand I was running.

I let it go for three days. On day four, I cornered him in the backyard.

He was working on the fence, shirtless in the afternoon heat, and for a moment I forgot what I'd come to say. The muscles of his back shifted as he moved, gleaming with sweat. His jeans hung low on his hips, and when he turned at the sound of my approach, I got a full view of his abs, sculpted and defined, a trail of dark hair disappearing beneath his waistband.