Page 14 of Her Mountain Man Protector

"Rowe?" I ask.

"My niece. Sister's deployed. She thinks she's grown. She's sixteen and she eats constantly. You'd like her. You're not meeting her until this cools."

Colt studies the mark on the map for a long second. Something in his face eases by a fraction, the first unclenching I've seen since he mouthed down at me in that loft. "I can work with that."

"You can also leave the hero act at the door of my range," Alden says. "You're on call with us when you want to be. Right now you're a client who happens to be my friend. That means you sleep. That means she sleeps. That means you don't run at VH-2 because you're angry."

"I wasn't headed to VH-2."

"Good. Stay that smart."

Marin slides a set of keys across the table. Two fobs. A gate code written in a hand too neat to be a man’s. "Grocery stop is on you. The house is stocked for a weekend, not a siege. You need hardware, you call the Watchline. You don't call the sheriff. Woodbridge still thinks the falls are the only drama they've got."

I look from the keys to the mill around us, this fierce rebuilt place with its glass loft and its river light, and I'm impressed in a raw, reluctant way that sits heavy behind my ribs. These people built a whole machine out of a dead factory. Colt belongs here more than he belongs in that sagging cabin, and he still chose the cabin first because his father is a ghost he refuses to file under lost. That loyalty is enormous. It's also the reason my life is now a marked map on someone else's table.

Alden catches me looking. "You nervous, Vega?"

"I'm sitting in a secret mill with a man who shoved me out a window and a woman who already knew my kill fee. Nervous would be the polite word."

"Polite doesn't keep you alive. Careful does. The house will feel far. That's the point. Far is what you needed in Chicago and didn't get. You'll get it here."

Colt's hand finds the back of my chair, not quite touching me, close enough that the heat of him is a fact I can't argue with. "She stays with me. That's the condition."

"I assumed," Alden says. "One bed up there, last I checked. Try not to break my furniture."

My face goes hot. "We're adults. We can handle a floor."

"Speak for yourself," Colt mutters, and Marin actually laughs once before the tablet steals her attention again.

Alden walks us back through the Watchline so I can see the river from the glass, then down past the gym and the turbine hall doors he doesn't open. He talks in that stoic, methodical register the whole way, pointing at cameras and the lot gate, giving Colt the tour as a workplace briefing even though this mill is the only safe building left in the county. I file every turn. I can't help it. Seeing is the job even when the job has become staying alive.

At the lot Alden clasps Colt's shoulder, a brief, solid hit of friendship that doesn't need extra words. "I'll look into the dock name and the jacket stitch. If Helix has a local pair of eyes in town, Marin will find the money that pays them. You two disappear up the falls. Check in at dark." He hands Colt a keyfob. “Here, take the black one,” Alden says, nodding toward a black truck in the lot.

"Copy," Colt says.

I hold Alden's gaze. "Thank you. I feel like a nuisance."

"You're the witness who kept the files. That makes you useful."

Colt opens my door because he’s a gentleman underneath all that rugged handsomeness. I climb in with the camera and the drive and the leftover diner heat still in my fingers. The mill shrinks in the mirror as we take the river road toward the far side of the falls, toward a high ugly driveway and a bed situation I’m absolutely going to fight him about, and I keep my eyes on the water because looking at his hands on the wheel does something restless and inconvenient to the rest of me.

"You're quiet," he says.

"I'm storing the layout. And deciding whether I'm impressed or furious that you had a whole secret mill and still let me believe the cabin was your entire personality."

"The cabin was mine. This is borrowed when I need it. Tonight I need it."

"Tonight we need it," I correct.

He glances over, grumpy and unwilling, and the corner of his mouth gives up a fraction. "Tonight we need it. Keep the camera down until we're behind the gate. Then you can photograph whatever you want as long as it isn't the road behind us."

"Deal," I say, and I don't take his hand even though it's right there on the gearshift, close enough to steal. The falls show white through the trees on our right, loud even through the glass, and the truck starts to climb.

“Look,” I say once we’re a few miles down the road. “It’s a country store. We’ll need supplies.”

Colt nods, turning into the lot. We hop into the store grabbing essentials and Colt’s good about getting the right type of supplies to keep us alive. When we’re out of the store, and packed back into the borrowed truck, I’m already itching to snap pictures of Colt in this different type of element. Normal.

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