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I put mine in it.

He closed his fingers around my wrapped wrist, careful of the joint, and held it. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Say it again.”

“I’m ready, Daddy.”

His jaw tightened. The small lateral motion. He held it for a second, then his hand came up and his thumb traced the line of my jaw, the same path he’d traced in the dark, and I stood still for it and let him.

“Come with me,” he said.

He took my left hand. Not my right — the wrapped one stayed at my side, and he’d chosen without being told, and the choosing went through me in a warm line from my palm to my sternum. He led me through the bunkhouse, past the table with its bare surface, past the shelf where my phone lay face-down in its nine o’clock grave, past the stove ticking its cooling rhythm, to the back room.

I’d slept in this room for many nights now, but suddenly, it felt different in here. Like everything was about to change for me in this room.

“Look at me,” he ordered.

I lifted my face. His green eyes were close, and the lamp from the main room caught them through the open door, and his expression was the open one — no grin, no dimples, the face that cost him. His thumb was still on my jaw. His hand was still holding my left hand. His other arm was around my waist, and the flannel was bunched between us, and I could feel the warmth of him through the fabric and the steady pressure of his palm against the small of my back.

“Take this off,” he said. Quiet. Not a command. An offering — the sentence held out for me to take or leave.

I pulled the flannel over my head with my left hand. My right wrist cooperated enough to let the sleeve slide off — barely, the joint protesting in a low, specific voice I was learning to hear. The flannel dropped to the floor. The air found my skin — arms, shoulders, the strip above my waist where the tank top had ridden up. Cool air. Creek air. The bunkhouse at night.

He looked at me.

Not the way men had looked at me in Denver — the appraising glance, the inventory of assets, the calculation of what was available and what it would cost. He looked at me the way he looked at the creek when the water was dropping: with attention, with concern, with the focus of someone who was trying to understand what was happening before it finished happening.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

I opened my mouth to correct it — the reflex, the automatic deflection, the producer’s instinct to redirect a compliment into something actionable or verifiable or at least qualified.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t tell me I’m wrong. Don’t tell me it’s the light. Don’t tell me the flannel’s doing all the work.” His hand moved from my jaw to my shoulder, his fingers tracing the line where the strap of the tank top crossed my skin. “Just let me say it.”

I closed my mouth.

“Good girl.”

The words went through me. Downward. Through my chest, through my stomach, through the place between my hips where the warmth was gathering. My knees softened. Not buckled — softened, the joints releasing a degree of tension I hadn’t known they were holding, and I swayed forward, and his arm tightened around my waist, and he held me upright with the casual strength of a man who broke two-year-old horses and dug post holes and carried sleeping women to mattresses.

“Sit down,” he said. “On the bed.”

I sat. The mattress gave under me. The wool blanket was rough under my palms. The pine frame smelled of sawdust and sap, and the scent mixed with the creek-air coming through the window and the fading warmth of the stove from the main room.

He knelt.

Cash Calloway knelt on the floor of the bunkhouse, in front of the bed, and his hands went to my boots. He unlaced the left one first, then the right, and he pulled them off and set them beside the frame, side by side, the way he set everything — carefully, with attention to where things went.

His hands went to the hem of my tank top.

“Can I?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He lifted it. I raised my arms — left high, right to the level the wrist allowed — and the fabric cleared my head, and the air found more skin, and I sat on the bed in my bra and my jeans and my wrapped wrist and nothing else, and he was still kneeling, and his hands were on my knees, and he wasn’t moving them.

“What do you want?” he asked.