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I hoped I hadn’t imagined it.

That realization followed me all the way back to the truck.

Chapter 6

Barrett

The sky had been wrong all afternoon. I’d felt the pressure behind my sternum and a tightness in my jaw—storm air. By the time we reached the north trailhead, the first fat drops were already hitting the windshield.

Hazel had the journal open in her lap, tracing the cave map with one finger, her lips moving. She hadn’t noticed the sky turning the color of a bruise.

“Road’s going to flood,” I said.

She looked up. “What?”

I revved the truck hard, not caring about the axle groan. “The low crossing between here and town floods in hard rain. Another twenty minutes, and you’re not getting through.”

She glanced at the windshield. A crack of lightning lit the treeline white.

“Oh.”

There was one other option. “My cabin is close by. We can wait out the storm there.”

Hazel looked at me. I kept my eyes on the road.

“Okay.” She looked at the sky, then back at me. “Practical.”

I turned the truck up the gravel track and felt every rut in my spine. Keeping my eyes on the road, a hand on the wheel and the other braced against my knee stopped me from doing anything stupid. Like reaching across the cab. Or touching the curl plastered to the side of her neck.

The rain broke properly before we reached the porch—a wall of water that turned the trees into shadows and the ground to mud in seconds. I parked as close to the door as I could, came around to her side, and stood there with my jacket held over my head like a canopy.

She looked at the jacket, then at me. “You’re going to get soaked.”

“I run warm.”

She slid out of the truck and ducked under the jacket. For three seconds, she was pressed against my side, her shoulder perfectly fitting into the space below my arm.

The cabin wasn’t large: one main room, a kitchen along the back wall, and a bedroom through a doorway off the living room. I’d built the table from black walnut and the shelves from reclaimed oak.

Hazel stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly. Her blonde hair, darkened with rain, dripped onto my floorboards. The damp fabric clung to the curve of her waist and was... distracting.

Shouldn’t look.

My shoulders brushed the herbs hanging from the rafters, and dried leaves crumbled onto my shoulders. Too much. Too much of what I am. I found a towel and a clean flannel and held them out to her.

She disappeared behind the bedroom door and came back a minute later, swimming in soft red plaid, sleeves cuffed twice, her own wet clothes bundled in one hand.

“This place isn’t what I expected,” she said, glancing around.

“I didn’t build this to impress anyone,” I said gruffly when she ran fingers over the tool scars on my worktable. Truth was, the knot pattern in that cedar plank made me think of her—tough, resilient, uniquely beautiful where the grain swirled. “Just needed to be functional.”

Her gaze traveled from the specimen cases to the handcrafted furniture, to the forty jars of honey lining the long shelf—fireweed bloom, late clover, snowberry winter resilience, all labeled in my blocky printing.

“You made all this?”

I crouched by the stove. Being large held so many other truths: ungainly, lumbering, belonging to another taxonomy. “Pre-fab never fits.”

She followed my gaze to the oldest quilt on the peg—the red-and-black splitter’s blanket Gram wove before I was born.