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Cal set the bags down on the bed. All of them. The careful collection of a day spent quietly equipping a girl for a life she hadn’t known she was going to have.
He turned to face her. She stood in the doorway, her hand still warm from his, the heat of it lingering on her palm like a brand.
“This is your room,” he said. Quiet. Simple. The way he said things that mattered. “It belongs to you.”
A pause. His eyes moved around the space — the bed, the fireplace, the bookshelves, the wide window overlooking the valley and mountains — then settled back on her.
“Try not to paint the walls black.”
Something deep inside her chest simply… melted.
He saw her. Not just the broken girl who needed saving, but her — the girl who lived in black everything, the one who would absolutely paint every wall in this room midnight black if she could. And the way he said it, with that soft, smile in his grey eyes… it carried the quiet promise that if she really wanted to, he’d grab the paintbrushes and help her do it himself.
Her eyes burned hot. Her throat closed so tightly it hurt. She pressed her lips together hard and nodded, desperately holding back the sob that was trying to claw its way out. She refused to cry.
Not again. Not today.
Not after she’d already been a damn waterworks for the last twenty-four hours. Sage Thompson didn’t do this. She didn’t fall apart.
But God, she was so close.
Cal looked at her for a long moment — reading the brightness in her eyes, the working jaw, the girl standing in the doorway of her room trying not to fall apart. He gave her a single, understanding nod. The kind that said some moments needed space, not company.
He turned to leave.
He was three steps down the hallway when she saw it.
His hand rising to his mouth. His jaw working. The deliberate, smug motion of a man who had just executed a perfect heist under cover of an emotional moment.
My cookie!
The last cookie — the one she’d been saving, the final sacred chocolate chip treasure from Mary Sue Ellen’s batch.
“HEY!” She was already in the hallway. “I was saving that!”
Cal didn’t turn around. He kept walking, those impossibly broad shoulders moving in what she was learning was his version of a shrug.
“Snooze you lose, princess,” he said over his shoulder, mouth full.
Sage grabbed a pillow off the bed — firm, decorative — and hurled it.
Cal moved casually, without apparent effort. The pillow sailed past his shoulder and thwapped softly against the wall.
He turned, his expression a masterpiece of fake innocence, chocolate chip crumbs at the corner of his mouth. “What do you want for dinner?”
You, said a traitorous little voice in her head that she was going to have executed at the earliest opportunity.
“Whatever,” she said, trying to sound casual. “I’m not difficult.”
One eyebrow rose. Just the left one. A single, devastating arch that somehow communicated complete and total disbelief after twenty-four hours of Sage Thompson.
She grabbed three more pillows.
Cal turned and walked away with that same calm, unhurried stride. A man who knew exactly how much trouble he was in and wasn’t even a little sorry about it. He was already down the hallway and rounding the corner before the first pillow bounced off the bannister, the second smacked the wall, and the third — thrown with genuine heat — sailed all the way to the top of the stairs before gravity pulled it back down.
“I’m NOT difficult!” she yelled after him.
From downstairs, distant and warm: “I didn’t say anything.”
