Page 21 of Claimed By My Exiled Alphas
“Not yet.” I pulled away from the cottage, heading toward the trails on the east side of town. “But you’ll know when we get there.”
She studied me while I drove, and I felt the weight of her attention like a physical touch. “You’re different today.”
“Different how?”
“More relaxed. Less like you’re playing ranger and more like you’re just yourself.”
The observation surprised me with its accuracy. I did feel more relaxed. Being with Talia had started feeling less like reconnecting with an old friend and more like discovering someone I actually wanted to know. The cooking lessons we’d shared over the past few weeks had revealed someone curious and passionate and funny in ways that made me look forward to our time together with an intensity that probably wasn’t entirely professional.
“Maybe I’m just myself,” I said. “That’s what happens when you’re with someone who knew you before you learned to pretend.”
“We were children. You barely knew who you were yet.”
“I knew I wanted to spend every possible minute outside. That I felt more comfortable tracking deer than making conversation at my parents’ dinner parties. That you were the only person who didn’t make me feel weird for caring more about ecosystems than social hierarchies.” I glanced at her. “Some things don’t change.”
She was quiet for a moment, processing. Then she said, “You really do prefer being alone out here, don’t you? It’s not just your job.”
“I prefer being alone to being around people who don’t understand what matters to me,” I corrected. “There’s a difference.”
“And what matters to you?”
“The forest. The watershed. Making sure this place stays wild enough that the species that depend on it can survive.” I turned onto the access road that led to the trailhead. “But lately I’ve been remembering that it’s possible to care about people too. If they’re the right people.”
I felt her looking at me again, but I kept my eyes on the road. If I looked at her now, I’d say something I wasn’t sure either of us was ready to hear.
We reached the trailhead parking area, and I grabbed my pack before leading her to the trail entrance. The path was narrow here, overgrown enough that most hikers missed it entirely. Good. I didn’t want to share this with anyone else today.
“I know this trail,” Talia said after we’d been walking for five minutes. “Or I used to know it.”
“Keep going. You’ll remember.”
We hiked in comfortable silence, and I found myself hyperaware of her presence behind me. The sound of her breathing, steady and controlled. The occasional rustle when she brushed against vegetation encroaching on the path. The way she moved with easy confidence that suggested she’d spent enough time outdoors to trust her footing.
The trail climbed gradually through mixed conifer forest, sunlight filtering through the canopy in shifting patterns. A Steller’s jay scolded us from somewhere overhead, and I automatically tracked its location while scanning for what had disturbed it. Old habits from years of wilderness work.
After twenty minutes, the trail broke out of the forest into an opening, and I heard Talia’s sharp intake of breath behind me.
“The meadow,” she said quietly. “Oh my god, Jace. It’s exactly the same.”
It wasn’t exactly the same. Twenty years had changed details that only someone who’d spent every day here would notice. The old snag where we’d once spotted a nesting hawk had fallen and was now slowly decomposing back into the forest floor. The creek had shifted its channel slightly, carving a new path through the sediment. The willows along the water’s edge had grown taller, more established.
But the essence of the place remained unchanged. The bowl-shaped meadow, maybe two acres across, surrounded by forest on three sides and opening to the valley view on the fourth. Native grasses gone golden in the autumn sun. The creek running clear over stones that clicked and murmured. The quality of light that felt different here, softer somehow, like the meadow existed slightly outside normal time.
“I can’t believe you remembered this place,” Talia said, moving past me into the meadow proper.
“I never forgot it.” I followed her to the creek bank where we’d spent countless hours as kids, looking for interesting stones andwatching for trout. “This is the first place I came after I moved back to Hollow Haven. Needed to know if it was still here, still the way I remembered.”
“And was it?”
“Better than I remembered. Because I’d spent fifteen years thinking maybe I’d romanticized it. Made it more special in my memory than it actually was.” I set down my pack and crouched beside the water, trailing my fingers through the current. “But it really is this perfect. This quiet. This removed from everything else.”
She knelt beside me, close enough that our shoulders almost touched. I could feel the warmth of her body, could catch the vanilla and honey scent that seemed to follow her everywhere.
“We used to catch crawdads here,” she said, peering into the clear water. “You’d flip rocks and I’d grab them when they tried to escape.”
“You were fearless about it. Most kids won’t touch crawdads.”
“Most kids hadn’t been raised by a grandmother who believed handling ingredients meant understanding where they came from.” She smiled at the memory. “She made me help with the garden too. Taught me that killing a chicken for dinner meant respecting the animal enough to do it properly.”
