Page 11 of Naughty With The Mountain Man
“And this doesn’t hurt your back?”
“It hurts less than listening to you pretend not to worry about me,” he says, and that arrow hits clean.
I’m suddenly a little unmoored. So I fuss with the edge of the quilt, then give up and sit on the bed, legs tucked under me. “Tell me about the war?”
His hands pause mid-fold. The question hangs in the small space between us, quiet and heavy.
He lowers himself to sit, back against the side of the bed, long legs stretched out on the rug. “There were multiple,” he says. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“You know what I mean. Your time. What you did.”
“Former Delta,” he says, like a line on a resume he never wanted. “Started in the Rangers. Got tapped for the big leagues. Spentyears being inserted where people needed to disappear or be found.”
“Tracker,” I say, remembering Nate’s shorthand. “He called you a ghost.”
He huffs a quiet, humorless breath. “Something like that.”
“What does ‘ghost’ mean?” I ask gently.
“That if I was doing my job right,” he says, “no one knew I was there until it was over.”
That lands in my chest like a stone. For a beat, there’s only the tick of the stove and the soft drag of his breath.
“Was it—” I hesitate, not wanting to poke the bruise and still needing to understand. “Was it scary?”
“Sometimes,” he says. “Everything’s scary when you know what to be afraid of.”
“That’s… profound and not comforting.”
He glances up at me, and there’s the faintest edge of a smile. It flickers and fades. “You get used to the noise in your head. Then you get used to turning it off.”
“Is that what you’re doing now?” I ask. “Turning it off?”
“Trying.” His voice is quiet. “Not very successfully.”
“Because of me?”
He doesn’t look away. “Because someone’s poking at you, and I don’t like not knowing why. Because the packages escalated in a way that says this isn’t random. Because you came into my house and it feels different with you here.”
My heart does a foolish, floating thing. I tuck my chin, trying not to look like a human heart-eye emoji. “Different good or different bad?”
His mouth twitches. “Good. And bad. And complicated.”
I trace a fingertip along the seam of the quilt. “Can I ask something else?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
I smile. “When you say you were inserted places… did you ever feel like… lonely? Like you were a puzzle piece that got put in the wrong box?”
His brow creases, a small, surprised furrow. “Sometimes.” He tilts his head. “You?”
“All the time,” I say before I can decide if that’s too much honesty for midnight. “At the center, I’m the one people talk to. The one who holds it together. Which is good, it’s—” I search for the right word, settle on the only true one. “It’s holy, sometimes. But then I go home and my apartment is quiet in that way that makes it feel like it’s pressing on your ears. And I think,Okay. But who holds me?”
I can’t tell what it does to him, that confession. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t reach for me. But something shifts in the room I can feel along my skin—like gravity recalibrating.
“You’re not alone,” he says, and it lands steady. “Not while you’re here.”
I swallow against the sudden lump in my throat. “Thank you.”
