Page 72

But she couldn’t seem to make herself stop and worry about that. She stepped back, opening the door wider, butshe didn’t invite him in. But she didn’t tell him to stay out, either.

He paused, there on the threshold, as if he wasn’t sure what he was doing there, either.

Then he came inside, his movements almost jerky, which made her stomach flip.

Because this was Jonas, who moved like silk. Like a whisper. Like a ghost.

He brushed past her, and she closed the door behind him, because that was what people did. Then her head was spinning and her knees felt strange, so she leaned back against the door she’d closed and stared at him.

Her heart started to clang, hard, against her ribs.

Because he was somale. He was a wicked blade of a man, thrust into the middle of the one place she was soft.

He was in all black, as ever, and her cabin was a festival of pastels. She couldn’t imagine anyone alive would be more out of place here than he was. He seemed to look around him for a very long while. And only when she thought her heart might actually have made a dent on the inside of her chest did he turn back around and face her.

Unreadable as always.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, and she couldn’t do anything with her voice. It was too soft, too thready.

Too obvious.

But Jonas was staring at her like it hurt. Like she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t quite handle this. Whateverthiswas. And while she watched, his expression changed.

She thought that he looked tortured. Wrecked.

And even as something in her reveled in that, because it so closely matched how she felt, the rest of her despaired.

“Jonas,” she said again. More urgently. “Why are you here?”

And when he spoke, his voice was as ravaged as his gaze. “Damn you,” he said, a dark lash that swelled in her like a kiss. “I don’t know.”

Eighteen

Jonas should not have been so surprised by Bethan’s cabin.

He’d had enough clues in California. She might have put on a good show about dresses and hair care being unlike her, but she’d taken to it all easily enough.

Maybe he should have expected that the woman who had once held him through the night would make her soft heart an actual, physical place. That she couldn’t possibly keep all of that inside her. That she might have gone through Ranger School, but she was still the same person she’d been throughout the longest night of his life.

He hadn’t meant to come here. Jonas had spent the hours since he’d last seen her in the lodge, trying to do exactly what Isaac had suggested he would. He’d alternated running laps up the most punishing trail he knew with cold plunges to reset his nervous system, but he couldn’t seem to find his equilibrium. No matter how many rounds he did.

He’d headed down to the gym to throw some weight around, but all it had done was make the gnawing, aching thing in him worse.

After he’d accepted that he couldn’t conquer it with iron, he’d eaten dinner in the mess hall in the hope carbs and sugar could settle what sweat couldn’t. But he hadn’t had it in him to listen to the usual off-color jokes and typical banter that passed for conversation with the Alaska Force crew.

Clearly he needed to be alone.

But sitting in the dark of his cabin only made it all worse.

When he’d decided he needed to go for a walk, he’d pretended he didn’t know where he was heading.

And then he’d hoped she wouldn’t let him in.

But she looked like dessert.

She was wearing something that looked too soft, too much like a cloud, to be sleepwear. Her hair was down again, and the buttery light that filled her cabin brought out all the shades of red that he’d spent a significant amount of time pretending he didn’t notice down there in the California sun.

The longer he looked at her, the pinker her cheeks became.