Chapter 41 #2
“Baby, I’ve never stopped looking.” His arms tighten, and his lips press against my temple. “I’ll always find you. Always.”
The words crack something open that I thought the crying had already emptied, but this ache is different. Something that heals instead of breaks.
He sighs and kisses the crown of my head. “Now come on. Let me take you home.”
Home.
There’s so much to that word that I don’t have the strength to analyze. But Hatton doesn’t give me the chance anyway.
He shifts his grip, sliding one arm under my knees and the other across my back, and he lifts me out of the ocean like I weigh nothing.
Saltwater drains from my nightgown in long streams as he wades toward shore, each step slow and steady.
I wrap my arms around his neck and bury my nose into the warm curve of it, feeling his heart thrum againshint mine.
When he reaches the beach, the sand gives under his bare feet, but he easily stays upright.
Out of the water, my limbs begin to ache as feeling starts to return.
The wind picks up, making me shiver so violently it hurts.
He tucks me closer, adjusting his grip, and the heat of him becomes a wall between me and everything else.
“Just a few minutes and we’ll get you warm,” he murmurs.
I close my eyes to the steady music of the world around me. The waves at our side, the few brave seagulls cawing after coming back early for spring, Hatton’s breathing, now controlled and steady.
When I open my eyes again, he’s stepping off the dock, onto the deck of my houseboat, then through the door, left wide open like someone raced out of it.
Chessy yowls from the kitchenette, tail puffed with indignation, as Hatton steps us inside and sets me down.
My body mourns the loss of his warmth immediately, and I’m shaking so viciously from cold that I can’t move as he closes the door, cranks the heat, and twists the shower handle to HOT.
Then Hatton crouches in front of me, still shirtless, tanned skin red and goosebumped from cold. He peels the soaked nightgown over my head in one careful movement, and I let him. I already laid everything that I am bare at his feet. Being naked is nothing.
Once he’s finished with me, he strips his sweatpants, leaving his boxers and my panties on, then steps us inside the shower.
We hiss at the warming water. As soon as he closes the door, he wraps his arms around me and just… holds me.
My heart pounds at the desperation in it.
I wrap my arms around his torso to hold him back, digging my fingers into the muscles of his back, aching to feel his strength.
“You can’t do that to me again, Lucy,” he says after a while, his voice hoarse and thick, barely more than a whisper. “Please. Promise me—” He swallows against my forehead. “Promise me you won’t try again. I can’t—I won’t be able to—”
His breath chokes out in heavy, shuddering gasps, and it hits me.
He’s crying too.
I pull back and cup his face in my hands, looking through the shower mist and into the welling moisture in his red-rimmed eyes. His hard jaw trembles, unable to hold it together anymore.
“I promise,” I whisper and squeeze him back. “I’m sorry, Hatton. I’m so sorry.”
He sucks in a breath and buries his head in my neck, his hold tightening until I’m breathless.
“Thank you.”
When the water starts cooling from scalding back to lukewarm, Hatton turns it off and reaches for two towels from the cabinet just outside the shower.
He works one through my hair, then goes over the rest of my body with rough friction at first, then a slower, gentler pass that has so much careful, patient attention that my eyes burn again.
After wrapping me in the towel, he quickly dries himself off, finds a long sleep shirt on the shelf, and guides my arms through the sleeves before easing me onto the bed. He pulls the quilt to my chin and smooths the damp hair from my forehead with his thumb, letting it linger there.
“Tea,” he mutters, half to himself, already turning toward the kitchenette. “You need something to warm you from the inside too.”
He busies himself making it, and I’m not surprised it’s exactly how I like it. But when he crosses back to hand it to me, something behind his eyes has shuttered.
“Here.”
Then he stops. Swallows. And turns back toward the door.
“I’m going,” he says it quietly, gripping the doorframe without looking at me.
“I wish I could say I’m going back to Harry’s, but I can’t leave you right now.
It’ll drive me fucking crazy. I’ll be just outside on the dock, and that’s all I can give you.
I’m sorry, but please don’t make me go farther than—”
“Hatton.”
He halts and turns around, knuckles going white with the pressure of holding back.
“Stay, Hatton.”
The words are stripped bare of everything except the want that aches in my bones. It’s not a command or a request. Just the most vulnerable thing I have left to give.
I need you.
His hand slides off the frame. His shoulders drop.
When he turns around, the look on his face is devastatingly handsome and incredibly painful all at once.
It’s shattered and grateful, terrified and hopeful.
The look of a man who just got handed back something precious he was certain he’d destroyed.
I set my tea on a shelf and scoot back to give him room. “Please?”
“Thank fuck.” He crosses the cabin in two steps and climbs into the bed.
The mattress dips under his weight, and then his arms are around me, pulling me back against his chest, his warmth encompassing mine, his heartbeat steady and strong against my spine. Chessy leaps up and settles heavily across both our feet, apparently deciding the crisis is resolved.
After his breathing settles to something less rushed, I swallow and whisper, “Hatton?”
“Yeah, baby?”
I should correct him. He shouldn’t be calling me that. But God help me, I love the way the thick, heavy protectiveness of it makes me feel.
“I don’t want to run again,” I manage to say, my voice hoarse.
His fingers flex and fidget against me, like he’s fighting with himself over what to do, how to respond.
Then the tension in his embrace releases in a long breath that wafts my hair and he pulls me in tight, curling around me and burying his nose into my hair.
“Then stay with me, Lucy. Please.”
It’s a plea and a prayer, and it relieves the last remnants of fight from my chest.
So I close my eyes.
And stay.