Chapter 2 #2
"I am, kind of." He didn't look up. "Just without the bar card or the ethics." Then he did look up, and his mouth tipped. "Don't tell anybody. Ruins the image."
"Your secret's safe."
Somewhere around eleven he stopped mid-sentence, set down the legal pad, and looked at me with a frown I couldn't place. "When'd you eat last?"
I opened my mouth, did the math, and closed it again.
"That's what I thought." He was already up, already moving, the way he'd been moving since the second ring of the phone.
He found the staff kitchen like he'd built it — he probably had helped build it — and came back five minutes later with two mismatched mugs of the terrible decaf we kept for late nights and a sleeve of crackers somebody had left in the cabinet, and he set it all down in front of me on top of the zoning code without ceremony. "Eat the crackers, Brynn."
"I'm fine."
"You say that a lot." He sat back down across from me, cradling his mug in two enormous hands.
"For a woman who spends all day feeding people, you've got a real blind spot about the fact that you're a person who needs feeding.
" He nudged the crackers an inch closer.
"I'm not gonna fix your whole life tonight.
I know that. But I can make you eat a cracker. Let me have the cracker."
So I ate the cracker. And the absurd small kindness of it — the club president of an outlaw MC standing in my dark kitchen at eleven at night because I'd forgotten dinner — undid something in me that two hours of legal strategy hadn't touched.
"I've got a guy," he went on, all business again, like he hadn't just dismantled me with a sleeve of stale saltines.
"Lawyer who does work for the club. Real one, bar card and everything.
I'll have him call you tomorrow — at your office, on the record, so it's clean.
You hire him through Safe Harbor, the club covers the retainer through a documented donation, everything above board.
No favors that can be used against you. You understand why that matters? "
I did. He'd thought of the exact thing I'd have worried about — the appearance of being in the MC's pocket — and built around it before I could even raise it. "You've really thought about how this could be used against me," I said quietly.
"I think about how everything could be used against you." He said it simply, like a fact about the weather, and then seemed to hear it, and went still.
The air changed.
We were on the floor of my office, knee to knee among the scattered papers, the building dark and silent around us, and the careful professional distance we'd maintained for two years had somehow eroded in the last two hours without either of us noticing.
He was close. I could see the gray storm of his eyes, the place where his beard had started to go silver, the small scar through one eyebrow I'd never been near enough to notice before.
"Declan," I said. I didn't know what I meant by it. His name was just the only word I had.
"I know," he said. "Line." He didn't move away.
But he didn't move closer either, and I understood, in that suspended moment, that he never would — not until I told him to.
He'd carry two hundred coats and build me a battle map and stay until midnight, and he would not cross the one inch of air between us unless I asked him to.
The decision was entirely, terrifyingly, mine.
I looked at this man — this dangerous, gentle, brilliant man kneeling on the floor of my life's work, who'd dropped everything to fight a battle that wasn't his — and for the first time in two years, I let myself want without immediately filing the want away as something I couldn't have.
I didn't kiss him. I wasn't that brave. Not yet.
But I reached across the scattered papers and I put my hand over his where it rested on the zoning code, and I felt him go absolutely still beneath my palm, felt the warmth of him, the size of him, the careful held-down power of him.
"Thank you," I said. "For not making me do this alone."
His hand turned over slowly under mine, until our palms were pressed together, until his fingers closed around mine with a gentleness that made my breath catch.
He didn't pull me closer. He just held my hand, on the floor of my office, in the dark, like it was a thing worth more than the kingdom they all said he ran.
"You're never doing anything alone again," he said. "Not if I have any say in it." His thumb moved once across my knuckles. "Now. Let's go win you a hearing."
We worked until one in the morning.
By the end the papers had migrated into something almost organized — a timeline, a list of allies to call, a one-page argument so clear that even I, who'd been losing sleep over this for three days, could suddenly see the shape of a win in it.
He'd done that. He'd taken the formless dread in my chest and given it edges and a name and a plan, and the relief of it was so total I felt almost drunk.
And when he finally walked me to my car — to my car, again, two years later, the symmetry of it not lost on either of us — he opened the door for me and waited, the way he always did, and just before I got in I turned and found him much closer than I expected.
For a moment neither of us said anything. The lot was empty and cold and lit blue-white by the one working lamp, and his breath fogged between us, and I was aware of every inch of the small distance he was so carefully not closing.
"Drive safe," he said, low.
"Declan." My heart was going so hard I was sure he could hear it. "When this is over—"
"Don't." He shook his head, and his hand came up — slow, asking — and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, the first time he had ever, in two years, deliberately touched me.
His fingertips were rough and warm and they lingered against my jaw.
"Don't make me a promise you make because you're scared, or grateful, or tired.
When this is over, you come find me with a clear head, and you tell me what you want, and I'll be exactly where I've been the whole time.
" His thumb brushed my cheek. "Standing in the open door. "
Then he stepped back, and let me go, and I drove home through the empty dark with my hand pressed to the cheek he'd touched, knowing two things with absolute certainty.
I sat in my own driveway for a long time before I went inside, the engine ticking as it cooled, and I let myself feel all of it — the fear and the hope and the want, tangled together so tight I couldn't have pulled one loose from the others.
For three days I'd been carrying the end of everything I'd built.
Tonight, for the first time, I wasn't carrying it alone.
That was the thing that finally made me cry, sitting in my driveway at almost two in the morning. Not the fear. The relief.
One: I was going to win that hearing.
Two: when it was over, I was going to walk through his door, and I was never going to want to walk back out.