Chapter 3 #2
"Don't you dare." He crossed the lot to me, slow, his eyes never leaving mine, and he stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back.
He didn't touch me. He just looked, and the looking was its own kind of touch, warm and unhurried and absolutely certain.
"I've been trying to think of a word," he said, low.
"The whole ride over. Knew I'd need one when I saw you.
" His gaze moved over me — my face, the dress, the curve of my hip, back to my face — and there was nothing in it but reverence. "There isn't one. There's just you."
I'd spent my whole life waiting to be looked at like that and convinced I never would be.
"You don't have a car," I said, because I am, as established, incapable.
His mouth finally curved. "Booked us a table somewhere with valet and white tablecloths." He nodded at the bike. "But I figured my queen might want to arrive on the back of her king's bike. Just this once." He held out a helmet. "Unless you'd rather I called a car."
I looked at the helmet. I looked at him. I thought about every careful, contained, line-keeping minute of the last two years, and I thought about the woman in the emerald dress in the mirror who, for the first time in longer than she could remember, hadn't flinched.
I took the helmet.
"Just this once," I said, "is a dangerous thing to offer me, Declan O'Connor. I've never been good at stopping at once."
His eyes went dark and warm all at once.
"Good," he said, and helped me onto the back of his bike, and the second I wrapped my arms around the solid heat of him and felt him breathe out at my touch, I knew — with the same certainty he'd had all along — that we were never going to be stopping at once.
The ride did something to me I hadn't expected.
I'd braced for fear — the speed, the exposure, the lack of anything between me and the road but a man and a machine.
Instead I felt the city blur past warm and golden and the engine hum up through my whole body and his back broad and certain under my cheek, and I held on and I laughed into his shoulder where he couldn't hear it, helpless and giddy, a woman of thirty-five discovering on a Tuesday night that she had never once in her careful life let herself simply be carried.
The restaurant was the kind of place I'd have been too intimidated to enter alone.
Low light, real candles, a sommelier who called Declan by name.
I waited for the ma?tre d's eyes to flick over me with the practiced calculation I'd learned to expect — is she a someone, is she pretty enough to be here with him — and I watched, instead, as Declan put his hand at the small of my back and the entire staff treated me like visiting royalty, because that was how he treated me, and they took their cue from the king.
He pulled my chair out himself, waving off the host who'd reached for it.
He ordered for neither of us and instead asked what I liked and then asked the kitchen to build the meal around it.
When the wine came he tasted it and then turned the glass so I could try it from the spot his lips had touched, and watched my face when I did, and I felt that small claiming move through me like warmth through cold hands.
Every gesture said the same thing the dress in my mirror had been too frightened to believe: you belong at this table. You belong anywhere I am.
We talked for three hours.
We talked about everything except the hearing.
He told me about his mother, who'd raised him alone and died before she saw him become anything but trouble.
I told him about my sister, the one I'd failed, the one whose kids had ended up in a system I'd spent my whole career trying to fix from the inside.
He didn't flinch from it. He didn't fix it.
He just held the weight of it with me across the candlelight, and somewhere in there I understood the engine underneath everything — that we were both people who'd lost a family and spent our lives building one out of whoever the world handed us.
His was leather and chrome. Mine was a warehouse full of scared kids. Same wound. Same answer.
"I was nine when my mother started working doubles," he said, turning his wine glass by the stem without drinking from it.
"I made my own dinners. Walked myself to school.
By twelve I was running with guys twice my age because they noticed me, and nobody else did, and that's the whole story of how a kid ends up in a club, Brynn — somebody finally looks at you.
" He met my eyes. "That's why I look. At the kids at your place.
At Eli. I know exactly what they're starving for, and it isn't food. "
I had to look down at the tablecloth for a moment. "That's the kindest and the saddest thing anyone's said at this table," I managed.
"Got a few more where that came from." His mouth tipped. "Pace yourself."
I laughed, and it came out wet, and I wiped under my eyes before my mascara could betray me, and he watched me do it with an expression so tender I had to change the subject or come apart.
So I asked him about the club, the real version, the parts that weren't rumors, and he told me what he could — the brotherhood of it, the way twenty broken men had built something that held, the funerals and the weddings and the babies christened in a clubhouse that the county thought was a den of criminals.
And I understood, listening, that he wasn't so different from me.
He'd built a Safe Harbor too. He'd just built his out of men the world had thrown away, and given it a name, and worn it on his back.
"You make me feel beautiful," I said, late, after the wine, when I'd stopped guarding my mouth. "I haven't felt beautiful since — I'm not sure I ever have. And I keep waiting for the catch."
Declan reached across the table and took my hand, turned it over, traced the lines of my palm with one rough fingertip in a way that made me forget the entire room.
"There's no catch," he said. "There's just a man who's spent two years certain of one thing.
" He raised my hand and pressed his mouth to the inside of my wrist, slow, deliberate, his beard rough against my skin, his eyes on mine the whole time — and I felt it everywhere, a current straight through me, a wanting two years in the building.
"You're not beautiful despite anything, Brynn," he murmured against my pulse.
"You're beautiful. Full stop. And anybody who ever made you add a word to that sentence was a fool I'd very much like to have a conversation with. "
The candle guttered. My heart did not.
"Take me home, Declan," I said.
His eyes searched mine. "Yours or mine?"
I'd kept the line for two years. I thought about it one last time — the funding, the families, the careful self I'd built like a fortress — and then I let it go, the way you let go of a breath you've held too long.
"Yours," I said. "Take me to yours."