Chapter Twenty-Three. Temperance
There were no lights from outbuildings or porches, and the last of the brake lights from the contractors’ vehicles disappeared out of Cloud Tide. Temperance let herself be lulled by the rugged purr of the Gator’s engine as they drove down the hill. Fireflies were out in force, hovering and flashing all around them. It felt like driving through a star field.
A tall hedge surrounded the pool, dense enough that it seemed to contain the muted blue shine of the solar lamps beneath the water. Even though the sun was gone, the air was still syrupy, heavy with the scents of chlorine and the poet’s jasmine that meandered up the south side of the little pool house.
Temperance kicked off her sandals and sat at the edge of the pool. She submerged her legs from the knees down. The painted concrete was warm through the thin cotton of her shorts.
Duncan went to the outdoor closet for one final project. Using his teeth to aim his small flashlight, he tightened screws on the strike plate in the doorjamb, then opened and closed the door a few times to test the fix. He made a satisfied little sound in his throat when he finished.
“You can’t stop, can you?” Temperance said.
“That’s been on my to-do list for weeks, but I haven’t been able to prioritize it.” He linked his fingers behind his head and stretched, canting his hips forward and boosting high on his toes. He grimaced and rolled his shoulders. “I was here, so I did it.”
Temperance scooped water up onto her legs. “I could have held the light for you.”
“Nah.” He pulled the hem of his shirt free from his pants and unbuttoned it. “Still feel okay?”
“Tired, that’s all.”
“No more googly eyes?”
“None today, at least.”
Duncan toed off his oxfords and lifted his white undershirt over his head in the same smooth motion. Then he undid the buckle of his belt and flicked open the top button of his pants.
“Oh, no—don’t even think about taking those off,” Temperance warned.
His hands hesitated over his fly. For a moment, he studied her, then without taking his eyes off hers, he began to empty his pockets onto the little glass table beside the wicker cabana. His phone and a small pocketknife came out of one. From the other, a large pocketknife, a handful of coins, his plastic baggie first-aid kit, and—inexplicably—a twenty-sided gaming die. From the rear, he withdrew his wallet. Then he yanked the belt free of its loops and laid it on top of everything.
He pulled off his socks, and in three strides, he was lowering himself into the pool.
With his pants still on.
Bands of muscle in his neck pulled tight. “Jeeeesus elder millennial Christ, it’s cold.” He sucked a breath through clamped teeth.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Temperance laughed.
“You told me not to take off the pants. I’m a good listener.”
He swam up beside where she sat and propped his forearms on the edge of the pool. An owl’s haunting call came down from one of the nearby trees. A few moments later, another answered.
She skimmed a fingertip across the back of his left hand. “This one’s new. What happened?”
He lifted his hand to look more closely at the half-healed scrape. “Pulled a board out of a stack of lumber I should’ve put away better. This one’s Past Duncan’s fault. I fucking hate that guy sometimes.”
“Hmm. You should be kinder to him.”
Duncan grunted and rested his chin on his forearm. “He’s caused me a hell of a lot of problems.”
“Seems unfair to hold him accountable when he can’t be here to defend himself, though.”
“I’m still the same guy, Temperance.”
“Are you, though?”
Duncan drifted away from the wall and floated in front of her. He stayed close enough she could feel the little zone of ambient heat his body created in the water. “All right. Enough stalling.” He swiped water from his jaw with the back of his wrist and nudged his chin toward her. “Get in.”
“You’re funny.” With a pointed foot, she pushed against his collarbone.
His hand closed around her ankle, middle finger meeting thumb. He swung wet hair out of his eyes and quirked a brow. “Funny.” His expression was anything but. “Is that what I am?”
With her free foot, she pushed against his shoulder. She might as well have pushed a stone wall.
Duncan snagged that ankle, too. A wide callus at the base of his fingers was coarse against her skin. A droplet of water glimmered on his bottom lip. He blew it away.
God.
Temperance had to lean back and brace herself on her hands to stay upright. Duncan’s attention diverted downward with a single flick of his lashes. Her nipples stiffened beneath the thin cotton tank.
“I want you in.” He tugged gently at her ankles.
An old memory flooded in, urgent and oversaturated. Maren and Nate’s basement. Duncan hunched over her on a couch too small for him to fit on, one big leg planted firmly on the floor for leverage. Their laughter when he propelled the couch into the side table and knocked over the lamp. Her, clamped against his body, as if she could somehow be the one inside him.
She swallowed hard. “We don’t have towels.”
Another tug. Her butt slipped against the painted concrete. It brought her alarmingly close to the edge. He squeezed her ankles tighter, and his playful rumble of mock frustration vibrated through his hands. “It’s so goddamned hot, we’ll be dry before we even get back to the house.”
His pants were a dark blur beneath the water. The absurdity of it was too much. “You have absolutely lost your mind.”
“I think you’re absolutely right.” He moved fast. He slid his hands up her calves, along the backs of her thighs. Water sloshed over the rim of the pool as he surged toward her, lifting her with two hands cupping her ass. She screech-laughed, pushing away with her knees against his chest. His laughter joined hers, and the night went silent around them.
“Wait!” she screamed. “Wait, wait.”
Duncan’s eyes narrowed.
“I have, ah—a very expensive lingerie habit. Okay?”
All the levity disappeared. He lowered her back to the concrete.
“You’ve already ruined one of my bras.” She nipped the inside of her bottom lip, considering. “I’ll get in, but you have to stay over there.” She pointed to the far end of the pool. “With your back turned.”
Duncan released her and floated backward. His eyes stayed on hers.
“Turn around,” she said.
He disappeared beneath the water and surfaced a few seconds later at the far end. Temperance stripped quickly, leaving her clothes in a warm little pile next to the pool. The water was chilly enough to steal her breath.
“Talk to me,” Duncan said after a while. He was so low in the water, his voice echoed around the inner edge of the pool.
“About what?”
“Anything. I like your voice.”
“Hmm.” Temperance floated on her back. “I talked to Coleman today. Someone paid for us to use the community room at Linden CC for the clinic for the next few months. Bought us some time.”
“Ah. That’s great.” Lightly, he added, “They mention who it was?”
“No, but we hadn’t told the public about the clinic’s closure until the Honey Moon. Whoever it was worked fast.”
An airplane passed overhead, its intermittent lights tiny but unmistakable in the night sky. A long time ago, on a summer night like this, Temperance and Duncan had stargazed from his truck bed, and they’d seen a plane cross the sky. “There’s people up there,” she’d mused, and it had struck them both as so absurdly funny they’d both laughed until they cried.
Temperance drifted for a while, reveling in the coolness of the water against her back, the heavy warmth of the summer air on her belly and breasts.
He’d been right to bring them here. She’d needed this.
When she looked over again, Duncan still faced away from her. He was submerged all the way to his chin, a dark shape in the water.
Temperance lowered her toes to the concrete bottom. “I can’t believe how many things you handle every day, Duncan.”
“Nah. I just like to under-promise and over-deliver. Makes me look good.”
“Not true. You do too much.”
A soft laugh. “Christ, woman. I could say the same about you.”
“I guess—when you’re already overwhelmed, it’s easy to just pile on one more thing, you know? Adding one more plate on the stack probably won’t bring the whole thing down. What’s one more, when you’re already spinning twenty?”
“Ever think about why you do it, though?” Duncan said.
Temperance tipped her head in the water to smooth back her hair. “It’s just—who I am.”
“Is it, though?”
Her laugh was dry. “Okay, since you know so much about me, you tell me why I do it.”
“I just think—if pushing ourselves like we do was going to work, by now it would have.”
She’d drifted close enough to him now that she could extend a leg and touch his back with her toes if she wanted to. “What do you mean, going to work? Work on what?”
“You’re smart, Teacup. You’ll figure it out.” He squeezed water back from his hair. His tone shifted a shade darker. “I want to see your face.”
Temperance bobbed there for a moment with her arms wrapped around her middle. Her braid arced out around her. “Turn around, then.”
He did. Once he faced her, he was motionless. She couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.
She let herself float toward him. He cupped her elbows to pull her close. Her knees bobbed gently against his thighs.
Their hands moved in unison—hers to settle where his neck met his shoulders, his to lightly support her waist. Her legs floated forward, instinctively bending to wrap around his middle. His thumbs passed over the soft skin of her hip bones, once, twice, before reaching around to cup the cheeks of her ass in both hands.
Temperance rested her forehead against his. Between her thighs, the ridges of his ribs stopped their rise and fall. He was holding his breath.
A swell of water rocked their bodies in a rhythm that was so much like slow, dreamy sex, she had to consciously resist echoing the sway of it with her hips. The space between them became a tiny echo chamber, magnifying the sounds of their breath and the drip, drip, drip of water from their hair.
She ran her thumb across his Adam’s apple. Watched his nipples tighten. Dark brows snapped together, and his fingertips dug into the soft spot where the lower curve of her ass met her inner thigh.
Duncan caught a droplet of water on his lip with the edge of his tongue, then dragged his bottom lip through his teeth, leaving it dark and wet in the low light. “Everyone’s coming home tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
“This will change again, won’t it?” he said. “We’ll go back to being assholes to each other.”
“I don’t know.”
His rib cage jerked hard between her thighs.
Hiccup.
Temperance let her nose graze the ridge of his cheekbone when she tilted her head to meet his eyes. Her heart stuttered in her chest. “I thought you said you didn’t get hiccups anymore when you’re nervous?”
“I’m not nervous.”
“Cold?”
“No.”
“Worked up?”
Underlit by the pool’s eerie glow, Duncan’s eyes turned quicksilver. “Slide your body down and find out.”
The tiny hairs at her nape rose in response to his words. An aggressive trail of goosebumps shot down her arms. She let her knees fall away from him and drifted backward like an untethered canoe.
He didn’t pursue. “You promised me a conversation, Temperance. About the night of the festival. What happened in the truck.”
I’m trying to bend here, he’d said the morning after in the vineyard. But you’re not doing enough reaching.
Temperance swallowed hard. Hesitated. “There’s this—inevitability to a storm. The power of it. The weather always wins. It frees you from even trying to fight it. All I could think about was how badly I wanted to be out there in it. The enormity of it. The wildness. Something’s broken in me, Duncan. But I shouldn’t pull others into that. I’m sorry if I scared you. I never want to hurt anyone.”
A vein throbbed visibly in his neck. “Is that why you come to me sometimes? Because it feels dangerous?”
“Maybe. In those first few years after we broke up.”
His lashes clumped around haunted eyes and cast spiky shadows. “What about now?”
The quiet ache in his expression brought her heartbeat into her throat. They’d arrived at the pivot point they’d been heading toward for the last week, but now that they were there, they circled it like a Maypole. Unable to move forward in a unified direction.
Vehicle headlights shone through the hedge. The other Bradys were home from the movies. Duncan hung his head and swore under his breath, and Temperance swam as fast as she could for her clothes.
THEelectric service returned just before one o’clock in the morning.
Temperance sat in the window seat of the Primrose room in fresh pajamas, untangling long strands of hair with her fingers. A bright spot to the west caught her eye. Work lights were on down at the bank barn, and the Gator was parked out front. The huge sliding doors were open, and she could see all the way to the loft at the rear. Duncan was there. It was too far to make out features, but the way he moved was unmistakable. She knew the shape of him by heart.
He sliced open a cardboard shipping box half again as tall as he was and pulled out what looked like panels for Rowan and Harry’s reception photo booth. Then he grabbed something from his tool bag and began to work.
“I have time for this,” he’d told her. That was two hours ago.
God, he had to be so tired.
Temperance didn’t really know what a soul was. It couldn’t be labeled on an anatomical chart, and a damaged one couldn’t be treated by anything she’d learned in medical school. But she unequivocally believed in its existence, because the thing inside her that ached for Duncan Brady was bigger than her body could contain, and stronger than any logic her mind could throw at it.
She was in trouble.