Chapter 48
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
PENELOPE
After tucking me into my bed, Declan disappeared to the kitchen while I stared at the ceiling and tried very hard not to cry. For so long, I’d thought I had him all figured out—the broody, tattooed menace who was allergic to rules. For months, I’d been so convinced he was pure chaos.
Turned out, he was the steadiest thing I’d ever known.
He strode back a few minutes later, tossing a pair of fuzzy cat-printed socks into my lap.
I raised a brow and reached for them. “What’re these?”
“For those ice blocks you call feet,” he said over his shoulder as he headed back toward the kitchen.
I could only breathe out a laugh as I tugged on the ridiculously soft pink socks, covered with facsimile copies of Darcy’s face.
I missed my cuddle buddy, but I knew he’d be making himself scarce until I was completely on the mend—he was not fond of me when I was sick and never had time for any of it.
I’d just settled back under the covers when Declan walked back in, carrying a bowl of something that smelled so good my empty stomach rumbled. The growl was so loud, I gasped and clamped my hands over my belly like I could muffle the sound.
The corner of his mouth ticked up as he settled on the other side of the bed and passed the dish to me. “Mom’s soup. She’ll kill me if she finds out you didn’t eat it yesterday, so this stays between us.”
Steam curled up from the bowl—homemade chicken noodle soup—and the tears I thought I’d blinked away were back with a vengeance. This time, though, I had no hope of shoving them down.
They spilled over my cheeks in fat rivulets, their end nowhere in sight.
It wasn’t just the soup—made specially for me by a woman who’d shown me more motherly love than I’d had in almost two decades.
And it wasn’t just Declan—this impossible, grumpy, devastating man who’d spent the night holding me through the worst of it and hadn’t flinched once.
It was the realization that I’d been taking care of myself for so long—so fiercely, so carefully, so quietly—that I’d convinced myself it was normal.
I’d believed the lie I’d told myself that everyone carried this much alone. That needing someone was a luxury I hadn’t earned.
But here he was, proving me wrong with a bowl of his mom’s soup and a pair of fuzzy cat socks and reverent hands that touched me like I was something worth being gentle with. As if I deserved softness and love and looking after. As if maybe I always had.
“Hey.” Declan tugged the bowl from my hands and set it on the nightstand before pulling me into his chest. “I’ll fess up and tell Mom I didn’t give you the soup yesterday. It’s not worth your tears.”
I breathed out a weak laugh and swiped at my cheeks with the heel of my hand, my voice rough and cracked. “You didn’t have to do all this for me.”
“You’re right.” He wrapped his hand around my neck and pressed his thumb to the underside of my chin, tipping my head back to meet his eyes. “You should’ve asked. But you didn’t. So here we are.”
I swallowed repeatedly, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t budge. “I could’ve handled it.”
His jaw bunched once—that quiet frustration I’d learned to recognize. Not directed at me, but rather for me. In that way that made me feel simultaneously protected and far too exposed.
“I don’t doubt that, Penelope.” His voice was low and even, his gaze steady as he swept his thumb along my jaw. “I’m just wondering why you thought you had to.”
I closed my eyes on a shuddering breath, my bottom lip wobbling.
And then everything I’d been carrying—the fever, the exhaustion, the years of white-knuckling my way through every hard thing alone because asking for help meant being a burden, and being a burden meant being left—poured out of me in a torrent.
Curling into him, I pressed my face into his neck and finally allowed myself to unravel.
As soon as my tears flowed, he wrapped me in his embrace and anchored me tightly as I fell apart in his arms. With each hiccupping breath and shudder that quaked through my body, I released everything that had been bottled up for far too long.
And through it all, Declan’s hold on me was unwavering. He brushed kisses against my temple and rocked me gently, all the while never saying a word. Not giving me bullshit platitudes like everything was going to be okay or telling me I didn’t need to cry.
He just let me be exactly as I needed to be. And apparently what I needed was to fall apart.
When the tears finally ran dry, I stayed right where I was—face buried in his chest, fingers knotted in his shirt—because the idea of him seeing my swollen eyes and blotchy face after everything he’d already seen the past twenty-four hours felt like one vulnerability too many.
“I’m sorry,” I croaked, my voice wrecked. “That was—”
“If you say ‘a lot,’ I’m going to take you back to the shower and start all over.”
A wet, broken laugh escaped me. “It was a lot.”
“Not for me.” He pressed his lips to the top of my head. “I’ve taken care of Lincoln after too many J?gerbombs. I promise, you’re a significant upgrade.”
I almost giggled. Almost. But the ache in my chest was still too tender, too close to the surface, and the laugh faded as quickly as it had come.
He must’ve felt the shift, because he slipped his hand to the back of my neck, his grip on me steady and grounding. “Talk to me, rebel.”
Four little words. That was all it took.
“No one’s ever taken care of me like this,” I whispered, hating how my voice shook. “Not really.”
His hand stilled in my hair for a beat before resuming its soothing path. He didn’t push, just waited for me to continue.
I should’ve stopped there. Should’ve sealed that wound back up and changed the subject. But something about being this sick—this stripped down and hollowed out—made the truth easier to release. Like my body was just too tired to keep holding it all in.
“My mom died when I was thirteen. I never knew my dad, so after Mom was gone, I moved in with her cousin and his wife. They weren’t bad people.
They just…didn’t want me. Not really.” I pressed my cheek harder against Declan’s chest, anchoring myself to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat.
“They never said it out loud, but they didn’t need to.
I could feel it, you know? It was in the way they never knocked on my door to say goodnight.
Or how they’d forget to set a place for me at the table and then make this big show of apologizing—like the apology was supposed to erase the fact that they hadn’t thought of me at all. ”
Declan tightened his arm around me, an almost imperceptible squeeze, but I felt it. Felt reassured by it enough to continue.
“I became really good at making myself small. Kept my room clean. Got straight A’s. Never asked for anything. Never complained. I thought if I could just be easy enough, they’d want me to stay.”
I swallowed down the ache climbing up my throat and exhaled a shaky breath. “They didn’t, obviously. I turned eighteen and left for college, and that was it. No fight. No big confrontation. Just a lot of distance they didn’t try to bridge.”
I’d never said that out loud before. Any of it. To anyone. And the vulnerability of doing so sat so heavy on my chest, I almost wished I could take it all back.
He cleared his throat, but his voice was still gruff when he spoke. “Yeah, I know what that math looks like.”
I shifted, tilting my head just enough to see his face. “Your dad?”
The muscle in his jaw ticked once, and he gave a quick nod.
“Stan was everyone’s favorite guy.” He traced a slow arc along the base of my skull with his thumb, over and over. “Just not ours.”
The words came out flat, detached. But his heartbeat had quickened beneath my ear, and he’d tightened his arm around me like I was the only thing grounding him in this moment.
I wanted to ask a dozen questions, but he’d given me the space to share as much as I was comfortable with, so I was going to do the same for him. I sat quietly, listening to his soft breaths, until he finally spoke again.
“Dad was a big-shit rock star when we were kids. Touring. Sold-out stadiums. The whole deal. But then the band imploded, and we all moved back here.” He clenched his jaw, the muscle pulsing once against the top of my head.
“He left for some reunion tour when I was fifteen. Said he’d be back in a few weeks.
” Declan shrugged, playing it off. “He wasn’t.
No call. No explanation. Just…didn’t come home. ”
Didn’t come home. He said it so simply—like he’d forced out the devastation of those words years ago and all that was left was the simple fact of it. But there was nothing simple about a father abandoning his family.
My chest ached so fiercely I had to close my eyes against the feeling that overwhelmed me. Not just for the boy he’d been—waiting for a father who’d already made his choice to leave—but for the man Declan had become. One who showed up quietly. Consistently. Without fanfare or performance.
Not because of his dad’s choices, but in spite of them.
“Spent a long time wondering if the reason was me.” His voice was so low, I almost missed it.
Almost.
“Declan—”
“I know it wasn’t,” he cut in. “Took me a while to get there, but I know now. He left because he’s a coward. Staying was harder than leaving, and he was never built for hard.”
The words settled between us, bare and honest, and I heard what lived beneath them. The thing he wouldn’t say outright but carried in every clenched jaw and deflected compliment and refusal to let people get too close.
He worried he was built the same way.
I placed my palm flat against his chest, right over his heart, and then I leaned in and pressed a kiss there. “You’re nothing like him.”
His body went rigid for a fraction of a second—a flinch so small, anyone else probably would’ve missed it. But I was pressed against him, and I felt his reaction across every inch of me.
“You didn’t know him.”
“No, but I know you.” I held his gaze, willing him to hear the truth in my words. “And I know he left while you stayed. And now you’re here, holding my hair back when I puke in the middle of the night and buying me fuzzy cat socks and making sure I eat.”
He was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that I thought he might shut down this whole conversation and just tell me to drink more water and go back to sleep.
Instead, he exhaled a slow, steady breath and pressed his lips to my forehead. He lingered there, breathing me in deeply, like he was trying to replace every leftover ache inside him with only the scent of me.
“Yeah, well.” He cleared the gravel from his throat. “Your cat socks were on sale.”
A watery giggle burst out of me, and I felt his chest vibrate with a low sound that wasn’t quite a laugh but was close enough.
Lying here in bed, tangled up in each other—both fully clothed but barer than we’d ever been before—something had shifted between us. Quietly. Irreversibly. We’d each handed the other something fragile and real, and neither of us had flinched.
That meant something. Maybe everything.
He pressed one more kiss to my hair before shifting me gently off his chest. “Your soup’s gotten cold because you decided to have a whole therapy session instead of eating.”
I huffed out a laugh and rolled my eyes. “Excuse you. I wasn’t the only one trauma dumping.”
He didn’t respond to that, just grabbed the bowl off the nightstand. “I’m reheating it. And you’re finishing it this time, before my mom shows up and ends us both.”
He headed toward my doorway—this grumpy, guarded, impossibly gentle man—holding a bowl of cold soup, hair mussed, shirt wrinkled and tear-stained from my breakdown.
And the feeling that swelled inside me wasn’t new.
It had been there for a while, growing quietly until I felt it in every inch of my being.
I just hadn’t been brave enough to name it before today.
I wanted to tell him I loved him. Wanted to say the three little words I hadn’t spoken to another soul since my mom died.
But instead, I said, “Only if you promise to stay.”
He tightened his grip on the bowl, and something shifted behind his eyes—raw and unguarded and so fiercely tender it made my chest ache in the most beautiful way. “I’ll always stay, rebel.”