Chapter 17
NATALIE
It felt like the whole peninsula had leaned forward, waiting for something to happen.
Rain slicked the marble under my feet and turned the air to velvet.
Cameras blinked their small red eyes. Volunteers in yellow slickers wrangled sawhorses into place, and a mounted cop shifted closer, his gelding flicking an ear like it could hear my pulse.
I’d just finished another hit—sandbags here, don’t be a hero there—when the sound reached us.
Not sirens. Hooves. Heavy and unhurried, a four-beat you felt through stone.
Heads turned as one, a murmured ripple running the length of Meeting Street.
The crowd parted without thinking, a little theater trick Charleston never quite unlearned, and there he was: Ethan, high in the saddle on Flapjack, rain beaded in his hair, jaw rough with the kind of day that didn’t apologize.
He looked like the city had conjured him. Dog tags dark against his throat. The bear claw glinting when the light found it. Flapjack’s ears were pricked, his black coat sheened in the weather, mane stringing rain. They were both ridiculous and right, fairy tale and freight train.
He found me the way a compass finds north—didn’t hurry, didn’t falter—just rode straight to the foot of the steps and reined in. Flapjack blew, a warm little thunder. For a second, the rest of the world fell away, and it was only the two of them framed by white columns and wet sky.
Behind me, Butch made a sound halfway between a laugh and a prayer. “Lord, have mercy,” he muttered, delighted and disapproving in equal parts. “That must be him. So much for discretion, Natty-girl.”
Discretion. Right. The word felt like a coat I’d outgrown somewhere between the shower and the City Hall steps.
Ethan swung down in a smooth, powerful arc, boots hitting marble with that calm finality I’d already learned meant things were about to happen. He came up the first stair, rain running in clean lines off his shoulders, and stopped just shy of me.
“Hi,” he said, like we were the only two people on the street.
I became aware of a thousand tiny things—the red lights on the cameras, Kimmy’s sharp inhale in my ear through the live-pack, the mounted officer’s grin he tried to hide, my granddaddy’s eyebrows heading for his hairline.
I thought about pausing, about stepping back to where it was safe and strategic and small.
I didn’t.
Forward only.
I put my palm on Ethan’s chest, right above the tags, and lifted my face. He didn’t ask. His mouth found mine, warm and certain, the city watching, the rain blessing it. It wasn’t a peck. It was a stake in the ground: this is mine, I am hers, we are not pretending.
The crowd reacted like crowds do when they get a better story than they came for—whoops and laughs, a cheer from somewhere that turned to many somewheres.
Even the cynical clapped. Butch groaned theatrically and then, traitor, clapped, too.
The Public Information Officer’s eyes went wide as pie plates: opportunity, hazard, both.
Ethan’s hand cradled the back of my head just long enough to make the ground tilt. When we broke, we didn’t jump apart. We stood close, breathing the same rain.
“What do you need?” he asked, low enough the microphones wouldn’t steal it.
“High eyes,” I said, without hesitation. “Flooded streets, stranded drivers, drains that look like they’re breathing backwards. Flapjack’d make a hell of a patrol.”
“Done,” he said, turning like he’d already decided. Then he glanced back, took me in from ponytail to wet jeans, and tipped his chin toward the horse with a look I hadn’t earned the right to love yet. “Come on.”
“On camera?” I asked, just to say the problem out loud, to taste whether it still scared me.
“If you want,” he said. “If you don’t, I’ll loop back.”
I thought about all the ways the city would try to cut pieces off me the second I ran—my voice, my clothes, who I loved, how. I thought about spending another decade apologizing.
Nope.
“Boost me,” I said.
His hands bracketed my hips, solid and easy, lifting like I weighed nothing.
The crowd went very still—then broke into delighted noise as I swung a leg over the saddle.
Flapjack shifted beneath me, warm and alive, scent of leather and rain and horse in my head like summer.
Ethan mounted behind in one clean motion, the saddle creaking, his chest a hot wall at my back.
He took up the reins around me, not trapping, bracketing.
His thigh pressed along mine. I exhaled into the new balance we made without working for it.
Kimmy’s voice laughed in my ear. “Nat, I love you. This is insane. You’re trending.”
“Tell them to trend themselves into moving their cars,” I muttered, and heard her cackle.
“What’s his name?” someone shouted.
“Flapjack,” Ethan and I said at once, and the crowd laughed like we’d rehearsed it.
Butch stepped closer, umbrella cocked as if he could keep the rain off a decision. He looked up at Ethan for a long beat, measuring, then nodded once—grudging acceptance from a man who’d never given that lightly. “Don’t drown her,” he said.
“Wouldn’t dare,” Ethan answered, and I felt his mouth shape the words against my temple.
“This is my granddaddy,” I said quickly, slipping a hand against Ethan’s thigh like I could bridge the two worlds with one touch. “Butch Kennedy. He and I built half these storm maps together.”
Ethan’s hand tightened at my waist, steady. “Nice to meet you,” he said, tone polite but edged with the quiet weight he carried everywhere.
Butch’s eyes crinkled, not with humor but with that old, sharp scrutiny. “Likewise,” he agreed. “I make it a point to know the men near my girl.”
I swallowed, heat climbing my throat, but I didn’t flinch. “Now you do.”
We moved out to a cheer, Flapjack shouldering into the street like he’d been born for parades and storms in equal measure.
Meeting to Market, Market to East Bay, east wind pushing rain sideways.
Ethan’s arms bracketed me without crowding.
Every time the horse shifted his weight, Ethan matched him, and I matched Ethan, a living proof that three bodies can learn each other fast when they mean to.
We were ridiculous and useful. Shops that would’ve ignored a woman with a stack of flyers turned out to a woman on a giant horse in a storm, and I took shameless advantage.
“High ground!” I called, pointing with my whole arm.
“Don’t park in the low garage—no, not even for ten minutes—I see you.
You in the Prius, you’re about to make a very expensive decision—go left.
Left. Thank you. You’re my favorite stranger. ”
Ethan edged Flapjack to the gutter where a drain hiccuped ominously. “There?” he asked.
“There,” I confirmed, and he dismounted in one easy slide, handed me the reins, and crouched into the filthy water like a man who understood that heroics sometimes look like pulling oak fluff out of a grate.
He cleared it with his hands. The drain gulped, caught, then spun to life, a small cyclone that earned a spontaneous round of applause from a pair of tourists in see-through ponchos.
He swung back up, warm and wet, and put his mouth next to my ear so he didn’t have to shout. “You’re having too much fun.”
“It’s working,” I said, high on the simple drug of effect. I turned my head without thinking, and his lips brushed my cheek. I shouldn’t have shivered. I did.
We looped Lockwood. We flagged a sedan before it became a boat. We called Huck to send cones to the corner where water disguised a hole. Everywhere, phones lifted. Everywhere, texts pinged. And everywhere, Flapjack made strangers smile in a hard hour.
After an hour, the rain hardened, a drum roll under a low sky. Ethan leaned back, listening with his body, the way men do who learned from weather early. “He’s starting to slog,” he said, palm rubbing Flapjack’s neck with a gratitude that tightened my throat. “I need to get him dry.”
“Go,” I said, already calculating how many blocks I could cover on foot before the tide shoved us off the board. “I’ll—”
“Nope.” He curved an arm around my waist, fingers splayed at my jacket hem, maddening and anchoring. “I’m not dropping you in a puddle. Text your people. Then come with me and I’ll bring you back.”
With him. Like it had always been true.
“Bossy,” I said, and texted Owen, anyway. Circle soon. Taking horse to shelter. Play nice with Public Information Officer.
Owen: Dear God, marry him on camera.
“Later,” I muttered, pocketing the phone.
We cut east and then south, the city thinning to quieter streets where live oaks met overhead, dripping lace.
Flapjack’s jog became a walk. His breath steamed.
My hands found the warmth of his neck without thinking and stroked, whispering nonsense the way women whose blood remembers animals do. He flicked an ear, listening.
Dominion Hall rose out of the rain—stone and dark glass, long stables tucked close, lamps glowing honey at each bay.
Once we were through the front gate, Ethan steered us straight for the stables, the horse first, everything else second.
Staff looked up as we came in, relief plain when they saw Flapjack, curiosity flickering sharper when their eyes landed on me.
The stable’s air was warm with hay and sweet feed, leather and the clean, animal musk that softened something in my chest I didn’t know was hard.
I slid down from Flapjack’s back, boots hitting damp straw, and tilted my head at the mansion beyond the stables.
“So, this is Dominion Hall.” My voice came out lighter than I felt.
Everyone in Charleston knew of it—money, quiet power, the kind of place whispered about in a city that thrived on whispers. “What are we doing here?”