Chapter 22 Willow
WILLOW
The house settles around me as I paint, old pipes sighing, the AC kicking on with a cough, the distant hiss of tires through the humid Charleston night. My body hums with all the hearts inside it, and when I press my fingers into my stomach, the triplets move around and away from me or toward me.
It’s been hard not to think of my sister and my mother lately, the people they haven’t been for me, the relationships that my father crushed when he abandoned us.
None of us are the same. I paint the water like I always do, a familiar sight, something steady and maternal.
I paint the glittering sun in her waves and wonder how Cheyenne and Dylan are doing, if they’re thinking of me or if they’re happy to have some time off from me with the guys stepping in so much lately.
This isn’t the future I pictured by a long shot, but I’m starting to get used to the idea of what it might be—this thing brewing between me and them. It’s real. I wasn’t imagining it.
The outside light strips across the ceiling. Headlights. I hold still and listen as a car door clicks and the lock beeps. After a minute, the softest knock follows. Not a demand but a request.
I open the door and find Rowan standing on the porch, hands in his pockets and a look in his eyes like a wounded animal. Something wild, something afraid. A hint of hunger. He’s half turned away, like he’s ready to abort the mission at the first hint of a no.
“Hey,” he says, eyes searching mine. I don’t know what he’s looking for, but whatever he finds gives him relief. His shoulders loosen a fraction.
I smile, leaning against the doorway. “You want to paint something with me?” I ask, nodding toward the canvas on the table.
He shrugs, his eyes shining bright. “Sure.”
“Come on.” I usher him in. “Cheyenne’s here still, sleeping, so we have to be quiet.”
I nudge a second canvas toward him. He takes the chair opposite me. We don’t talk at first. We mix color. His brush tests the water jar like it’s a stethoscope he doesn’t quite trust.
He squeezes a careful line onto his palette. “When I left earlier,” he says eventually, swishing blue into white, “I told the lads something I’ve been trying not to say out loud.”
I keep my brush moving. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to.” He sets a wash, watches it spread, corrals it with the side of his brush. “I think part of why I told you not to check…is because I was afraid you’d only want me if some piece of paper told you to.”
The bristles pause in my fingers. I look up.
He’s already shaking his head, a rueful little smile. “That’s not it,” he rushes on, voice lower. “I don’t mean it like a test. I mean—I want to be chosen. By you. I don’t want a lab to do it for us.”
“Rowan.” I reach for him without ceremony.
His hands are cooler than mine. When our fingers lace, he looks at our hands like they’re an answer to a question he didn’t think he was allowed to ask.
“I know you have some things you’re working through, and so do I.
But to answer the question—I want you here with me because of me.
You don’t have to be afraid of emotion around me.
I cried over a broken tea bag the other day. I’m not one to talk.”
“What are you working through?” he asks lightly, but I can feel the care threaded through it.
I suck on the inside of my cheek, unsure of how much I want to say. He seems to feel the hesitancy because he says, “So you get to know all about my past, but I can’t know about yours. Classic.” But his tone is teasing, his eyes set on his painting again.
“My dad left when I was ten.” The words creak out, old hinges being honest. “He had a mistress. Married her. Had kids. He just…left to go do life with them.”
“Christ, I’m sorry, Willow.”
“It blew up everything. I’ve got a sister, Camille, I barely talk to.
My mom floats. I started surfing and painting and convinced myself I’d be single and free forever because you can’t really trust anyone.
” I rinse my brush and watch the blue cloud the water.
“And then you all arrived and detonated my thesis.”
He huffs a breath of a laugh, flicking a curl back. “You detonated ours too.”
“I know,” I say, and mean it in the heavy way.
He glances at my canvas, then his. “I needed it,” he admits. “My world blown open enough that I couldn’t hide in it.”
“I see you,” I whisper.
“I see you too, so I do,” he tells me, turning his painting around for me to see a portrait of me—my skin in a melancholy blue, outlined in indigo, my hair gold.
I look like myself as the ocean. Mouth dropped open, I look into Rowan’s dark brown eyes and see nothing but longing there.
“I will never betray you. That isn’t me.
I’m loyal to the end, and you’ve got me.
I see it now, what it means to make your own family with someone. ”
He stands up, and I look up at him from my seat, seeing the hunger and longing brimming through those teddy-brown eyes. His fingers slide along the table as he makes his way to me, and I feel the pounding in my heart and between my legs.
Unconsciously, I turn my body to face him, and he slides into the space between my legs, taking my face into his hands. “I know you still have choices to make, but for now, know that you don’t have to worry about me.”
“I’m scared is all,” I admit. The words settle between us with the weight of honesty. “Not of you. Of…how big all of this feels. The babies. The choice. The way I look at you and feel seen, and that makes it harder to pretend I’m not terrified.”
His thumb strokes my knuckles, slow. “I can do scared. I got a lot of practice with that.”
The room holds steady around us. The cicadas wear down the silence outside like a file. I feel the pulse in my wrist against his palm—steady, then faster.
“Will you kiss me?” My voice is quiet. It still shocks me, how simple it is to ask, how brave it can feel.
The softest grin unfolds. “Aye,” he says. “I will.”
He leans in like you approach something sacred—no snatching, no rush, the kind of patience that makes you ache.
His breath warms my upper lip. My eyes close because they have to.
When his mouth meets mine, it isn’t fireworks.
It’s the slow ignition of a pilot light, the thing that means the whole house can be warm.
He kisses me once, fully, and then again, lighter, as if he’s tasting yes.
I make a sound I don’t mean to make, and it changes him.
If the first kiss was prayer, the second was promise, then the third is hunger showing its face.
He angles closer, one hand rising to cradle the back of my head, the other still banded with mine.
I pull him, and he comes willingly, knee knocking into the couch, laugh muffled against my mouth like we’re already sharing the same breath.
“Come here,” I whisper, and the need tucked under those two words surprises me with its teeth.
He shifts, kneeling on the rug between my legs, hoodie pulling at the throat, eyes darker than the room. I slide my fingers beneath the hem and find the warm cotton of a T-shirt, the warm skin beneath that. He sucks in a breath when my nails graze the dip above his hip, like an admission.
“Tell me if anything is too much,” he says, the doctor in him surfacing in the best possible way. “Or not enough.”
“Same to you,” I answer jokingly, but he doesn’t laugh.
He nods. His mouth comes back to mine, and we lose the last polite edges.
I cup his face and feel the hard line of his jaw soften under my palms. We kiss like we’ve been dying to and were too noble or too afraid to admit it.
When he finally pulls back for air, his forehead rests on mine.
We breathe together for a moment like we’re syncing a rhythm.
“We’re going to wake up Cheyenne,” I whisper when he lets out a groan.
“Should I go?” he asks, his voice heady.
“No. Take me to bed.”
“That’s all I needed you to say.” He obeys, standing and holding out a hand.
We do the small choreography of the hallway in silence, stepping over the one board that shrieks, moving past the guest room door like criminals in a heist film.
In my room, I let the hush fold around us.
He closes the door with a careful push and pushes me up against it, his mouth at mine again, his hands tracing my body.
He pins me with his hips and pulls back to take his shirt off. I help him hungrily, sighing at the sight of him. At the pale skin underneath and the tiny scar near his ribs that I don’t know the origin of.
He peels my sleep shirt off, slowly, giving me a beat at every inch in case I change my mind.
The air kisses my skin. When I’m bare to him, he looks greedily at me.
His breath catches, jaw flexes, and all that restraint starts to split at the seams. “Tell me what you want from me, Willow. You drive me crazy. You have since the first day on the cruise.”
I laugh softly against his hair, but it turns into a gasp when he finds that spot just below my ear. His teeth graze skin. “Rowan,” I breathe, half warning, half plea.
“Aye,” he answers, tone darkly amused. “That’s the sound I wanted.”
He presses me harder into the door, hips rolling against mine slowly and deliberately.
The friction steals every coherent thought from my head.
My words come out broken between breaths, muttered into the air as he holds my head back.
“I want you to touch me the way only you do.” My nails dig lightly into his shoulders.
He makes a sound that’s half growl, half sigh, the kind of sound that could start an engine, and he pulls my sleep pants down and turns me around quickly, one of his hands protective around my belly as he does.
“Only I touch you like this, huh?” I whimper, and he turns my face to him and whispers, “But I bet you let them try.”
His pupils are blown so far out his eyes are black. All those pointed edges of his face are even more obvious in the soft lighting of my bedroom.
A sound comes out of me that I’m not expecting, and he clamps his hand over my mouth. “Is this what you want?” he asks, staring me in my eyes as his fingers move between my legs and spread me open by my lips, exposing my soaking wet pussy to the air.
Whimpering, I shake my head, and he lets out a chuckle. “You want me to stop?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Then say what you want.”
“I want you inside me.”
That’s all he needs. His mouth is on mine again, hungrier now, tasting me like he’s been waiting too long. The brush of stubble along my jaw burns in a good way. His fingers are inside me, the bottom of his hand knocking against me from how deep and hard he finger-fucks me.
“Look at you,” he murmurs, breath hot against my ear. “Trying to be quiet.”
He curls his fingers just right, and my whole body jerks. “Rowan—”
“That’s it. Say my name like that again.
” He kisses me again, deeper this time, one hand cradling the back of my head while the other traces down, mapping me in touch instead of words.
Every brushstroke he made earlier feels echoed in his fingers now—messy, expressive, deliberate.
His fingers stroke inside me, lighting a fire in me as he holds me against the door.
He finds my rhythm faster than I do, coaxing it out of me with his hand and a low growl that vibrates against my throat. My knees go weak, and he catches me before I slide down the door, holding me there with his hips.
He presses closer, his erection hard against my ass through his pants, and the slow grind of it makes me whimper again. His hand moves faster. Filthy. Perfect. I grab at the door for balance, at him for sanity. “Please,” I gasp, not even sure what I’m asking for.
“Please what?” he asks roughly, breath uneven. His voice is a dark laugh. “You think I don’t know what you need?”
He pulls his hand away before I can answer. I almost sob from the loss until I hear the sound of his pants unzipping. He holds my chin. “I want to see your eyes widen when you feel me enter you, Willow,” he tells me. “I like when you say please.”
When he pushes his length into me, it’s sudden—hard, deep, unrelenting. My body arches into it, shock melting into heat. He swears under his breath, one hand braced on the door beside my head, the other gripping my hip to keep me exactly where he wants me.
The rhythm starts fast and gets faster. Controlled chaos.
Every thrust lands with the sound of skin and breath and everything we’re trying not to let the house hear.
His mouth finds the back of my neck, teeth scraping, and I cry out before I can stop it.
His hand snaps up instantly, covering my mouth again.
“Quiet, Willow,” he warns, voice gone raw.
“Or do you want her to hear? Do you want everyone to know how much you like it?”
I shake my head against his hand, eyes squeezed shut, and he murmurs into my ear, his breath gentle against my skin but his words piercing, “Are you sure? Why don’t you go ahead and call Sean and Declan now?
You can let them hear just how much you like my cock.
It might be the only time they hear you make sounds like this. ”
“No, I only want you,” I tell his palm, and he releases my mouth and rewards me by fucking me harder.
My breath shudders against his palm, every noise trapped and turned into heat.
The world narrows to the drag of him inside me, the sound of his low curses, the rhythm that borders on punishment but never crosses it.
“Ah, sure, grand,” he replies raggedly, his lips tracing the words against the back of my neck, “because I don’t know if they’d still look at you the same if they saw you like this. Do you think Declan and Sean would still want you if they knew what I do to you?”
I lose it, my pussy clenching wildly, my pulse pounding in my ears, sputtering against his hand as he holds my cries in.
He keeps going until he follows, breath hitching, forehead pressed to the back of my shoulder.
For a second, he stays there, still inside me, chest rising and falling against my back.
He kisses the corner of my jaw and growls, “You’re going to be the death of me, Miss Abel.” He’s thrusting slowly, letting my orgasm taper off, breathing hard. I turn just enough to see the look on his face—sweat, stubble, a half smile that’s equal parts pride and possession.
When he finally moves, it’s not to pull away but to turn me in his arms toward him, chest to chest.