Chapter 10
Lark
Logan’s arms were around me and his voice was in my ear, and my body had stopped being mine.
The truck. The truck was in the water because I was so stupid. Every second I sat here was another second the water rose and the engine died and the one thing I couldn’t afford to lose slipped further out of reach.
And I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t move. Not just because of Logan’s arms wrapped around me.
My body had locked itself into a shaking that went deeper than my hands, deeper than the cold. It lived in my ribs, the muscles along my spine, the backs of my legs. Deep, involuntary waves that started somewhere beneath my lungs and radiated outward.
My breathing had fractured into short, sharp pulls that caught in my throat before they could fill anything. My fingers were locked on his forearms so hard I could feel tendons shifting under his skin.
His voice came through the noise. Low, even, close enough that I felt his breath warm against my temple.
“I’m right here. It’s going to be okay. If you want to go try to get the truck, we will.”
I tried to answer, and nothing came out. My throat was sealed shut, and my chest was caving in on itself, each breath shorter than the last.
And then it hit me. What I’d done. What I’d said.
The words I’d never spoken out loud to anyone had come pouring out of me in ragged, broken pieces. The mortgage. The bank. Three months behind. The heat I couldn’t afford and the propane I’d let run out and the grants that vanished.
I’d said all of it, every ugly thing I’d been swallowing for months, and I knew from the look on his face when he’d asked about the barn shower that he’d pieced it all together.
I’d handed a man I’d known for three weeks every secret I’d been keeping from the rest of the world, and I couldn’t take any of it back.
“You’re not alone in this, Lark.” That deep voice again. The only thing that seemed to be able to penetrate this panic smothering me.
Together. He’d said that too. Minutes ago, or hours, I didn’t know anymore. When I’d been clawing at rock and lunging for the rain and trying to get out of my own skin, he’d caught me and said we’ll go together.
I’d never had together.
I’d had alone. I’d had my mother’s voice on the phone saying Carter’s been asking about you like that was something I should want to hear.
I’d had my father’s silence and my sister’s disinterest and you’re being difficult, Eleanor while I stood in their foyer bleeding through a dishcloth wrapped around my forearm.
I’d had Carter’s hand on my elbow steering me toward the car, steering me toward the bedroom, steering me toward the version of myself he’d decided I should be.
Not one person in my adult life had ever said you can go, and I’ll go with you.
Logan had.
The shaking didn’t stop. But the edge of it changed.
The desperate animal need to run faded by slow degrees until I realized I wasn’t fighting his arms anymore.
I was leaning into them. My weight had settled back against his chest behind me and my fingers had loosened on his forearms, and I was still here.
The panic crested somewhere above me like a wave that had run out of ocean. My body was still flooded with adrenaline, the tremors still running through my hands. But the worst of it was pulling back. Receding. Leaving wreckage behind, the way the water below us was leaving wreckage, but receding.
And as it pulled back, I felt him.
Not his voice as a lifeline. Not his arms as the thing between me and the flood. The warmth of his chest against my back, solid and specific. The rhythm of his breathing, slow and deliberate, completely out of sync with mine, like he existed at a different speed than the chaos inside me.
His heartbeat pressed against my shoulder blade, constant and unhurried, and I wanted to scream at it for being so calm when nothing else was.
He loosened his arms.
Just barely. An inch of space, maybe less. Not letting go. Just easing the hold, the way you’d open your hands around a bird to see if it wanted to fly.
I didn’t fly. I didn’t take the space.
The adrenaline still flooding my body searched for somewhere to go.
I couldn’t run. I couldn’t fix anything.
I couldn’t go back to the barn and pick up the clipboard and start the evening rounds and pretend that the last hour hadn’t peeled me down to the studs.
All that desperate energy was still alive in my blood and it had no direction and no exit, and I was vibrating with it.
I turned.
I didn’t decide to. My body just moved, shifting in his arms until I was facing him, my hands sliding from his forearms to his chest, fisting the wet fabric of his shirt.
I looked up at him, and I knew what my face looked like because I could feel it. Wrecked, open, everything I’d spent years hiding written across it in block letters, and I didn’t have the energy to put a single piece of it away.
It wasn’t pity on his face. If I’d seen pity, I would have cracked a joke about cave breakdowns and started cataloging the cloud cover and asked him if he thought Duchess was mad about dinner being late.
Pity was the one thing I knew how to outrun.
But he wasn’t giving me pity. And he wasn’t giving me desire or worry or that careful, manufactured softness that people put on when they think you’re fragile and want you to know they noticed.
He was just there.
A man sitting on the ground in a wet shirt with firelight on one side of his face, looking at me with no performance at all.
No mask rearranged to make me comfortable.
He’d just held me through the ugliest thing I’d shown anyone since I’d walked into a women’s shelter with a bleeding arm, and his face said nothing except I’m here.
Every person in my life who’d witnessed my pain had needed me to manage their reaction to it. My family needed me to minimize so they didn’t feel guilty. Carter needed me to apologize so he could feel justified. Even the well-meaning ones needed me to show progress so they could feel helpful.
Logan needed nothing from me. And that undid me more than anything else could have.
I kissed him.
It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t romantic. It was my mouth crashing into his because the adrenaline had nowhere to go and his face was right there, open and unguarded and asking nothing, and my body chose before my brain caught up.
The kiss was hard and messy and graceless, and I tasted rain and smoke from the fire and my own salt.
He didn’t pull away. His hands stayed where they were, on my back, on my arms, and for a terrible suspended second, I thought he was going to gently stop me. Put his hands on my shoulders and ease me back and say something kind and reasonable that would have made me want to die.
He leaned in instead. Met my mouth with his and matched what I was giving, the desperation and the mess, and his hand came up to the side of my face and held it there.
The kiss changed. Or I changed. The desperate energy pouring through me found its direction, and the direction was Logan.
I shifted the rest of the way around and pressed into him, my body moving against his.
I wasn’t thinking anymore. I was past thinking.
My hips found his thigh and I ground against him, and the sound that came out of my throat had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with a woman who needed to get out of her own body before it shook itself apart.
He read me.
I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how a man I’d known for three weeks could understand in the space of a breath what I needed, but he shifted underneath me, lying back. His hand moved to my hip, firm and steadying, and the other pressed against the small of my back.
He wasn’t leading. He was giving me something solid to move against, and he was letting me set every single term.
I buried my face in his neck, my hips rocked against his thigh, and the friction cut through everything else. The denim between us and the heat beneath it and the hard muscle of his leg pressed exactly where I needed it. My breath left me in a sound I didn’t recognize.
His hand on my hip tightened. He shifted his thigh higher, angled it, and the pressure changed. I heard myself gasp against his skin.
He knew. He knew exactly what I was doing, and he was making it easier, tilting his body to give me more of what I was chasing without once trying to take it somewhere else.
I ground against him harder. My hands fisted in his shirt, and my hips found a rhythm that had nothing to do with grace and everything to do with the tight, building ache between my legs that was the only thing louder than the panic.
I pressed my mouth against his neck and tasted salt and rain, and I could feel it climbing, the tension winding tighter with every roll of my hips, every point of contact where his body met mine.
He didn’t rush me. When I moved faster, he was there. When I gripped his shirt so hard I heard a seam pop, he let me. He slid his hand from my hip to the curve of my ass and pressed me closer, and I stopped breathing entirely.
The release caught me off guard, breaking through me. My whole body went rigid, every muscle locked, and the sound that tore out of me came from somewhere below my chest and cracked open on the way out.
Then I went loose against him all at once, boneless, shaking for an entirely different reason, my forehead pressed hard against his collarbone and my breath coming in wet, ragged pulls against his skin.
The fire popped and settled behind us. The rain outside the overhang had gone from pounding to a murmur. His hand moved to my hair, slow, and I felt the weight of it against the back of my skull. Neither of us spoke.
My heartbeat was everywhere. In my throat, my fingertips, the places where my body was still pressed against his. His heartbeat lived under my ear, faster than I’d expected from a man who seemed incapable of being rattled, and that detail lodged somewhere in my chest and stayed.
He pushed wet hair off my forehead. His thumb traced my jaw once, careful, and then his hand settled warm and still at the back of my neck.
He didn’t ask if I was okay. If he had, I would have had to answer, and I didn’t have a single lie left in me.
The awareness crept in. What I’d done. I’d kissed him. I’d ground myself against his leg in a cave and come apart against his body and made a sound that I was going to hear in my own head every time I looked at him for the rest of my natural life.
I’d let this man see me completely unraveled in the space of one afternoon.
I pulled back. Put a few inches of cold air between us. My body missed the warmth immediately, which was a piece of information I planned to deal with later. Or never.
“Well,” I said. “That was probably not in the ranch hand job description.”
His eyes held mine. “I’d have to check the fine print.”
“There is no fine print. There’s barely a job description. I wrote it on a flyer in my kitchen at four in the morning with a marker that was almost out of ink.”
“Sounds about right.”
I almost laughed. What came out was closer to a breath, the shape of a laugh without the sound. The deflection was tissue-thin. We both knew I was building scaffolding over an open wound, and we both knew he was letting me do it.