Chapter 19
NINETEEN
The stilt house was a lonely box perched on twelve-foot timber pilings. When Dante cut the engine, the storm immediately filled the silence, the wind hammering the car, the rain coming sideways off the Gulf.
“Wait here,” Dante said.
He stepped out into the rain, and she watched him through the blurred windshield, head down, shoulders hunched, as he found the key taped under an Igloo cooler exactly where Miller had said it would be. He held it up, and she took that as her cue.
She grabbed the plastic bag of gas station supplies and ran for the stairs, the rain hitting her hard. The wooden steps creaked under their weight as they climbed, and Dante unlocked the door with wet hands and pushed it open.
He didn't turn on the lights.
Jessica stood just inside the doorway while he moved through the space, checking the windows, checking the single closet.
It was a one-room efficiency: a kitchenette along one wall, a wide bed tucked into an alcove, large windows that should have looked out over the Gulf but were just black mirrors full of storm.
She set the bag on the counter and stood in the center of the room, her hair plastered flat, t-shirt soaked through and clinging to her. She was shivering, a violent tremor she couldn't suppress.
Dante turned back to her and stopped.
For a moment they just stood there, dripping on the floor of a stranger's house.
“You're freezing,” he said.
“I'm fine.”
He crossed the room and his hands landed at her sides before either of them could think about it. The wet fabric was cold under his palms at first, then less cold where he held her. She sucked in a breath but didn't move away.
“We're okay here,” he said. “For tonight.”
Jessica looked up at him. In the dark, with the rain hammering the windows and his hands on her ribs, the distance they'd been keeping felt less than it ever had.
“For tonight,” she repeated.
“Yeah.”
She held his gaze. “Then let it be tonight.”
She heard herself say it and understood what she was doing—drawing the same line he kept drawing, the one that let them have this without either of them having to look at what came after. A coward's bargain. She didn't care. She was tired of being brave.
Something in Dante's face shifted. “Jess—”
“Don't.” She pressed her palm flat against his chest, over his heart, where she could feel it going. “Don't make it more than I can hold right now. I can do tonight.” Her voice caught. “I can't do the part where we pretend there's an after. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
For a moment he didn't move, and she thought he might pull back, the way he had in the motel.
Then his hand came up to the side of her face.
“Tonight,” he murmured. Then he kissed her.
It wasn't like the motel kiss, the desperate, colliding force of two people who'd been starving. This was slower, deliberate, his mouth finding hers like he was making sure she understood this was a choice. His thumb traced her cheekbone, and she felt the restraint in him finally let go.
Her hands slid up his chest, over his shoulders, pulling him closer. The wet fabric between them was nothing, less than nothing, and when his fingers found the top button of the shirt, she didn't stop him.
He undid it slowly. Then the next. His hands were clumsy with cold and something else, trembling against her skin as the shirt opened and the air hit her.
“Baby,” he said against her mouth, and the way he said it—raw and half-wrecked, like he still couldn't believe she was letting him—made her eyes sting.
“I'm here,” she said.
His forehead dropped to hers, and for a second he just breathed, his hands flat against her bare skin, holding still in a way she understood was him giving her one last chance to change her mind.
She answered by pulling his shirt over his head.
His skin was hot under her hands. She ran her palms up his chest, feeling the hard terrain of him. His hands were at her shoulders, sliding the wet shirt the rest of the way down her arms. It hit the floor with a sodden thud.
She was standing in just the sequined dress now, soaked through, the fabric clinging to her like a second skin. She watched his eyes move over her and watched him stop trying to hide what was there.
“You're freezing,” he said again.
“So warm me up.”
He reached for one of the rough towels on the rack by the kitchenette.
He didn't hand it to her. He stepped into her space and draped it over her head, and then he was gently rubbing her hair dry, his hands working through the wet pink strands like he needed to keep them busy or they'd do something else entirely.
“Hold still,” he muttered.
She didn't hold still. She pressed her palms flat against his stomach. The muscle contracted under her touch like she'd burned him.
His hands stopped moving. The towel hung around her neck and he used it to pull her an inch closer, his breathing uneven now.
Jessica leaned in and pressed her mouth to the hollow of his throat.
She felt his pulse hammering against her lips, felt his whole body go taut, and understood with a sudden, dizzying clarity that Dante Cruz—the man who'd escaped the scariest gang in the country, who'd survived federal prison and witness protection—was barely holding it together because her mouth was on his neck.
He found the zipper at the back of the dress.
It was stuck; salt and grit from the road had jammed the teeth.
She felt him pull once, carefully, then again with less patience, and then the metal gave and the fabric parted and his hands were on her bare back, palms sliding down her spine, and she stopped thinking.
“Daniel,” she said against his skin, and her use of his real name did something to him she could feel in his entire body.
His hands tightened at her hips. He lifted her, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, and he carried her backward until her shoulders hit the wall beside the bed. The wood groaned behind her.
He kissed her again. She tasted rain and salt and him, and when his hand came up to the back of her neck, fingers tangling in her damp hair, tilting her head back, she let him.
“This is real,” he said against her throat. Not a question. A thing he needed to say out loud once, even if neither of them was allowed to keep it.
“I know,” she said.
He pulled back just enough to look at her, and what she saw in his face wasn't the controlled, guarded man who'd been managing this for days. It was someone younger, rawer, closer to the Daniel she'd known in a trailer in Chicago.
He set her down on the bed and followed her onto it, the wool blanket rough against her skin as the dress slid the rest of the way off.
His weight settled over her, and she pulled him down, her hands at the back of his neck, and for a while the storm outside was just sound, meaningless noise against the windows.
His hands were everywhere. Unhurried now, slower, almost reverent, like he was relearning the geography of someone he'd memorized years ago and wasn't sure what had changed.
When his fingers found the curve of her breast and her breath caught, he came back to it, paying attention in a way that made her chest ache, because she'd forgotten what it felt like to be touched by someone who was actually present.
She said his name again, quieter this time, and he answered by pressing his mouth to her collarbone, her ribs, the soft skin below her navel, his lips tracing a path that was slow and deliberate and devastating.
She was pulling him back up to her, her breathing ragged, her body focused on nothing except where he was and where she needed him to be, when—
Thump.
It wasn't the wind. The wind was a constant howl, a shifting pressure that hadn't stopped since they'd arrived. This was solid and heavy. The sound of something hitting the wooden pilings beneath the house.
Dante went still above her. Every muscle locked at once, his breath held, his eyes fixed on the dark rectangle of the door.
“Dante?” she whispered, her voice ragged.
“Quiet.”
He was off her and on his feet in a single motion, the transition so fast it left her cold where his body had been. His hand found the .45 on the kitchenette table without looking; the same hands that had been tracing her skin two seconds ago now wrapped around a gun.
Jessica sat up, pulling the wool blanket to her chest, her pulse hammering for a different reason now.
The house groaned in the wind. Rain battered the windows. Beneath the floor, something shifted.
Dante stood between her and the door, barefoot, shirtless, the gun held low.
He didn't look back at her. He didn't need to. She could read his body as well as she ever had, and what it was telling her now was that the world they'd shut out ten minutes ago had found them.
One second his weight was over her, his mouth on her skin, her body so focused on him that the storm had stopped existing.
The next, she was sitting up in a strange bed in a dark room, clutching a wool blanket to her bare chest while Dante pressed his back against the wall beside the door with a gun in his hand.
She wanted to scream at the timing. At whatever cruel thing kept doing this to them, kept letting them get close enough to touch before ripping the floor out. She was so tired of almost.
“Is it them?” she whispered.
“I don't know.” He didn't look at her. His focus was on the door. “Get behind the counter. Stay low. If that door goes, you go out the back window.”
She didn't move. She stayed exactly where she was, hair dripping onto the pillow, her heart still hammering a rhythm that had nothing to do with fear.
We were right there, she thought. A tear escaped and tracked through the salt on her cheek. We were finally there.
Another thud from below, something large and metallic scraping against timber.
Dante moved to the door, his hand on the knob, his body coiled. He ripped it open and the wind screamed into the room, bringing a spray of seawater with it. He leveled the gun into the dark.
Five seconds passed. Then ten. The rain lashing his face, his finger on the trigger, the muscles in his back rigid.
Then his shoulders dropped. He lowered the weapon.
“What?” Jessica said, already on her feet. “What is it?”
He stepped back inside and kicked the door shut, turning the bolt. He leaned his forehead against the wood, his chest heaving, the adrenaline coming down through him in visible waves.
“A skiff,” he said. “Loose. It's wedged under the pilings.” A breath. “It's just a boat, baby.”
He turned from the door. His eyes found hers across the dim room, and she watched him register what was on her face – the tear, the rawness, the fact that she was sitting on a bed they'd been in together sixty seconds ago and the distance between then and now felt like a canyon.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then the tension left his body, not all at once, but in a slow release. He set the gun on the counter and crossed the room. He sat on the edge of the bed beside her, close enough that his arm pressed against hers, and he didn't say anything.
Jessica leaned into him, her forehead finding the curve of his neck. He was wet and cold and smelled like rain, and she pressed into him anyway.
His arm came around her. His hand settled on her back, over the blanket, and he held her.
The skiff scraped against the pilings again, a low, hollow sound that was already becoming ordinary.
“I hate this,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
“I don't mean the danger. Or the running.” She pulled back enough to look at him. “I hate that every time we get close to something real, something takes it away. And I hate that I'm starting to think that's just what happens to us.”
Dante looked at her for a long moment. Then his hand came up and he wiped the tear track from her cheek with his thumb, the gesture so gentle it almost started her crying again.
“It's a boat, Jess,” he said. “That's all it was. We're still here.”
She held his gaze, wanting to believe it was that simple, knowing it wasn't.
“Come on,” he said. He shifted back on the bed, pulling her with him, and she let herself be pulled—back onto the mattress, back under the rough wool blanket, back into the warmth of him.
He settled onto his back, and she curled against his side, her head on his chest, her palm flat over his heartbeat.
It was still pounding. Faster than his steady hands had let on.
“You're not as calm as you pretend to be,” she murmured.
“Never have been,” he said.
She closed her eyes. The storm battered the house and the skiff knocked against the pilings rhythmically.
His hand moved slowly up and down her back, and after a while her breathing began to match his, and the distance between the moment they'd lost and the one they were in now didn't feel quite so far.