Chapter Eleven – Lark #2
I wake early out of habit and lie still for a few seconds, listening. No movement in the hall. No low scrape of boots by the door. No quiet presence in the kitchen making coffee stronger than it needs to be.
Just the house. Just me.
Rook stretches at the foot of the bed and huffs when I sit up, as if even he thinks this change in routine is unnecessary.
“Apparently, we miss structure now,” I mutter.
He blinks once and thumps his tail against the comforter. A friendly voice calls out from somewhere in the hall as the slam of a door follows.
By the time I reach the kitchen, Claire is already pouring coffee into a travel mug while looking over some handwritten list on the counter. She glances up when I step in, like she had planned this all along.
“He left twenty minutes ago,” she says. “Thought I’d come see if you needed anything.”
I head to the coffee pot like I wasn’t listening for that exact answer before she gave it.
“I didn’t ask.”
“No,” she agrees. “You didn’t.”
Her tone says plenty anyway.
I pour my coffee and pretend not to notice the second mug missing from the dish rack. Pretend not to imagine the shape of his morning—boots laced at the door, turnout bag slung over one shoulder, the quiet focus that settles over him when work pulls the rest of him into line.
It takes me a second to notice it. The kitchen looks the same. The table. The chair pulled slightly off-center.
Everything exactly where it should be— except the vase. I step closer. Wildflowers. Not arranged. Not precise. Just gathered.
The same ones I pointed out the other day without thinking. Half distracted. Talking about how they used to grow near my dad’s place.
I didn’t think he was listening. Or maybe I did. I just didn’t think he’d remember.
My fingers brush one of the petals lightly. There’s no note. No comment. Just…there. Like it’s always been.
Dangerous. That’s what all of this is. Dangerous in a way that has nothing to do with fire.
Hadley arrives not long after, all delight and bright purpose, sweeping into the house with Bailey and Lila behind her and Ivy a beat later, carrying a pastry box in one hand and sunglasses tucked on top of her head.
Rook runs straight for Ivy first. I squash away the instant jealousy I feel at that. She crouches without hesitation, letting him sniff her hand before scratching gently under his chin.
“There’s my favorite tiny man.”
“He is absolutely not tiny,” I say.
“Emotionally,” Bailey says, breezing past with an iced coffee the size of her head. “He’s a menace.”
The next hour passes in a blur of movement and chatter, and the kind of female energy I’m still not used to being a part of without having to perform.
Bailey talks me into going to the bookstore even after I insist I should be at the inn.
Lila ignores that excuse by asking if I’ve eaten breakfast with the kind of voice that only works if people care what your answer is.
Hadley makes herself useful by grabbing Rook’s leash before I can argue and declaring that “fresh air counts as emotional regulation.”
The bookstore—Bailey’s bookstore—is exactly what I should’ve expected and somehow more than that anyway.
Warm wood floors. Shelves packed to the ceiling.
A soft bell over the door. The whole place smells faintly of paper, coffee, and sea air that seeps in every time someone enters.
And it’s in a freaking lighthouse. I’ve never seen anything more iconic.
I should feel out of place.
Instead, sitting in the reading nook with a coffee in one hand while Hadley sprawls on the floor beside Rook and tells me stories about Holt at sixteen, I feel something else. Like I’m being folded into the shape of a life I never asked for.
“He used to jump off the hayloft into those old feed sacks because he thought it made him look fearless,” Hadley says, grinning into her cup. “Broke his wrist at seventeen and still tried to tell everyone he slipped rescuing a cat.”
I look up from the book I haven’t actually read a page of. “There was no cat.”
“Absolutely no cat,” Lila confirms from the armchair by the window.
Bailey slides a stack of new releases onto a nearby display. “There should’ve been a cat. It would’ve improved the story.”
Ivy glances over the rim of her mug. “He does have cat-rescue energy, though.”
The image hits me before I can stop it. A younger Holt, all loose limbs and foolish confidence, jumping before thinking because some part of him expected the landing to figure itself out.
My mouth curves. I shouldn’t know exactly what that version of him would look like, but I do anyway.
“And now he lectures me about common sense,” I mutter.
Hadley’s grin goes feral. “Oh, he likes you.”
The room goes still around that sentence in a way only I seem to notice. I take a sip of coffee to buy time. Bailey smothers a smile. Lila looks down at the pastry in her hand. Ivy doesn’t even pretend that she’s not watching for my reaction.
“I’m revising my statement,” I say. “You’re all impossible.”
“No,” Hadley says. “We’re observant.”
That word again. I hate how much I hear his voice in it.
By the time I get dropped off back at Holt’s house to get my car and head back to the inn that afternoon, Nolan is already there waiting for me.
I don’t even want to think about how Nolan managed to bully the realtor into handing over the contractor's spare key yesterday after deciding I clearly “wasn’t answering my phone enough.”
I should be irritated by his overprotectiveness. Instead, I’m mostly tired.
He’s in the front hall when I step through the door, measuring tape in one hand, phone tucked between his shoulder and ear while he talks through scheduling with a supplier who sounds deeply incompetent from what little I catch.
He glances up, spots me, and immediately wraps the call with the kind of efficiency that used to impress me before it started exhausting me.
“Morning,” he says.
“It’s afternoon.”
He glances at his watch. “Technically.”
I set my bag down and study him. There’s a coffee waiting on the front table beside the plans. My usual order. No comment attached. No smug expression. Just there.
That’s Nolan in a nutshell. Annoying enough to make me want to argue. Thoughtful enough to make it complicated.
He’s already stacked trim samples by the wall, laid out fresh notes on the front table, and opened every first-floor window despite the humidity trying to fight him for it.
“You’ve been busy.”
“Trying to get ahead of the rain.” His gaze moves over me once, not intrusive, but careful. “And trying to make sure you don’t walk into another problem before breakfast.”
His answer holds a little too much edge to pass as casual.
I meet his gaze. “If you have something to say, go ahead.”
He exhales once and sets the tape down. “You stayed at his place.”
I still.
Nolan’s voice isn’t sharp, exactly. It’s too controlled for that. Too careful. Like he knows this is a line, and he’s already bracing for me to shove him back over it.
“Not a hotel,” he adds. “Not a rental. Not even the next town over.”
“Yes.”
His jaw works once. “Okay.”
I blink. “Okay?”
“I don’t like it,” he says. “But okay.”
That throws me more than an argument would have. “Since when do you stop at not liking something?”
He looks down at the plans, then back up. “Since I’m trying to remember you’re not someone I get to manage.”
There it is. No point pretending otherwise.
The words should make me soften. Instead, they make something uneasy move under my skin, because Nolan has always been better at telling half the truth than lying outright.
“Is there a reason you’re worried,” I ask, “or are we just revisiting old habits?”
His gaze flicks toward the back hall, just for a second.
“Both, probably.”
“Nolan.”
He exhales. “The latch on the side gate was open when I got here this morning.”
My spine straightens. “Why didn’t you lead with that?”
“Because I wanted to know whether you’d already noticed.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he says quietly. “It’s not.”
The next few minutes disappear into work and friction layered over old familiarity.
We move through the back in silence, giving way to function.
Measurements. Materials. Timeline. Money.
He’s good at this, which is part of the problem.
He sees structure first and sentiment later, if at all.
My father used to say it made him a strong contractor and a dangerous man to build a life with.
At the time, I thought he was being dramatic. Now I’m not so sure.
We work in the same pattern the next day. Barely acknowledging each other unless it’s something with the house. I don’t ask where he’s staying or why he decided he had to be here, just like he isn’t asking about my determination to finish this project.
By late afternoon, I’ve forced myself through enough to call it progress. Nolan stays after I tell him I’m done because he wants to finish marking the subfloor near the stairs.
I leave him to it and head back to the farm with dust in my hair and old frustration waking up under my skin.
Holt’s truck is already there. One glimpse of it parked by the barn, sun flashing off the windshield, and something in me unravels and settles at the same time. Something that feels awfully close to relief.
Rook beats me to the porch. The front door is half open, and through the screen I can see Holt in the kitchen, one hand braced on the counter while he reads something on his phone. He looks up at the sound of the screen slamming behind the dog and catches sight of me before I can prepare for it.
His whole expression changes. Not much. Just enough that I know I’m not imagining what’s between us anymore.
“You’re early. Figured you’d be there until dark,” he says when I step inside.
“Nolan stayed.”
There’s a pause. One beat. Two.
Then he sets his phone face down on the counter. “How’d that go?”
“Productively.”
He huffs once through his nose, like he doesn’t believe me but isn’t going to call me a liar just yet.
I drop my bag by the door and move toward the sink to wash the dust off my hands.
The kitchen smells like garlic and butter and something roasting in the oven.
It’s domestic in a way the inn will never be.
Lived in. Cared for. That should make the ache under my ribs easier to ignore. Except it does the opposite.
“He’s useful,” I say, because apparently I’m determined to make this harder on myself.
Holt leans back against the counter and crosses his arms. “That wasn’t the question.”
I dry my hands slowly and turn.
“What was it?”
His eyes hold mine.
“Did he make it harder?”
The answer comes too quickly.
“Yes.”
Something in his jaw shifts.
“Explain.”
I should refuse. Instead, maybe because I’m tired, maybe because his kitchen has become a place where the truth slips easier than it should, I say, “He acts like if he plans enough ahead, nobody else gets to change the shape of things.”
Holt is quiet. I keep going before I can stop myself.
“Every decision has an angle with him. A purpose. A way it should unfold. He doesn’t understand how to let a thing breathe long enough to become itself.”
The room stills around that.
Then Holt says, very softly, “And you think I do.”
It’s not a question.
I look at him. At the soot long gone from his skin now, replaced by clean lines and damp hair and a T-shirt stretched across shoulders that still make me think of the way his hands felt on my waist in that hallway.
“You try to control things too,” I say.
His mouth curves, but there’s no humor in it. “Yeah.”
“But it’s different.”
Those words settle between us and change something in the air. He steps closer. Just one step.
“How?”
I swallow. Because the answer is too big and too simple and far too dangerous.
“You make room,” I say. And then, because apparently I’ve already given the game away and don’t know how to stop, I add, “Even when you don’t want to.”
His gaze drops. Not to my mouth this time. To my hands. To the way my fingers are twisting the dish towel around themselves without my permission, then back up.
“That feels like a bad thing to say to me right now.”
My breath catches slightly.
“Why?”
He takes another step until there’s almost no distance at all.
“Because I’ve been trying real hard not to think about kissing you again since the other day,” he says.
Everything in me goes still as the room crowds around me. And somewhere behind us, Rook barks once from off in the distance because apparently even the dog can tell this night just changed shape.