Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
AUSTIN
I'd been awake for at least five minutes, listening to the unfamiliar creaks of this old house.
Listening to the soft, even rhythm of Iris breathing beside me.
The light in the room was a soft, hazy gray filtering through an unfamiliar window, not the sharp stripes of sunlight that usually cut across my bedroom floor.
I was in her bed. In Heron House.
The fact registered with a dull, heavy certainty, not the sharp panic I would have expected. I turned my head on the pillow. She was a mess of blonde hair and bare shoulders, smelling of sleep and cinnamon. The woman who had bulldozed her way into my life was now curled up in the middle of it.
Iris let out a soft, contented sigh in her sleep. One small hand, which had been resting on the mattress between us, flopped over to land right on the center of my bare chest.
And I froze.
I lay there, rigid, the warmth of her hand a five-pointed brand against my skin, and I waited. Waited for the usual panic to set in, the claustrophobic sensation of walls closing in, the desperate need to escape back to my solitary space where everything was under my control.
But it didn’t come.
Instead, there was calm. Not just in the room, but inside my head.
The relentless energy and frustration that had been my unwelcome companions for weeks—the very things that had driven me across the yard and up her stairs yesterday like a man possessed—were gone.
It was like a massive pressure valve, one I hadn’t even realized was tightened to the absolute breaking point, had been released in the raw, frantic honesty of last night.
The world hadn’t ended. The sky wasn’t falling. It was just morning.
And I didn’t want to leave.
The realization was as shocking, as disorienting, as our first kiss had been. It was a foreign concept, an alien emotion, and it threw me.
Iris’s eyes fluttered open, the blue hazy and dark with sleep.
They landed on me, and for a long moment, there was sleepy recognition and the slow processing of the reality of me, here, in her bed.
Then awareness dawned, and a faint, self-conscious blush crept over her face, coloring her cheeks a delicate shade of rose.
She looked young, vulnerable, and so devastatingly beautiful in the soft morning light that it made my chest ache.
I cleared my throat, the sound jarring.
Say something, you idiot. Anything other than ‘I need to go check my crab traps.’ Don’t be the asshole you usually are.
“Morning,” I managed.
Her lips curved into a tentative, shy smile. “Hi.” Her voice was soft and husky. “You… you stayed.”
It was both a statement of surprised fact and a question filled with a fragile, tentative hope that I felt all the way down to my bones.
“Seemed like the thing to do,” I mumbled, the heat rising in my face.
She propped herself up on an elbow, the sheet slipping down to reveal the graceful swell of her breast. “Did it now? I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for… you know. Post-conflagration snuggling.”
The words, so ridiculously formal and yet so accurate for what had happened between us, had me fighting a smile. “Don’t think there is one.”
“We should write one.” Her voice was still soft, but with a new, teasing lightness. “Chapter one—the gentleman does not flee the scene of the… conflagration at first light.”
In a move that went against every rule in the Austin Coleridge playbook, I got up, not to flee, but to act. I found my discarded jeans on the floor where we’d dumped the whole pile last night and pulled them on.
“Chapter two,” I said with my back to her. “The gentleman makes coffee.”
I didn’t wait for her response. I just walked out of the bedroom, my heart beating in a strange, unfamiliar rhythm.
I didn’t do coffee.
I didn’t do mornings after.
Yet here I was.
I entered her kitchen and navigated around a stack of blueprints that looked a hell of a lot more professional than Mick’s chicken scratch I’d glimpsed when she made me lunch.
She had a fancy new coffee machine, a beacon of modern convenience inside a mausoleum.
I found fresh coffee in the fridge and managed to get a pot brewing without setting anything on fire.
She emerged a few minutes later, wrapped in a faded blue chenille robe that looked ancient and invitingly soft, her hair piled into an even messier, more precarious bun on top of her head. And despite that, she was radiant. Almost ethereal.
She leaned against the doorframe with a gorgeous upturn to her lips. “You know your way around a coffee maker. I’m impressed. I was half-expecting you to try and brew it with seawater and a blowtorch.”
“Very funny,” I grumbled as I grabbed two cups from a mug tree. One had a cartoon manatee wearing a top hat on it. Of course it did. I automatically handed it to her. “I’ve been making damn good coffee for years. I even provide it on charters.”
“Uh-oh. Now I’ve got coffee expectations.” Her fingers stroked mine as she took the steaming mug, sending that now-familiar, not-at-all-unpleasant jolt up my arm. She winked over the rim as she sampled it. “Okay. You’ve got the job.”
I just snorted.
She moved around me with a careful, charged awareness, pulling a covered plate from the counter. “I was experimenting yesterday afternoon. Mango shortbread. It should still be fresh. Want one?”
“Uh, sure. Thanks.”
The simple domesticity of it all—her in that soft robe, me pouring coffee, the sweet scent of mango as she warmed the squares in the microwave—was both deeply foreign and surprisingly pleasant.
She set the shortbread on the cluttered kitchen table between us.
It tasted incredible. Light, flaky, with a tropical sweetness from the mango that was unexpected and damn near perfect with the strong, black coffee.
I took several bites before I realized she was watching me, waiting for a verdict. I swallowed.
“It’s delicious.” I met her gaze, and the memory of the night before flashed through my mind. The taste of her, the feel of her silken skin. “Kind of like you.”
Her eyes widened slightly, and a slow smile bloomed on her face, a warmth that chased away the last of the morning-after awkwardness.
She didn’t look away. Didn’t make a joke.
She just held my gaze. For a long moment, the air was filled with nothing but the low hum of the refrigerator and the unspoken truth of what was happening between us.
The weirdness was gone, replaced by something milder and more solid.
She sighed after taking a bite. “I have to admit this is better than my usual breakfast of Nutter Butters and long, soul-searching conversations with dust bunnies.”
“You eat cookies for breakfast?”
She turned, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Sometimes, on days that end in y. Don’t judge my coping mechanisms, Captain. They are varied and highly effective.”
It felt like a regular morning. Like something normal people did. And that thought was absurd. I was an imposter, a trespasser in a life that wasn’t, and could never be, mine. Yet it didn’t feel entirely wrong, either.
“So I’ve wanted to ask you about something for a while.” She took a sip of coffee, clearly trying not to smile. “And I think we’ve been suitably introduced now. You mentioned your hibiscus was award-winning when you were yelling at me during the Great Sprinkler Incident.”
Heat flamed over my face. Of all the conversations we could have had over our first shared breakfast, she had to pick the most embarrassing moment of our entire acquaintance. “I didn’t yell during Sprinklergate.”
“You yelled a little.” Her grin was growing now as she clearly enjoyed my discomfort. “With your eyes. Highly intimidating eye-yelling. So what’s the story about that hedge? What award?”
I stared into my coffee mug like it might offer me an escape route.
The hibiscus story was exactly the kind of ridiculous, overly invested behavior that revealed too much about who I really was.
It showed the part of me that got obsessive about things, that couldn’t do anything halfway, even when it was supposed to be casual.
“It was a stupid bet,” I said. “With Braden.”
“One of your brothers, right?”
“The youngest of us. I’m close to him.”
“Tell me about the bet.”
Her words were soft but insistent. When I glanced up, she was leaning forward slightly, chin propped on her hand with curiosity written across her features. Not mocking, not preparing to laugh at me—just interested.
I took a long sip of coffee, buying time. But something about the way she stared at me, patient and encouraging, made me want to tell her. Made me want to share this piece of my history.
“Braden said I was too uptight to grow anything that wasn’t practical. No flowers, no pretty plants, nothing that didn’t serve a clear purpose. Just trees and landscaping.”
“Sounds like something a little brother would say.”
“He wasn’t wrong, exactly. My landscaping was all function and no form.
Gumbo limbo trees, some grass, nothing flashy.
” My ears were starting to burn, but I pressed on.
“So I bought a bunch of hibiscus plants. Bright red, the most impractical, purely decorative thing I could find. Planted them to make a hedge right down the edge of my backyard just to prove him wrong.”
“And?”
“And I got invested.” The admission was huge, exposing. “I started researching proper care techniques, optimal soil conditions, fertilizer schedules. I bought a pH testing kit and started tracking rainfall patterns. I likely spent more on those plants than most people spend on their entire garden.”
Iris was trying not to smile now, but I could see the delight dancing in her eyes. “Of course you did.”