16. The Caretaker’s Cottage
Chapter sixteen
The Caretaker’s Cottage
Tara couldn’t sleep, and after she’d given the guest room three full hours of trying, she stopped lying to herself about it and got up.
The Thornwood house was quiet the way old houses got quiet when the people in them had finally stopped making sounds.
The hallway floorboards under her bare feet were warm with the day’s heat.
She didn’t bother with shoes. She crossed the hall in the t-shirt and sleep-shorts she’d been not-sleeping in, and she went down the stairs the way she had learned in her teenage years when she tried to sneak out, weight on the outside edge of each step because the inside was where the boards would squawk and tell on you.
The kitchen was empty. Somebody had turned the stove light off.
The maps were still on the massive cypress table where the family had left them at one in the morning, weighted with the salt cellar and an inkwell and a smooth river stone Miss Delphine had set down to hold the corner of the Marcus map.
Tara stopped at the table for one breath and looked at the work they had accomplished in a day.
Eli’s trail-magic prototype had stretched past the new pin Grandmère had given them at noon and was already reaching for the southern location Marcus had moved Serena to, a careful seam of ink running across the chart in handwriting that had stayed steady, even when his hand hadn’t.
Beside it, the bayou stabilizer Tara had drawn for Eli was drawn out in chalk in two concentric circles.
The thrum at her chest was humming low and warm, the way it had been humming in some register since the moment she’d walked back up the path from the cottage the night before.
Past the window over the sink, the night felt off. The air had been thickening all day, the pressure dropping the way it always dropped before the gulf threw a storm inland. Somewhere out over the water a storm was brewing, but the storm alone wasn’t what kept her awake.
It was the thrum that had her not-sleeping.
That, and Marcus, and the things her grandmother had been talking about in the kitchen all afternoon.
Tara had been all ears. Grandmère wasn’t one to ignore, and the woman who had been her friend since their freshman year of college was still in the clutches of a sadistic madman sixty some-odd miles south down a gulf road.
She was probably also not sleeping right now.
Tara choked back a sob and rubbed at her chest.
Tara had a long list of reasons not to sleep tonight. The thrum just guaranteed it. She didn’t even want to pretend anymore.
She walked out the back screen door.
***
The path through the preserve at night was the same path she’d walked at dusk yesterday with a male she hadn’t yet decided what to do about, and she walked it now in a different frame of mind, with the moon up and the cypress shadows long and the wrought iron at the property line catching the moonlight in the same slow seam her witch-trained eye had caught it in the first time.
The cypress smelled greener and colder than it had during the day.
The herb garden gate was propped open the way Dex had left it the night before.
She didn’t stop at it this time.
The caretaker’s cottage was lit.
She had known it would be. Grandmère had been calling that kind of knowing “body-knowing” since Tara was old enough to hear the word, the intuition that came before evidence.
She had known he wouldn’t be sleeping either.
The lamp through the window was a soft yellow he’d turned low on purpose, and there was the slow rhythmic sound of stone on metal coming through the screen, and Tara stopped at the bottom of the porch steps and let herself acknowledge what she was about to do before she did it.
She was about to open a door she’d already walked through once. She was going to walk through it with a different form of intent this time.
That was the only thing she let herself acknowledge.
She climbed the porch.
She didn’t knock.
***
Dex was at the kitchen table.
A long blade lay across a folded towel. A whetstone in his right hand. He was sharpening a shorter blade with the slow patient passes a man used when he was using the work to think.
The lamp was at his elbow. He was shirtless.
She’d been keeping a careful distance from his shoulders in her head all day. The lamplight ran along them now in a way that made the carefulness pointless. The scar across the back of his left shoulder caught the light when he moved, an old, long line that disappeared into the muscle of his back.
He was a big man. Her body had recognized that the way you knew a wolf was a wolf.
The lamplight made it specific. The spread of his chest. The breadth where shoulder met arm.
The depth of chest to back where those delicious lat handles were waiting for her to hold onto.
His hands at rest looked too big for the small whetstone they had been holding.
He didn’t look up.
“You sharpening for tomorrow?”
“I’m sharpening because I’m not sleeping, chère.”
“Same.”
He set the whetstone down. He looked up. His eyes weren’t gold yet, just the warm brown they got in low light, and his mouth moved at the corner in the slow, knowing way it had moved at her in every room they’d been in together since her grandmother’s porch.
“Bed’s in there,” he said. He nodded at the inner door of the cottage. “I was going to lie down on the kitchen floor in a minute.”
“Oh, were you?”
“I was.”
“Liar.”
Dex snorted. “Where am I lying down, Tara?”
She crossed the room in three slow steps and put her hand flat to the bare skin of his chest where the lamplight was warm. She let her palm rest there for a long beat without saying anything, because what she was about to say needed her hand to be on him first.
His chest rose under her palm.
His heartbeat was wildly erratic for one so calm. And infuriating, she thought.
The thrum in her chest and his pulse under her hand weren’t running at the same tempo, but they were running in the same direction, and she had decided somewhere around the time she pulled out a new protection charm from her Grandmère that she wasn’t going to fight her grandmother’s body-knowing about what direction either of them was running in anymore.
“With me,” she said. “So where will it be, the floor or the bed?”
She didn’t smile at her own joke.
He didn’t either.
“Dex.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m scared. I have been scared since the morning Serena’s voice cut out on me, and I am out of places to put it. The only thing in my body right now that isn’t fear is the thrum I have when I’m in the same room with you.”
He set the whetstone down.
“I know,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. “I feel you, Tara. I’ve been feeling you since you smacked me with a bond on your grandma’s porch. I didn’t realize at the time what your fear stemmed from.”
“I don’t want to talk about her tonight. I don’t want to think about her tonight. I want to be alive in this cottage for a couple of hours.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Wait,” Tara pulled back. “What do you mean I smacked you with a bond?”
He chuckled. He placed her free palm at his lips and nipped.
“Tara.”
“Dex.” She drawled, sliding her hand down between their legs and grabbing a handful of him. There was a lot of him to grab.
“Fucking hell, woman.”
***
The cottage bedroom was smaller than the kitchen. The bed was still neatly made, untouched enough that Tara knew immediately he hadn’t been sleeping in it. Something about that gave her pause.
She sat carefully on the edge of the mattress.
Dex stayed at the foot of the bed.
He’d been looking at her differently since the second she walked through the door. Not softer. Less hidden. Like he was tired of holding pieces of himself back around her.
“Sit down,” she said.
He sat down on the bed beside her. Half-facing her. Hand on his knee. The third knuckle had the long-healed scar she’d noticed at her grandmother’s table the first night.
She watched his hand and not his face. She picked it up and laced her fingers through his without asking.
He didn’t move.
“My father walked out when I was ten,” she said.
His thumb moved a quarter-inch against the back of her hand. He didn’t say anything.
“Grandmère came up that summer and took me home with her. I never really went back to my mother’s after.”
She made herself stop there.
She looked up at him.
“Your turn.”
He looked at their hands. He looked at the floor. He closed his eyes for one breath.
When he opened them, his eyes were warm-brown, and the wolf wasn’t anywhere in his face, which was something he’d been doing for her all night without her quite realizing he’d been doing it.
“I don’t have a last name to hand you.”
She waited.
His jaw worked.
“Bodie picked the one on my paperwork off a road sign.”
The words came out flatter than she’d heard him say anything yet. She tightened her fingers around his without thinking about it.
He looked down at the place she’d tightened.
“Abandoned at fifteen. Placed in a holding cell in Broussard like a rabid… No pack would claim me.” His thumb moved against her hand again, the same quarter-inch.
“Bodie walked in, paid the fine, and drove me up here. Next morning Jasper shoved the syrup across the table and they’ve all treated me like a brother every day since. ”
He looked down briefly.
“I didn’t know what to do with that.”
He took a breath.
“I’m a wolf, with no name, with a wolf temper — bound by all the laws that come with being a wolf, but none of the protections of a sanctioned pack. We’re a pack of outcasts, which I love by the way, but we aren’t afforded the standard pack protections, and you should know that. This is me, Tara.”
She didn’t answer right away.
She looked at him. She let her face do whatever it was doing.
She’d known him for barely three days.
She trusted him in a way that didn’t make any sense. That was the part that really scared her.