16. The Caretaker’s Cottage #3
He came a second later with her name in the curve of her shoulder and his hand gripping the swell of her ass, and for a long stretch neither of them moved.
***
She traced the scar across his back lightly with her finger.
She had her body curled against his side and her hand on the long-healed line that ran from the back of his left shoulder down to the blade. The type of scar a wolf acquired in a fight he wasn’t supposed to survive. While the skin had grown smooth over it, the line hadn’t healed clean.
Dex didn’t pull away when her fingers found it. He turned his head into the pillow toward her face. His eyes were warm-brown again, no gold in them now; the wolf had gone back to wherever the wolf went.
“A Beaumont brat gave me that scar when I was nineteen,” he said quietly. “A coyote he was running with decided to leave me in a ditch overnight.”
Silence stretched briefly.
“Bodie found me the next morning.”
His eyes lifted back to hers.
“Nobody saw much of the coyote after that.”
She kissed the scar.
She didn’t move for a long beat. He didn’t either.
Then the guilt struck, sharp enough to take the breath out of her and evoke bile at the back of her throat.
The bed was the smallest part of it. The rest went all the way back to Nashville, to her own voice on the phone all those months ago, light as anything, telling Serena to stay put with the hot brothers and enjoy herself, God knew she’d earned a little fun after Marcus.
She’d said it the way you tell a girlfriend to order the second margarita.
She’d known what the Voss boys were and thought knowing made her wise about it.
She had not known one true thing about the world she was waving her best friend into, coyotes, wolves, warlocks, the feedings, rooms with no windows, all the things that walked this corner of the world wearing the faces of men.
She had aimed Serena straight at the center of it and called it a good time.
And here Tara was now, in a wolf’s bed with a thrum in her own chest she would not say out loud, learning bit by bit what that world actually cost a person.
Learning it in her own skin, because apparently that was the only way she was ever going to learn anything.
Dex picked up on it immediately. Damn thrum.
His hand at her hip tightened a fraction.
“Tara.”
“Don’t.”
“You’re not failing her by lying in this bed. The boys are working. Rowena is working. Bodie is working. Eli is going to be on the trail-magic until his hand gives out. There is nothing you can do for her right now that any of us is not already doing.”
Her eyes filled up. She didn’t let them spill.
“Comfort is not a betrayal. Anybody who told you such is a liar.”
She didn’t say anything.
Then she leaned her forehead into his collarbone.
He held her there.
“What about yours?” he asked, tracing a line under her rib. “This one here.”
She turned her body a little so the lamplight fell across her own ribs.
She lifted her arm. The scar she’d carried since she was eight years old was the small white crescent under the soft skin of her left ribcage where Grandmère’s old beagle had bitten her on a hot afternoon; she’d been too small to know better.
She told him about it.
She told him about the dog and the heat and the way Grandmère had cleaned the wound with rum. Dex traced the scar the way she had traced his, slowly, with one knuckle.
He wrapped one arm around her shoulders and the other across the curve of her hip.
The lamp burned itself out without either of them getting up to stop it.
Louisiana dawn arrived soft and gray through the cottage window.
The cypress trees emerged slowly from the dark, and a cardinal started up somewhere near the live oak beyond the garden.
Tara’s hand stayed on the swell of his massive chest.
She didn’t move. He didn’t ask her to. The bond between them had settled into something low and steady by dawn.
Not demanding.
Just there.
Beside her, Dex slept heavily on his side of the bed, one arm thrown across his stomach. His breathing a soft breeze against the top of her head.
Tara lay listening to his breathing and, for the first time in days, allowed herself to rest without keeping part of her attention on the door.
She had almost drifted off when the wind changed.
It came up off the gulf and leaned on the cottage, and the cardinal cut off mid-note, and the gray at the window went a shade darker instead of lighter.
Tara opened her eyes. Feet on the path, a man’s voice, Bodie’s maybe, low and fast, not the register a man used for good news.
A screen door banged in the distance, and an engine turned over.
The storm had made up its mind out over the water.
The thrum in her chest had gone tight where it had been warm all night.
Whatever grace this borrowed dark had bought them was spent, and the thing they had all been racing toward was close enough now that it leaned on the windows like the weather.
She put her mouth to the scar on Dex’s shoulder. She did not let herself stay in the warmth a breath longer than that.
“Wake up,” she said. “It’s time.”