Chapter 5 #2
I press my forehead against the cold windowpane and close my eyes and feel the weight of six strangers settle into the hollow of my chest, next to the weight of my mother, and for a moment I understand why she stayed. She stayed because leaving would have meant leaving them too.
Behind me, I hear Callum set his glass down. I hear him not move. He's giving me the space to feel this, which is the first thing he's done since he walked through that door that doesn't feel like a calculation.
I turn around. He's standing in the hallway where I left him, watching me with those eyes, and the look on his face is not pity, not guilt, not the careful neutrality he wears like a uniform.
It's something rawer. The expression of a man who has just handed someone a terrible weight and is watching them decide whether to carry it or collapse under it.
I'm not going to collapse. My mother didn't collapse. My mother carried this for decades, alone, in this house, with these mountains and these journals and this stopped clock. She carried it. She planned and she waited. The least I can do is pick up where she left off and finish what she started.
The silence after he finishes is thick and heavy, and I step closer to him, close enough to smell the rain on his skin and the bourbon on his breath and something underneath both, something sharp and dark, cedar or smoke, the scent of a man who runs expensive and knows it.
My body registers him before my brain does, a response so immediate and involuntary that it cuts through the horror and the grief and the weight of six men in a mountain and arrives at something more dangerous than any of those things.
"You came here in the rain without telling your uncle. You walked so no one would see your car. You just told me the worst secret your family has, and you're standing in my mother's house looking at me like..."
I stop. Because the way he's looking at me has nothing to do with property acquisitions or family obligations.
His eyes are on my mouth, and his breathing has changed, and his hands are at his sides in the specific, deliberate stillness of a man who is keeping himself from reaching for something.
The stillness is restraint. The controlled tension of someone who has decided to wait until the last possible second before taking what he wants.
"Like what?" he says, and his voice is lower than it was a moment ago, rougher at the edges, and the sound of it moves through my body like a physical thing, a vibration that starts in my chest and drops.
I should step back. I should maintain the distance that keeps this transactional, adversarial, safe.
I should remember that this man works for the family that spent decades trying to buy my mother's silence, and that whatever is happening between us is either a complication or a strategy, and I can't afford either one.
Instead I close the distance between us and put my hand on his chest, right over his sternum, right over the place where his heart is beating hard enough for me to feel it through the wet fabric of his shirt.
The disconnect between the stillness of his body and the hammering underneath my palm tells me more than anything he's said all night.
"You should leave," I say, and I don't move my hand, and we both know I'm not telling him to go. I'm giving him the opening to stay without having to ask.
His hand closes over mine. Not gently. His fingers press my palm harder against his chest, holding me there, and his eyes don't leave mine, and when he speaks his voice has the low, certain quality of a man who has stopped pretending.
"No." He holds me there, his fingers pressing my palm harder against his chest. "I'm not a good man."
"I know."
"I've done things for my family that..."
"I know." My hand tightens in his shirt. "I'm not asking you to be good. I'm asking you to be honest."
He kisses me. Or I kiss him. The distinction collapses in the moment of contact, his mouth on mine, cold from the rain and warm underneath, and something else, something that has been building since he sat in my dining room and lied to me with perfect diction, something that has been accumulating in every careful text and every measured silence and every moment his composure slipped just far enough to show me the man behind the mechanism.
The kiss deepens, and his hands find my waist, and mine find the back of his neck, and we are pressed together in the narrow hallway of my dead mother's house, and the grandfather clock stands witness, and the rain comes down, and the moment the kiss shifts from careful to consuming is so fast I miss the seam between them.
His tongue slides against mine and the taste of him, bourbon and heat and the dark edge of something restrained finally letting go, makes my fingers tighten in his hair.
He groans into my mouth, low and rough, and the vibration of it travels down my throat and settles between my legs like a fist closing.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me. His eyes are different now, stripped, intent, darker in the dim hallway light. The look on his face is intent and hungry. The way a man looks at something he's about to take apart.
"This changes everything," he says. Not a question. Not a warning. A statement of fact delivered in the same tone he'd use to read a contract clause, except his pupils are blown and his hand is in my hair and the composure is a ruin.
"I know." I run my thumb along his jaw, feel the muscle tighten under my touch. "I should tell you I'm on birth control. IUD."
"Good." His hand slides through my hair, fingers curling at the base of my skull, tilting my head back so my throat is exposed to him. The possessiveness of the gesture makes my breath catch.
"I don't want anything between us," I say, and the words come out low, rough, meaning more than the practical.
"Neither do I." His mouth grazes the underside of my jaw, and the scrape of his teeth against the tendon there sends a jolt straight down through my center. "I'm clean. Tested. I don't share."
The last two words aren't medical. They're territorial, delivered against my skin with the quiet certainty of a man establishing terms, and my body responds to the claim in them before my brain can mount an objection.
"Good," I say, and pull his mouth back to mine.