Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Leah
I wake up in a bed that isn't mine.
It takes me a second, that disoriented pause where your brain hasn't caught up to your body, and you're lying in sheets that smell wrong.
Except they don't smell wrong.
They smell like cedar, laundry detergent and something warm underneath that I've been breathing in all night, and the reason they smell like that is because I'm in Coin's bed.
In Coin's house.
Wearing nothing but his sheets.
The other side of the bed is empty.
The pillow still has the indent from his head and the sheets are pulled back neatly—because of course they are, because this is a man who makes his side of the bed even when there's a woman still sleeping in it.
The thought makes me want to laugh and also makes my chest do something complicated that I'm not ready to name at six-thirty in the morning.
I lie there for a minute. Just lie there, staring at the ceiling of a room I've never been in before, processing.
The room is clean. Not bachelor-pad clean—actually clean.
No clothes on the floor, no dishes on the nightstand, no dust on the dresser.
There's a framed photo of the girls on his bedside table—Wrenleigh and Sadie Jo at what looks like a county fair, cotton candy in their hands, Wrenleigh mid-laugh and Sadie Jo giving the camera a shy half-smile.
Next to it, a phone charger, an alarm clock, and a worn paperback that I can't read the spine of from this angle.
That's it. That's the whole room.
A man's entire personal life in a twelve-by-twelve space: his daughters' faces, a book, and a bed that hasn't had anyone in it but him for longer than I want to think about.
Until last night.
Last night.
I press my face into his pillow and breathe, and the memories hit me in pieces—his hands on my hips, his mouth on my scar, the way he said I've got you like he meant it in every possible interpretation of the phrase.
The way he touched me like I was something he'd been thinking about for a long time and wanted to get right.
The sound of my name in his mouth.
I should be panicking.
I should be doing the thing I always do after I let someone get too close—the mental inventory of all the reasons this is a bad idea, the exit strategy, the emotional retreat back behind the walls I've spent twenty-eight years building.
I don't want to do any of that.
I want to walk into that kitchen and drink coffee with the man who held me last night and didn't let go, even after I stopped shaking.
I want to sit at his table in his shirt and watch him do whatever mundane morning thing he's doing—probably packing lunches for daughters who aren't even here—and I want it to feel exactly as easy as it sounds.
That terrifies me more than anything.
Not the sex. Not the vulnerability. The ease of it. How natural it feels to be here.
I find my underwear on the floor beside the bed. My jeans are in the hallway, which is a fun piece of evidence. My sweater is... somewhere.
I pull on my underwear and grab a t-shirt from his dresser because I'm not hunting for my sweater at six-thirty in the morning.
It's soft and too big and it smells like him, and I'm adding this to a growing collection of his clothes that I have no intention of returning.
I pad barefoot down the hallway.
The hardwood is cold under my feet.
The house is quiet in the early morning way.
This is softer.
Dawn light coming through the windows, the smell of coffee drifting from the kitchen, the low hum of a house that feels lived in and loved, even when the people who live in it are somewhere else.
He's in the kitchen. Of course he is.
He's standing at the counter with his back to me, pouring coffee into two mugs.
He's wearing jeans and no shirt and his back is—okay. His back is a problem.
Not broad the way Garrett's is, or massive the way Maddox is. Just solid.
Compact muscle under skin that I had my hands on a few hours ago, and the memory of how it felt under my palms makes my breath catch in a way that's ridiculous for a grown woman who has seen plenty of shirtless men in a clinical setting.
This is not a clinical setting.
He hears me. I don't know how—I'm barefoot and I'm quiet—but he turns, and there's the almost-smile.
Except this morning it's more than almost.
This morning, it's real.
Small, private, and meant only for me.
A smile that lives in the corners of his eyes and the barely-there curve of his mouth, and it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen on a man's face.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
"Coffee's ready."
"You're a saint."
"Don't let the club hear you say that."
I take the mug he holds out.
Our fingers brush and this time neither of us pretends it didn't happen.
He holds the contact for a second.
I sit at the kitchen table and he sits across from me.
We drink coffee in the early morning light, and it's so domestic and so ordinary and so far from anything I've experienced in my entire adult life that I have to grip the mug with both hands to keep myself grounded.
"The girls come back at noon," he says.
"I know. I probably shouldn't be here when they do."
"Probably not." He pauses. Turns the coffee mug the way he turns the coin—slow, thoughtful. "Not because I don't want you here. But because Wrenleigh will have questions I'm not ready to answer, and Sadie Jo will know without asking, which is worse."
"Sadie Jo reads you like a book."
"She reads everyone like a book. Gets it from me." Another pause. "Leah?"
"Yeah."
"Last night wasn't… I need you to know that wasn't just—" He stops.
Starts again. This is a man who chooses his words like he's paying per syllable, and right now he's spending more than usual.
"I don't do casual. I can't. Not with you.
Not with who you are to my girls, and to Garrett, and to—" He meets my eyes. "—to me."
My throat tightens. "I don't do casual either."
"Good."
"Good."
We stare at each other across his kitchen table like two people who just discovered they're standing at the edge of something with no railing, and neither of us is stepping back.
"This is going to be complicated," I say.
"It's already complicated."
"Garrett."
"Yeah."
"The club."
"Yeah."
"Your girls."
"Yeah." He takes a breath. "But I'm not sorry about last night. I need you to hear that. Whatever comes next. The complicated parts, the hard parts, all of it. I'm not sorry."
"I'm not sorry either."
And I mean it. I mean it the way I've never meant anything before.
Not when I chose nursing, not when I chose to stay in Morgantown, not when I chose to keep showing up at this man's house with PT exercises and excuses that stopped fooling anyone weeks ago.
I mean it completely.
He reaches across the table and takes my hand. Holds it the way he held it on the porch—rough, warm, his thumb finding my knuckles like they belong there.
We finish our coffee.
We don't talk about whatever's been putting armed men on his porch and new locks on his doors.
He doesn't offer and I don't push.
Not yet. Not this morning.
This morning is just coffee, his hand on mine, and the sunrise turning the kitchen gold.
I'll push later. I always do.
I leave at eight, shower at my apartment, change into fresh scrubs, and drive to Ruby Memorial for a noon shift.
The whole drive I'm replaying things—his mouth, his hands, the way he said I'm not sorry like it was the bravest thing he'd done in years.
My body still feels like it belongs to someone else.
I grip the steering wheel and tell myself to focus because I have patients who need me to be a professional and not a woman still feeling last night in her thighs.
I check on Haley Briggs first.
She's been moved out of the ICU—still in the hospital, still weak, but breathing on her own.
Her mother is at her bedside, red-eyed and exhausted and holding her daughter's hand like if she squeezes hard enough she can keep her in this world by force.
I've seen that grip a hundred times. It never gets easier.
"She's doing well," I tell the mother. "She's strong."
"She's sixteen," the mother says. "She shouldn't have to be strong."
I don't have an answer for that. I never do.
My shift is brutal—a car accident, two chest pain cases, a toddler who swallowed a quarter, and another OD that we catch early enough to reverse before it goes sideways.
The rhythm of the ER takes over, the way it always does, and I let it carry me.
There's comfort in the work.
There's comfort in being needed, in being useful, in being the person who shows up when everything falls apart.
But for the first time, being needed doesn't feel like enough.
Not after last night. Not after waking up in a bed where someone wanted me—not my skills, not my steadiness, not what I could fix.
Just me.
By the time I get off shift, Garrett is waiting for me at the clubhouse.
Not inside. On the front steps. Sitting with his forearms on his knees and his hands clasped, which is Garrett's version of a bomb about to detonate.
He's in his cut, grease on his forearms and when I walk up, he doesn't stand. "Sit down, Leah."
I sit. Not because he told me to, but because I can hear what's coming and I'd rather face it sitting.
He's quiet for a long moment. "You didn't go home last night," he says.
It's not a question. I don't treat it like one.
"No. I didn't."
"I know where you were."
"I know you do."
Another silence.
He's staring at the parking lot, his jaw working.
The tattoos on his forearms are dark against the grease stains, and he looks so much like the boy who pulled me out of a fire twenty-four years ago that it actually hurts.
"He's my brother, Leah. Club brother, but brother all the same."
"I know."