CHAPTER 16 #3
The evening hummed around them. Crickets in the grass. A truck far off on the county road. Water dripping from the cottage gutter into a barrel below.
Colt took off his hat and held it in both hands. "I spent eight years thinking you could have asked me. Then yesterday I had to look at the fact that I could have asked you too."
Wren's eyes shone. "You wrote."
"Once."
"I never saw it."
"I know. " He drew the words up from somewhere deep and raw. "I believe you."
She shut her eyes. The breath that left her was small and uneven.
He wanted to cross the threshold then. Hold her.
Kiss her until the old years stopped making noise.
That wanting ran hot and clear through him, but wanting had been the easiest part since the first day she came back.
Trust was the work. Trust was the part that needed repeated action, like fence checked after rain, like gates latched by hand instead of glance.
"Beau asked if you could come to the wedding as our friend," he said.
Wren opened her eyes. "She did?"
"I told her you could be her friend. I didn't promise her anything more."
"Thank you for that."
"I won't put her in the middle."
"I know."
"And I won't use Harlow as a wall because I am scared to move."
Wren's throat worked. "I never wanted to take anything from her."
"I know that too."
He set his hat on the porch rail. His hands felt empty without it. Maybe that was good.
"Wren, we have eight years behind us and eight days before that wedding. I can't make those years clean. I can't pretend three weeks in Dusthallow is the same as staying. And I won't ask you to make promises you don't mean because I am tired of being afraid."
"What are you asking?"
He stepped closer, stopping on the far side of the threshold. Near enough to feel the warmth from the house, not near enough to crowd her.
"One honest week," he said. "Not three borrowed weeks where we keep acting like the ending is already written.
One week where we tell the truth, where we don't use Beau, Harlow, money, Odette, or old pride as cover for what we want or what we fear.
One week to see what we are when we stop punishing each other for what we didn't know. "
Wren stared at him. The porch light caught the wet in her eyes and the tired shadows under them. She looked like a woman with too many ledgers open: wedding work, old grief, a mother who traded love for leverage, a future she still had to earn with her own hands.
"I don't have anything polished to offer you," she said.
"I'm not asking for polished."
"I don't know where I'll be after the wedding."
"I know."
"I won't be kept."
"I know that too."
Her chin lifted. "Do you?"
He deserved the question. He took it clean. "I'm learning it. And if I forget, you tell me."
"That sounds simple."
"It won't be."
"No."
They stood with the threshold between them, the old line and the new one, porch boards under his boots and cottage floor under her bare feet. Then Wren reached out and touched the place where his wrist showed below his cuff.
It was a small touch. It hit him harder than any kiss could have if it had come without the words before it.
Colt looked down at her fingers. "May I kiss you?"
Her answer was a nod first, then a whispered, "Yes."
He stepped inside only after she moved back to make room. The door stayed open behind him to the porch and the evening air. He cupped her face with one hand, giving her time to change her mind. She leaned into him, and the last clean space he had been keeping between want and action disappeared.
The kiss started careful and did not stay there.
Wren rose onto her toes, her hands catching at his shirt.
Colt wrapped an arm around her waist and felt the tremor run through her, felt his own answer to it low in his body and dangerous in its sweetness.
He kissed her like the years had been a long dry season and this was the first storm he was not afraid to stand in.
Her mouth opened under his. He slowed because slowing was the only way not to take more than the moment allowed.
When he lifted his head, they were both breathing hard.
Her fingers were still twisted in his shirt.
His hand rested at her back, warm through cotton.
He wanted the rest of the night. He wanted every locked room between them opened.
He also had a daughter asleep under a quilt, a woman in his arms who had been pushed and judged and nearly bought out of town, and a promise he had just made to tell the truth instead of using hunger to hurry past it.
He touched his forehead to hers. "I need to go before I forget how to be decent."
A shaky laugh left her. "I appreciate your timing."
"I don't."
That made her smile, and the sight struck him square in the chest.
He stepped back because he had to. Wren let him, but her hand slid down his sleeve and caught his fingers before distance took hold.
"One honest week," he said.
She held his gaze. "Yes. But only if we stop pretending wanting each other is the same as trusting each other."