Chapter 16 #3
“I don’t know.” She hugs her knees. My sweatshirt swallows her. “The journal doesn’t say. She mentions meetings. Assignations. Never specifics. Never why.”
“Malcolm’s archive—”
“Has nothing. No Name isn’t on any of his maps. It’s been erased.” She meets my eyes. “He’s been editing the record for decades.”
The boat rolls. Harder this time. A wave hits the starboard side, and the whole vessel shudders. Something in the galley clatters across the floor and hits the bulkhead with a bang.
Scarlett flinches. A full-body recoil, and she tries to hide it by tightening her grip on her knees, and something in my chest cracks open.
I move. One berth to the other. Sit beside her. Close enough that our shoulders touch. Close enough to feel the tension in her arm, the fine tremble she’s trying to suppress.
“Hey.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. “We’re okay. The boat’s solid. She’s ridden out worse.”
“Has she?”
“No. But I have.”
That gets a smile. Small. Fragile. Gone as fast as it arrived.
Another roll. The boat heels twenty degrees, holds there for three heartbeats, then crashes back to port.
The motion throws her against me. Hard. Her shoulder drives into my chest, her hip against my thigh, and instead of pulling away she clings.
She grabs my jacket. She presses her forehead into my collarbone.
I hold her. One arm around her shoulders, my other hand braced against the bunk frame. She’s warm against me. She’s shaking, and the cabin is sixty degrees, and she’s been carrying something since Main Street or maybe longer.
I want her. Right now, in the middle of a storm that could still kill us both, with my hand flat between her shoulder blades and her breath going fast against my throat, I want her so badly I can’t think straight, and I know exactly what that makes me.
She burned this town down. She stood on my dock in eight-hundred-dollar boots and called it charming. Colter’s still fixing what she broke. Every single reason I built the wall is still standing.
None of them are helping.
“Scarlett.” I don’t recognize my own voice. “Look at me.”
She doesn’t. She keeps her face buried in my jacket, her fingers twisted in the fabric, and her breath comes against my neck. Fast. Shallow. She isn’t going to cry in front of me. She’d rather drown.
I tip her chin up with my thumb, and I know I shouldn’t, and I do it anyway.
Her eyes are dry. Brown, flecked with gold, wide and honest and scared. But not of the storm.
This is the last second I get to be a smart man.
I kiss her. It’s a bad kiss. Too much teeth, too much want, too much everything I’ve tried to strangle since the night on my brother’s porch.
She makes a sound against my mouth that’s half panic, half warning, and I want to stop, should stop, except she doesn’t push me off—she clamps both hands into my hair and kisses back hard enough to bruise.
Her mouth is cold from the storm, her tongue hot, and the taste of her is salt and sweat and something sharp that’s just her.
I’ve been hungry for three days. Now I’m starving.
I drag her into my lap and she lets me, straddling my thighs with zero hesitation and bracing herself on my shoulders, and she’s trembling but not from fear.
I’ve held women before—plenty, in a life before—but never this way.
Not like she’s a lifeline, not like I’m going to die if I let go.
I get my hands under the sweatshirt and she yanks at the hem, desperate and clumsy, and we laugh into each other’s mouths at how little it takes to reduce us to idiots.
She gets her fingers under the waistband of my pants and finds skin.
My whole body lights up. Heat, electricity, the snap of every nerve I thought died in 2014.
The boat lurches. We both slide, cursing and clutching at anything that holds.
She pulls my head down and bites my jaw, hard, and the pain snaps me alert.
I want her on her back.
The bunk is six inches wider than her hips.
I crowd her into the space and push until she relents, laughing, twisting, shoving me in the chest. My hands are in her hair and then under her sweatshirt, up her spine, along the warm, bare skin and the ridges of her shoulder blades. I want more. I want all of it.
I work her shirt up, intending to peel it off and get my first real look at the woman under the designer clothes—
She catches my wrist.
“The light.” Her voice is low. Raw. Something in it I haven’t heard before. “Turn it off.”
I glance up at the lamp swinging above us, and every pass of it lays her out for me. Flushed throat. Wet mouth.
Fuck.
I’ve spent the last week refusing to look at her, and now that I’m finally letting myself, she’s asking me to stop.
“I want to see you.”
“Dean.” Her fingers tighten on my wrist. “Please.”
Whatever she’s asking for, it costs her something to ask.
I reach past her and kill the lamp.
Her breath leaves her in a long and shaky exhale when the light goes out. Then she takes my face in both hands and pulls me down to her, and her mouth meets mine with a hunger that erases every objection I’ve ever had.