Chapter 29 #2
I’m pacing now. The room is too small, the walls closing in.
“I helped him. I stood on that ferry on day one, and I filmed your island, and I posted it, and I watched the numbers climb, and I told myself it was just a job, just a story, then I’d leave.
But it wasn’t just a story. It was people’s lives.
It was Piper’s bookstore and Shea’s garden and your boat and your family and I—” My voice breaks.
I swallow. “You should be happy I’m leaving. I’m everything you hate, Dean.”
His gaze travels over my face, my hands, the half-packed suitcase on the bed, and he nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “You are.”
The words land. Actually land, like some physical hitting my chest hard enough to knock the air out.
“Right. So.” I turn away and zip up my suitcase. “That’s it.”
Footsteps cross the room behind me, and his hands settle on my shoulders. He turns me around and pulls me against his chest so hard my feet leave the floor.
“But you’re also everything I want,” he says into my hair. “Every single complicated, stubborn, imperfect inch of you.”
I don’t move. Can’t move. His arms lock around my back, and he holds me like he’s afraid I might dissolve.
“What?” I breathe the word against his collar and the salt smell of him fills my lungs.
“I decided you were a shallow influencer before I knew you,” he says. “The day you got on my ferry, I looked at you and saw everything I hate about outsiders, and I made up my mind.”
I can’t help the sad laugh that escapes me. “And I decided you were exactly what I hate about small towns. The closed-off local. The guy who judges people before they open their mouths. Too stubborn to ask questions once he’s made up his mind.”
“We were both wrong.” He sets me down. His hands frame my face.
His thumbs trace my cheekbones, and the calluses catch on my skin.
“I was wrong about you, Scarlett. You’re brilliant and difficult, and you fight dirty, and you look at me like I’m worth looking at even when I’m being the world’s biggest pain in the ass. ”
Another laugh bubbles out of me, but this one sounds dangerously close to a sob. “You are a pain in the ass.”
“Yeah, well, so are you, Hollywood. We’re well matched.
” He kisses me, hard and certain, his mouth on mine, his hands in my hair, and I kiss him back with everything I’ve been holding.
Eighteen months of fear. Eighteen months of performing fine when I wasn’t fine, of smiling for cameras while cancer ate a hole in my chest, of rebuilding myself in silence because I was too proud to ask for help and too terrified to admit I needed it.
His tongue tangles with mine, and his hands slide down my back to the edge of my sweater. They slide under, palms warm against the small of my back, and I arch into him.
“I love you,” he says against my mouth, the words rough, like they were dragged up from the pit of his soul.
Dean Kinsella is a man who doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean.
And that’s when the tears start.
He pulls back just enough to look at my face and wipes my tears with his thumbs. His eyes are wet too, and that breaks something open in me I didn’t know was still sealed.
“I love you, too,” I say, and the words come out wrecked, snotty, the ugliest confession in the history of confessions. “I’ve been falling in love with you since the storm. Maybe before. I don’t know when it started. I just know it’s real and it terrifies me.”
“Good,” he says. “It should terrify you. It terrifies me, too.”
He kisses me again, softer this time, his mouth moving against mine with a tenderness that makes my chest ache.
I grip the front of his shirt and hold on, because if I let go I might float away, and I have never in my life wanted to be anchored to something the way I want to be anchored to this man.
His hands find the hem of my sweater and pull it over my head.
The cool air touches my skin. His eyes drop to my chest, to the scars, and the look in them is the same one I saw on the boat—reverence, not pity—and I believe him.
I believe him completely.
We undress each other. Not the hungry rush of the storm, not the careful exploration of the night he traced my scars. This is something else. Deliberate. Certain. His shirt hits the floor. My hands find the scar on his forearm, and I trace it with my fingertips the way he traced mine.
He lays me down on the quilt. The brass bed creaks.
The house settles around us. Somewhere downstairs, a pipe knocks.
Shea’s probably in the kitchen, making tea, solving whatever crisis the morning has handed her, and the normalcy of it—life continuing, repairs beginning, the world not ending because I made a mistake—feels like a gift I don’t deserve.
Dean’s weight settles over me. His skin is warm. His mouth finds my neck, my collarbone, the scar below my left breast, and he kisses it the way he did on the boat—slow, deliberate, like he’s reading a map he plans to memorize.
“You’re staying,” he says. Not a question. A fact.