Chapter 32
Tucker
Light streams across the bed, sliding under my eyelids and waking me. I stretch and slowly adjust to the idea of being awake. My arms and butt are sore…ah.
Right.
Neither of us wanted to get out of bed to draw the curtains, so here we are, in the bright light of day.
Well, here I am.
Something clicks in my brain, the tiny switch being thrown on a battery pack, a shift into alarm.
I can feel the emptiness of the bed even without opening my eyes, even without reaching out a hand.
“Autumn?”
The bed is wide and cool, the room empty.
No sound sifts to me from the bathroom. A sense of wrongness latches onto me.
I open my eyes and sit up, then push the covers off and press my bare feet into the hotel-room carpet.
Reach for my boxer briefs, tug them on, the gears of my brain clicking into place.
“Autumn?”
Something shapes itself in my chest, an old, instinctual fear. Gone. She’s gone.
I wasn’t the one who woke up to find Elizabeth gone, but sometimes I dream I was. Sometimes I dream I wake to the perfect quiet of her place at night, appliances humming, beams cracking, the tiny exhalations of a house settling.
Over the not-silence of the hotel air conditioner, loud and metal, I hear another sound. A clunk. A beep. The hotel-room door. It opens, and Autumn steps in, in jeans and a T-shirt, hair damp. She smiles at me, but the smile fades as she takes in my expression.
That’s when I see the two cups of coffee in her hands.
“Coffee maker stopped working overnight,” she says, setting them both on the desk. There’s concern in her face now, and I realize I’m panting like I’ve run a mile.
“Tucker,” she says. She comes close and wraps her arms around me. “You okay?”
My breath has gone somewhere else, and I have to work hard to find the thread of it. The touch of her body helps. I focus on it, on the strong, soft length of her, pressed to me. She’s fine. She’s here. She’s safe.
Pulling back, looking up at my face, she touches my cheek.
“I took your AirTag,” she says. She reaches into her pocket and pulls it out, displaying it to me in her palm. “In case Weggers looked. Because when we were down the hall from it the other day, he could tell.”
She’s trying to reassure me, to tell me that her leaving was no big deal at all, and of course she’s right. She’s completely right.
“I woke up, and you were gone—” I say into her hair. Meaning…all sorts of things. And I think she knows that because she clutches me a little tighter.
“I’m here,” she says.
She strokes my hair. My breathing slows.
She lifts her face to mine, and like she’s my next breath, I take her mouth, adrenaline transmuting into sharp need.
I was scared, I think, but I don’t say it, couldn’t say it even if I wanted to, because this kiss is something else, some other level.
Not just human mechanics, not just lips and tongues, but all the other things.
Luck or fate or whatever put us in the same place, the wild, fizzing chemistry of how it feels when we’re together.
The black panic of her being gone and the perfect everyday-ness of her walking back through the door with two cups of coffee in her hands.
“The coffee,” I manage.
“Fuck the coffee,” she says, and we’re tumbling onto the bed, kissing hungrily, grasping at each other like we can hold the moment in place, like we can keep the world outside the tight clutch of ourselves.
I roll her on top of me, and she groans when she feels me between her thighs.
“Hang on,” she says, breathless, and wrangles herself out of her jeans and tee, so it’s just a pair of pale blue panties and the cotton of my briefs between us.
And then she begins a slow, soft roll, a caress of both of us, her eyes steady on my face as she does it.
Steady and tender. I think she knows I need to see her and feel her.
And touch her, which I do, teasing patterns on her pretty round breasts. I widen my circles to touch all the goose-bumped flesh my palm can cover, drift back again to torment her nipples to tight beads.
When her eyes are so dark they’re nearly black and I can feel her wetness through both layers of fabric, we pull apart long enough to shed underwear and roll the condom on me—her hands pushing mine aside because I’m going too slowly for her tastes, which makes me harder.
I watch her the whole time, the way her nipples look as they tighten even more at the feel of me inside her, the way her eyes go dark, the red flush that rises up her chest to her throat right before she arches and comes, tight and hot around my cock.
“Autumn.” Her name holds everything else I can’t say, how fast this happened and how I wish it hadn’t but can’t imagine it any other way, how beautiful she looks, shattering for me, how I want to put those two AirTags into my pocket and wrap my hand around both of them, as if that, by itself, would keep us together and keep her safe.
I say it again, bitten off as white-hot pleasure surges up my spine and I tighten and pour myself into her—“Autumn,” like I’m begging, and she says, “Tucker,” like she’s answering.
We lie there for a long time not saying anything. I still don’t have the right words to explain any of it: Why I never want her to walk away and why there’s a chant in my head saying, I can’t do this.
Which is why what I actually say is, “Shower?”
We make it down to breakfast somehow, barely in time for the buffet, which we pile onto our plates like people who’ve burned several thousand calories overnight.
Luckily Hanna is way too distracted by the fallout from the mouse situation to clock the sex-brunch situation.
“It’s everywhere,” my sister groans, when Autumn and I set our plates down across from her and Easton. “It’s everywhere, and it’s viral, and I’ve had four cancelations.”
“I’m so sorry.” Autumn dips her chin. “It’s all my fault.”
Hanna shakes her head vehemently. “Oh, no, it’s definitely not.”
Autumn bites her lip, a lip whose exact softness I now know intimately. “Everyone knows how much I hate mice. I’ve posted about it multiple times on my socials. It’s common knowledge by now if you follow me. This was someone out to get me. My personal stalker.”
Easton frowns. “Or it could just as easily have been aimed at Tucker. He has the double job of keeping you safe and making sure the wedding goes off as originally scheduled. And if either of those things doesn’t happen, Blue Iron potentially gets millions of dollars’ worth of land.”
“At some level it doesn’t matter what the saboteur is trying to accomplish,” I say.
“What matters is figuring out what’s going on before it escalates.
Before we lose the land or someone gets hurt—or both.
After breakfast, anyone feel like doing some investigating?
We should be able to trace those mice back to their source. ”
That’s something everyone can agree on, so once Autumn and I have demolished all the calories, the four of us find a corner and start making phone calls.
We start by talking to the no-kill pest-control people from last night. They’re dubious that we’ll be able to trace the mice.
“From what we can tell, they were probably trapped from the local wild population. Or possibly bred—some of them are a little too clean to have come from the woods. Or a combo.” The woman on the other end, Sheila, sighs.
“But I don’t think you’re going to trace them to a pet store or a science supplier. ”
We try anyway, dividing up and calling the area pet stores and all the science suppliers we can get hold of. No dice.
“I should have let you put security cameras in the barn,” Hanna says, covering her face with her hands.
“Yes,” I say, “you should have. And you will now.”
“As soon as this wedding’s over,” she says.
“Now,” I say.
“They’re already in there setting up for tomorrow. I don’t want you to get in their way.”
“Hanna.”
“Tucker.”
“Hanna.”
That last one isn’t me. It’s Easton, cutting in. “Sweetheart,” he says, and her head swivels so her gaze can meet his—all tenderness and steel. “Please.”
She’s quiet for a second, watching him. Finally she says, “Okay.”
So that’s how Autumn and I end up in the barn for the next couple of hours. I enlist Rhys and Quinn to help me install security cameras that should have been in there years ago, and Autumn helps Hanna’s crew decorate for the wedding tomorrow.
I spend about seventy percent of my time focused on the task at hand and the other thirty watching her, chatting and laughing with the crew.
For the first time since I met her, she seems happy to me—not like someone who’s just telling the world she is.
She’s bright-eyed and engaged, offering suggestions and hitting it off wildly with the florist, a woman named Tessa.
Autumn’s eyes find mine across the room. There’s heat in them, like she’s recalling last night. And this morning. I’m remembering now, too, trying not to relive it too vividly so I don’t become unfit for public spaces. She gives me a sexy secret smile, and I nearly lose the battle.
This could be us.
Then I remember how it felt to wake up this morning, bed empty, heart pounding, that bitter blood taste of panic and loss on my tongue, and I go back to my task.