Tiernan
The tea had gone cold in the pot by the time I heard her on the stairs.
Half two in the morning. I was still up in the snug off the hall, sitting in the last of the heat from the fire Cormac had banked down before he vanished to wherever he vanishes.
I'd come back down after Ronan. After he told me, in about nine words, about her forehead on his shoulder and her fist in his sleeve and his hand laid over hers.
I'd made a pot I didn't want, because tea is what my hands do when the rest of me has things to sit with and the sitting isn't going well.
The footsteps stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
She was deciding whether to come in. I let her decide.
She came in.
She was in what she slept in, a soft shirt and loose trousers, hair down, bare feet on the cold flagstones. She'd expected an empty room. I watched her clock the change and adjust to it without a word, which was its own small marvel, a person recalibrating that fast at half two in the morning.
"Sorry," she said. "I thought everyone was asleep."
"Don't apologize. Sit down."
She considered the empty chair across from mine, then took it.
I got up, fetched her a mug, poured without asking, and set it in front of her. The snug was warm. The fire ticked. Outside, the Dunraven night carried on without us, the way it had on every bad night I'd sat up in this room.
"Ronan came up to see you," I said. Not a question.
"He told you."
"He tells me things. Not everything. Just the things he can't carry on his own." I turned my mug on the table. "He's carried a lot on his own for a long time."
She wrapped both hands around her mug the way people do when they want the warmth more than the tea.
"He sat with me. Didn't try to fix it. Barely said a word." A pause. "I let him. I'm not sure what that means."
"It means you're starting to let yourself remember who you are."
That earned me something. Not the almost-smile she handed out like a coin she didn't want to spend. Warmer than that.
"You knew who I was the second you walked into the bar," she said.
"Yes."
"You sat there an hour, drank my father's whiskey, and talked to me like a stranger."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
I had answers. Practical ones. The whole logical case for why you don't walk up to a woman who spent years building a file on your family and announce yourself into it. All true. None of it the real reason.
"Because for an hour you were just a woman in her bar who knew her whiskey and made jokes about hardware stores, and treated me like a person instead of a variable in the worst problem of her life." I shrugged. "I didn't want to be the one who took that off you the second I sat down."
She was quiet.
"That's a very soft reason for a man in your line of work."
"I'm full of soft reasons. Widely considered a liability for it."
The warm thing again, nearer a smile than before.
"You found me," she said. "After all this time nobody did."
"I found a bar with your father's whiskey behind it.
I'd run that name into the ground for years, expecting the usual.
Three lads from Cork and a coincidence of spelling.
" This time I let myself look at her, because some things you say to the person or you don't say them.
"What I didn't expect was for it to be you.
That part I didn't engineer. That part knocked the wind out of me and hasn't given it back. "
"What did you find," she said. "When you looked up."
She knew exactly what she was asking. She asked it anyway.
"You," I said.
The fire shifted in the grate. The room was very warm.
"I've been angry a long time," she said, to her mug, to the space between us. "Anger's useful. I burn it like other people burn fuel. Put it in, go." She turned the mug in her hands. "I came here, and Ronan sat beside me and said nothing, and that was harder to manage than the anger ever was."
"Being looked after is harder than being alone," I said. "When you've been alone long enough."
"How would you know?"
"Because I watched Ronan be alone for years. And Cormac. I'm the one who held the shape of a family around two men who'd rather carry everything themselves." I stopped. "Not the same as what you've had. I know it's not. But I know what it looks like from the outside."
"You take care of them."
"I try."
"That's the job you actually do here. Not the deals. Not the smoothing over. Them."
Being read that accurately did something to the inside of my chest I was going to have to manage.
"Both," I said. "It's both."
She nodded, slow, taking it in and putting it somewhere.
We sat in the warm with the tea and the low fire, and the quiet changed under us.
I'd been in enough rooms to feel the exact second one stops being about the words in it.
This had been in the air since the bar in Chicago, low and steady.
Through the confrontation. Through the dinner she'd pretended not to feel it at.
Through a whole week of near-misses in doorways and over case files, both of us too disciplined to name it.
I'd told myself I was being patient. Really I'd been running on it like fuel and calling it patience, every shared meal and every conversation and every time I made myself not reach for her because the hour hadn't come.
It had come.
"Tiernan," she said.
"Yeah."
She set her mug down.
"I haven't let myself want anything in a long time.
" Her expression sharpened, precise, the look of a person deciding to say a true thing out loud.
"Wanting felt dangerous. Like a thing that would slow me down.
" A beat. "It's been getting harder to remember why.
Somewhere around the third time I caught myself waiting for you to walk into a room.
" Her jaw set, the way it did right before she did something that cost her. "I want."
The word sat there, unfinished and loaded, in the warm air.
"I know," I said.
I stood. I came around to her side of the table slow, the way a person moves toward something they don't want to startle, leaving her every second she needed to change her mind, to say no, to put the walls back up.
She didn't move away. When I stopped beside her chair she tipped her head up at me with the face of a woman who'd decided something and wasn't going to undecide it.
I held out my hand.
She took it.
I drew her up out of the chair, and then she was close, in the firelight, near enough that I stopped being able to pretend at distance. And God. Up close she was something else. The line of her jaw. The heat coming off her skin. The quality of her attention that made you the only thing in the room.
"Still time to change your mind," I said.
"I know."
She didn't change it.
I brought my hand up and cupped her jaw, and she let me, and I kissed her slow. She'd been in a hurry for years. This wasn't a thing that needed hurrying.
She kissed me back.
Her hands fisted in my shirt. She kissed me back like someone who'd kept herself under hard lock a long time and just turned the key.
I got an arm around the small of her back and pulled her flush, and there was no resistance in her anywhere, only a sound against my mouth that did away with most of my remaining thoughts.
"Tiernan," she said against my lips.
"Still here."
She made a sound that was almost a laugh. I pulled back just far enough to take her in, flushed, breathing harder than a minute ago, and I grinned, because I couldn't not.
"Don't smile like that," she said.
"Can't help it."
"It's very..." She stopped.
"Very what?"
"Tiernan," she said, with a warning in it.
"Sienna," I said back, with none.
Something broke open in her face. Not the management. Not the careful read. The thing underneath, the one she'd kept behind everything.
She pulled me back down by the collar. I went.
I kissed her the way I hadn't let myself since Chicago, one hand in her hair and the other flat between her shoulder blades, holding her to me like that was the entire point.
The warm room and the low fire and the black night outside were all still there and none of it mattered.
She had her hands knotted in my shirt and she was making sounds against my mouth I planned to spend a long time learning by heart.
I pulled back.
She made a sound of protest.
"Not here," I said. "Not like something we have to keep quiet about at two in the morning. You've had years of quiet. Not for this."
Her face opened on something warm and complicated, a thing I didn't have a name for yet and meant to learn.
"Tiernan," she said.
"Sienna."
She took my hand and led me upstairs.
Her room was warm from the fire Cormac had laid, dark but for that and the gray sea-light in the window. I had about four seconds to take it in before she turned, pulled her shirt over her head, threw it somewhere, and stood there daring me to do something about it.
I did something about it.
I crossed the room, got my hands on her waist, and walked her back toward the bed.
She went, her fingers already at my shirt buttons, working them with a focus that made me want to laugh and made it very hard to think at the same time.
She shoved the shirt off my shoulders, ran her palms up my chest, and took inventory of what she'd uncovered with that same directness she brought to everything.
"Well," she said.
"I was thinking the same thing."
I reached behind her, unhooked her bra, slid it off, sent it after the shirt. Firelight moved over her skin, and something in my chest did a complicated warm thing I'd deal with later, because I had more pressing work in front of me.
I filled my hands with her breasts and felt the sharp catch of her breath. I dragged my thumbs over her nipples until they drew up tight and she made a low sound in her throat that went straight down my spine and lower.
"Bed," I said.