CHAPTER 12
No Turning Back
She came to him that night without calling first, which told him something all on its own — Wren Calloway did not do anything without deciding it thoroughly in advance, and the fact that she'd driven up the mountain in the dark without a plan said more than any words she might have brought with her.
"Garrett Doyle came to see me," she said, standing in his doorway with her jacket still on, like she hadn't fully committed to staying. "Told me my father would rather see me dead than hear me say I loved you."
Kade went very still. "Do you."
"Love you?" She said it like she was testing the weight of it out loud for the first time, and something in his chest came fully undone at the sound of it, all his careful restraint since the sugar shack finally giving way at once. "God help me, Kade, I think I might."
He didn't remember closing the distance between them. He only remembered her hands fisting in his shirt, pulling him down to her instead of waiting to be reached, and the low, helpless sound she made against his mouth that undid the last of whatever caution either of them had left standing.
This was not the careful, aching kiss from the sugar shack, both of them shaking with adrenaline and relief.
This was slower, and far more dangerous, because it came from choice instead of fear — her hands sliding up into his hair, his arm banding around her waist to pull her flush against him like he could somehow fuse the bond closed through sheer proximity alone.
"Tell me to stop," he said against her mouth, giving her the door one last time, because whatever else came of tonight, he needed her to walk through it and not be swept.
"Don't you dare," she said, and that was the end of any restraint either of them had left.
? ? ?
Afterward, she lay with her head against his chest in the dark, tracing an absent line along his collarbone, and Kade found himself more undone by the quiet of it than by anything that had come before — the simple, unbearable fact of her weight against him, warm and real and entirely unafraid, the bond between them settled now into something steadier than the frantic hum it had been since the sugar shack, like a held note finally allowed to resolve.
"It's different now," she murmured. "I can feel you. Not just the general — I mean I can feel *you*, specifically. Like knowing which room in a house you're standing in with your eyes closed."
"That's the bond, settling." He pressed his mouth to her hair, breathing her in, letting himself, for one unguarded hour, believe that the thing in the trees might simply let them have this. "It'll keep tightening. Every time we choose each other instead of being afraid of what it costs."
"And if it costs everything?"
"Then it costs everything," he said, and meant it more than he'd meant almost anything in ten careful, guarded years, "because the alternative is a life spent flinching from you the way I flinched from every good thing after Elena, and I find I'm done doing that.
I'd rather burn for this than survive by refusing it. "
She was quiet a long while after that, and he thought, for a moment, she might have drifted toward sleep, until she spoke again, quieter still.
"Garrett said I sound like my father. Sharp, he meant it as a warning.
I think I'd rather be sharp than spend thirty years letting a grudge do all my thinking for me. "
"You're nothing like your father," Kade said, "except in the ways that matter — the stubbornness, the refusal to look away from something just because looking costs you. He aimed all of that at the wrong target for thirty years. I don't think you're going to make the same mistake."
? ? ?
She stayed until morning, the first time she'd done so, and woke before he did to gray light coming soft through the curtains and the unfamiliar, oddly comforting weight of his arm still slung across her waist. She lay there a while, cataloguing the room in a way she hadn't had the chance to the night before — the plainness of it, a man's space kept tidy out of discipline rather than any particular vanity, a single framed photograph on the dresser that she suspected, from its careful placement facing slightly away from the bed, was Elena, kept close but not so close it demanded acknowledgment every morning.
When he woke, he caught her looking at the photograph and didn't flinch from it the way she half expected him to.
"I keep meaning to move that," he said instead, voice rough with sleep.
"Haven't yet. Maybe I will now." "You don't have to," she said, and meant it, and watched something in his face ease at hearing that he didn't have to choose between honoring one grief and building toward a different future entirely.