22. Chapter 22
Cole
Ihaven’t slept since the article went live.
Two nights now. The house has been wrong since Liz’s call, since Mara’s name went back into a headline with our photos under it, and I’ve been sitting up in the dark with the cameras on a loop and the bat I told myself I’d never need within reach.
Owen and Mara sleep. I sit in the middle of the stairs and wait for the night to prove me right.
Tonight it does.
The voice is calm.
That’s the part that gets me. Not aggressive. Not panicked. Measured, like a man who has done this before and knows how it ends.
I’m already at the base of the stairs when he speaks. Bat in my right hand. Every light in the house dead. Someone hit the secondary breaker on the way in, which tells me this isn’t random. This is practiced.
He’s mid-forties, broad, hands loose at his sides. Flashlight clipped to his jacket and pointed at the floor between us. He came for control, not a fight.
Lyle Mercer. I know this face from Dev’s file.
I clock what I can in the dark. The cold air moving through from the kitchen, where a window’s open that shouldn’t be: his way in. Jacket loose enough to hide something on the left. One visible exit behind him. No second set of footsteps on the way down. He came alone.
Pressure job. Not muscle. He’s here to deliver a message.
“You’re trespassing,” I say. Low. I keep my voice down, and not for him. For my son asleep upstairs who is not going to wake into this.
“I’m delivering a message.” He tilts his head. “Ms. Eldridge would like to discuss terms before this gets messy.”
Ms. Eldridge.
He broke into my house and he’s talking about messy.
“Your client’s documentation,” he says. “Photographs. Statements. The kind of thing a judge sees better with the right framing. She’d like you to consider settling before the framing happens.”
I take one step down. He reaches into his jacket.
That’s the moment I almost close the gap entirely. Six feet. Under two seconds.
I shift my weight forward.
Then I see it. Movement above me, a small shift in the dark at the top of the stairs.
Mara.
The math changes in under a second. If Mercer turns and sees her, this stops being a pressure job. I keep my eyes locked on him and breathe slow through my nose.
She is supposed to be sleeping. Instead she’s on the landing, and she has a chair in her hands.
Of course, she does. She sleeps light since the boot print: I’ve heard her up at odd hours, checking the house the way I check it.
The breaker dropping would have killed the hall nightlight outside Owen’s room.
She’d have felt the house go fully dark and known what a dead nightlight at two in the morning means, the same way I knew the second the lights died downstairs.
She didn’t need to hear Mercer. She needed the dark to change, and it changed.
She doesn’t make a sound. She doesn’t have to. She sets the chair down at the top of the stairs, quiet, deliberate. A barricade between the dark below and the hallway that leads to Owen’s room. She stands behind it with both hands on its back and looks down at the man in our house.
Mercer’s eyes flick up past my shoulder and find her.
I watch his face run the same calculation I just ran. Two of them awake. Two witnesses. A woman positioned at the top of the stairs like she’s done the threat assessment herself and landed on hold the line. This was supposed to be a man alone in the dark, rattled, reachable. It isn’t.
A pressure job only works on a man who’s afraid and by himself. He can see he’s got neither.
His hand comes out empty. He takes a step back toward the kitchen.
“Don’t,” I say.
He doesn’t run. He walks. Calm the way he came in. Shoulders wrong now. The retreat of a man who got read.
“Tell her to send her lawyers next time,” I say to his back.
He’s gone before I hit the bottom step.
I do the sweep in under four minutes.
Basement first. The breaker, thrown clean, the panel cover just slightly off. He’d clocked it earlier in the week. Kitchen window: scuff marks on the ledge, mud on the sill. Entry and exit both. I photograph both and send them to Dev with three words.
He was here.
Then I go back to the foot of the stairs.
She’s still on the landing. Chair in front of her. Face tilted down toward me. Jaw set, knuckles white on the chair back. She’s been standing there the whole time, between the stairs and the hallway to Owen’s door, and she has not moved an inch.
I drop the bat against the wall.
I take the stairs two at a time. I check the hall first, because I can’t not: Owen’s door, still shut, the thin quiet of a kid who slept through the whole thing on the other side of it. Safe. Asleep. None of this reached him.
Then I pry the chair from her hands and pull her against me. She comes without resistance. Her hands grip the back of my shirt.
“You came down,” I say into her hair.
“The nightlight went out,” Her voice is steady, barely. “I knew. I didn’t wait to be sure. I wasn’t going to be behind a door for it.”
“I know.” I hold on. “I know.”
Her heart is going as fast as mine. I hold on until it slows.
“Owen?” she asks.
“Asleep. Never woke.” I feel her let go of a breath against my chest. “He’s fine. He doesn’t know.”
“I’m okay,” she says.
I don’t let go.
“I should put the chair back,” I say, eventually.
“Leave it.”
I look at her.
“I want to know it’s there,” she says.
I leave it.
We go down to the kitchen, the same direction without a word about it, both of us unwilling to be near a bedroom with the adrenaline still running this hot in our hands, both of us staying within earshot of the stairs and the boy at the top of them.
I press my palms flat on the counter and breathe out, long.
When I turn around she’s in the doorway. Arms wrapped around her own elbows. Holding herself together.
I cross to her. My hands cup her face and she tips into it, forehead finding my chest.
“You’re okay,” I say.
“You’re okay,” she says back.
Like that was the thing she’d been afraid of. Not herself. Me.
My thumb brushes her cheekbone and her breath catches.
“Don’t think,” she says. “Just…”
I take her mouth.
Not gentle. Not careful. There was a man in my house with his hand in his jacket. There was my son asleep upstairs. There was her on the landing, holding the line.
We are still here.
She kisses back like she needs the same thing I do.
I back her against the counter and she grabs my shirt with both hands and pulls. Not toward her. Just holds. Like she needs to feel that I am solid and real and not going anywhere.
I am not going anywhere.
My hands find her waist and I pull her in flush and she makes a sound into my mouth that is not a word and I swallow it and press closer.
Her hands move. Up my chest, my throat, into my hair. She grips. The pull travels down my spine. The counter is at her back and I lift her onto it because I want her higher, want her wrapped around me, want a different shape than any of the careful almosts we’ve spent a month not finishing.
The stone is cold against the backs of her thighs and she gasps, but her hands are already at my belt.
I cover them with mine. “Let me.”
Her chin comes up. One beat of assessment. Then she moves her hands.
I get my mouth on her throat. She tips her head back and I feel her pulse hammering under my lips, fast and unsteady from the man in the dark and this, all of it at once, and I stay there. Mouth open against her skin, and the heat of her I have been not-touching for a month.
“Cole.” My name in her mouth. Rough. Broken at the edges.
“I’ve got you. Quiet—he’s asleep.”
“I know.” Barely a breath. “I’ll be quiet.”
I get her shirt over her head and drop it. Her bra next, my fingers at the clasp, and when it falls away I step back. Just to look.
She’s flushed from the cold and the kissing and whatever she’s feeling right now, and she’s looking at me with her chin up and her chest rising and falling and her eyes completely dark.
“Stop looking,” she says. Unsteady.
“No.”
She makes a sound that’s half frustration and reaches for me. I let her pull me back in.
My hands go to her breasts and her head drops back and I take my time.
Thumbs first, slow drags that push her hips toward me.
Then my mouth, and the sounds she makes are sounds I intend to spend a long time learning.
The sharp inhale. The low broken exhale.
The way her hands tighten in my hair when I use my teeth, very gently.
I use my teeth, very gently.
Her whole body shudders.
“Cole. Please.”
I lift her off the counter just enough to get her sleeping shorts down, and her underwear with them, and then she’s bare on my kitchen counter with the porch light coming through the window behind her, looking at me like she’s been waiting for this since the gate.
I think she probably has. So, have I.
I step between her thighs. My hands run up the insides of them and my thumbs find her and she grips the counter edge and her head drops back.
“You’re already wet.”
“Cole.” A warning. A plea. Both.
“Tell me.”
“Yes.” Barely a word. “Yes. Please.”
I drop to my knees.
She makes a sound low in her throat when my mouth finds her, and her hand comes down into my hair and holds. I hook one thigh over my shoulder and pull her to the edge and take my time, because I have been thinking about this for a month and I am not going to rush it now.
I learn her. The place that makes her grip tighten. The pressure that makes her thighs shake. The sound she makes when I slide two fingers into her and curl them up, sharp and broken, her face turned into her own shoulder.
“There.” Her voice is wrecked. “Right there, don’t stop…”
I don’t stop.
I work her toward it, steady, until her thighs lock around my head and the hand in my hair has gone tight enough to hurt and she comes against my mouth with her whole body shaking, her free hand pressed flat over her lips, the sound small and desperate and mine.
When I lift my head she’s flushed from the collarbone up, her eyes wet at the corners, her face open in a way she didn’t plan.
Good.
I stand.
Her hands go to my belt. She gets it open, shoves my jeans down, and her hand wraps around me and I brace one palm on the cabinet above her head and breathe.
“Mara.”
“I want you.” Her hand moves. Slow. “I’ve wanted you since the gate.”
The words go through me like a current.
“Since the gate,” I say.
“Since the gate.” She looks up at me, eyes black. “Now, Cole.”
I push her hand away and line up.
“Eyes on me,” I say.
She looks at me.
I push inside her.
Slow. All the way. Her mouth falls open and her head tips back and I feel her take all of me and I hold there and let us both feel it. The reality of being inside her after a month of wanting it. The way she fits against me like something that was always going to happen.
“Oh.” A breath. Then, quieter: “Oh.”
“Yeah.” My voice comes out rough. Barely mine.
“Move.” Her hands grip my forearms. “Cole. Move.”
I move.
Long strokes. Deep. All the way out and all the way back, slow enough that she feels every inch, and every time I push into her she makes a sound against my jaw I’m going to be hearing for a long time.
Her legs wrap around my hips and pull me closer. Her nails drag down my forearms.
“Harder.”
I give her harder.
The cabinet behind her head rattles soft and I press my palm against it to quiet it and drive into her again. She bites down on her own lip to stay quiet, and the sight of it pulls something tight and wordless through my chest.
“Look at me,” I say.
She looks at me.
Her eyes are wet. Not sad. Full. The expression of a person receiving something they had stopped believing they were going to get.
I know that expression. I’m wearing it too.
My thumb finds her and she comes apart immediately, her whole body seizing, her face turning into my shoulder, her teeth finding the fabric of my shirt. I feel her clench around me in waves and I push in deep and hold and follow her.
The sound I make against her temple is not controlled at all.
We stay there. Both of us breathing. Her legs still around my hips. My hands on her waist holding her upright. The kitchen quiet around us except for the rain on the boards and Owen asleep upstairs and the sound of two people remembering how to be separate again.
Her forehead drops to my shoulder. My hand slides up her back. I hold her.
After a long moment she lifts her head. Her hair is loose. Her mouth is swollen. There is a mark on her shoulder I didn’t plan and am not sorry about.
She looks at me.
“Hi,” she says. Soft. Slightly broken.
My chest opens, wide and sudden.
“Hi.”
Her mouth curves. Just the corner.
I press my forehead to hers.
“I love you.”
It comes out quiet. Against her temple. I have said those words into a dark window with my back to a room. I have never said them to her face, to her, with her hearing them and knowing they were hers.
She goes still. Her hand slides up into my hair and holds.
“Cole.”
“I know it’s a hell of a time.”
“Say it again.”
“I love you.” I pull back enough to look at her. “I have loved you since the gate. Since the mud on your boot. Since Owen waved at you through the glass and I watched you almost wave back and then decide to.”
Her eyes are wet.
“I waved back,” she says.
“I know.” I press my mouth to her temple. “I saw.”
She laughs once. Soft. Slightly broken. Then she puts her face against my chest and just stays there, and I put my arms around her and let her.
I hold her until the shaking is all the way gone, until her breathing comes even against my chest, until she’s just warm and here and mine in the dark kitchen.
When I lift her down off the counter her legs are unsteady. I keep my arm around her waist.
"Easy," I say, and she answers, "I'm okay." I find her sleep-shirt on the floor and pull it over her head.
My hoodie is draped over the kitchen chair. I hold it out and she steps into it and I zip it for her. I press my mouth to her forehead.
“Tomorrow is going to be complicated,” she says. “Elise. The lawyers. The article. All of it.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know that too.”
She studies me a second longer, then presses her mouth to mine. Once. Brief.
My phone rings. Dev.
I let myself have one more second. Her hand at the front of my shirt. Her breath still uneven. Then I answer.
“Marcus didn’t wait for morning.” No preamble. “Emergency motion, filed an hour ago. Cited the break-in, asked the probate court to expedite Elise’s hearing on the strength of it. Separate filing in the Civil Division for an emergency stalking order against Mercer.”
A pause.
“Probate judge granted the expedite. Monday morning, nine a.m. The stalking order’s already temporary as of tonight.”