Chapter Eleven
Meredith stood outside Quarry's cabin for three full minutes before she knocked.
The compound had gone quiet, families headed home, brothers settling into their evening routines. Through the trees, she could see the lake catching moonlight, silver ripples on black water. The air smelled like pine and smoke and possibility.
Six years.
Six years of sleeping alone. Of waking up to empty beds and cold sheets and nothing but plants for company. Six years of telling herself she didn't need anyone, that the nursery was enough, that her grandmother's land was all the partnership she required.
Tonight, standing in dirt she'd planted and surrounded by people who'd accepted her, she wanted more.
She wanted hands on her that weren't her own.
She knocked.
The door opened, and Quarry stood there in a t-shirt and jeans, barefoot, hair still damp from a shower.
He looked at her with surprise that hit her somewhere soft—a man who didn't expect anyone to walk toward him.
A man who'd spent so long being the one who moved first that having someone come to him felt foreign.
"Meredith." Her name came out rough, uncertain. "Is something wrong?"
"No."
"Then why—"
"Can I come in?"
He stepped back without asking more questions. She walked past him into the cabin—sparse and clean, bed against one wall, the same basic layout as hers but somehow more lived-in. His cut hung by the door. Work boots lined up beneath it. A book on the nightstand, spine cracked with reading.
The door closed behind her, and suddenly the room felt very small.
"What's going on?" Quarry kept his distance, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. Giving her space. Letting her set the terms.
Always letting her set the terms.
"I've been thinking," she said.
"About?"
"About what you said. At the ridge cabin." She turned to face him. "That when we got here—when this happened—it would be because I wanted it. Not because I was scared."
Something shifted in his expression. Heat, banked but present. Hope, carefully controlled.
"And?"
"I'm not scared anymore." She closed the distance between them, one step at a time, watching his body go taut with restraint. "I'm not running on adrenaline. I'm not displaced or desperate or looking for comfort."
She stopped inches away from him. Close enough to feel the warmth radiating off his skin. Close enough to see his pulse hammering in his throat.
"I'm here because I want to be. Because I've spent six years alone with dirt and plants, and tonight I want something different." She reached up and pressed her palm flat against his chest. His heart pounded beneath her hand. "I want you."
Quarry didn't move. Didn't breathe. Just stood there like a man facing something he'd wanted so badly he was afraid to reach for it.
"Meredith." His voice cracked. "If we do this—"
"I know what I'm choosing."
"Do you? Because once I touch you—" His hands flexed at his sides, knuckles white with the effort of keeping them still. "Once I have you, I'm not letting go. That's not how I work. You'll be mine, and I'll be yours, and there's no going back from that."
"Good."
"Good?"
"I don't want to go back." She slid her hand up his chest, over his shoulder, into the hair at the nape of his neck. "I want to go forward. With you."
Something broke behind his eyes. The control he'd been holding, the restraint, the careful patience—all of it crumbled at once.
His hands came up to cup her face, tilting her head back, and then his mouth was on hers.
The kiss started gentle. Testing. The first contact of lips that had been circling each other for days, finally meeting. Meredith sighed into it, her fingers tightening in his hair, pulling him closer.
He groaned against her mouth and the kiss deepened. His tongue slid against hers, tasting, claiming, and she felt it everywhere—heat pooling low in her belly, electricity racing along her spine. He kissed like he did everything else: slow, thorough, devastating.
"Davis." The name escaped her on a breath, and she felt him shudder.
"Say it again."
"Davis."
His hands slid down her body—shoulders, waist, hips—mapping her through her clothes with deliberate attention.
Sledgehammer hands that had crushed a man's throat.
Hands that planted rosemary with impossible care.
Now they touched her like she was something precious, something worth being careful with.
"You're sure?" he asked against her mouth.
"Yes."
"Completely sure?"
"Davis." She pulled back enough to meet his eyes—dark now, almost black with want. "If you ask me one more time, I'm going to start thinking you don't want this."
His laugh was low, rough, barely controlled. "I want this more than I've wanted anything in years. That's the problem."
"That's not a problem." She pulled his shirt over his head and let her hands explore what she'd uncovered. Muscle and scars and warm skin that jumped beneath her touch. "That's the point."
He lifted her like she weighed nothing—hands under her thighs, her legs wrapping around his waist—and carried her to the bed. The mattress dipped beneath them as he laid her down, his body covering hers, weight braced on his forearms.
"Slow," he said. "I need to go slow with you."
"Why?"
"Because I've been thinking about this since the moment I saw you hauling that dead tree.
" His mouth traced down her jaw, her neck, the hollow of her throat.
"Because I want to remember every sound you make.
Every way you move. Every—" He bit gently at her collarbone and she gasped. "—every reaction."
Meredith arched into him, her hands clutching his shoulders. "Davis—"
"I like hearing that." His fingers found the hem of her shirt, sliding beneath to touch bare skin. "Nobody calls me that. Just you."
"Just me?"
"Just you." He pulled back enough to meet her eyes, and the intensity there stole her breath. "Mine, Meredith. You're mine now."
"Yours," she agreed, and the word felt like a vow.
He undressed her with the same slow deliberation he brought to everything—removing each piece of clothing like unwrapping something valuable, pausing to touch each new inch of revealed skin. His mouth followed his hands, kissing and tasting, learning her body the way he'd learned her garden.
And she learned him in return. The scar on his left shoulder where equipment had caught him wrong. The knots in his lower back that never quite released. The way his breath hitched when she touched the sensitive skin at his ribs.
The way his whole body trembled when she whispered his name.
"You're shaking," she said.
"I know."
"Why?"
He pressed his forehead to hers, breathing hard. "Because you're the first thing I've touched in years that I didn't have to break. And I'm terrified of getting it wrong."
The confession cracked something open in her chest. This man—this dangerous, patient, devastating man—was afraid of hurting her. Was shaking with the effort of being gentle when his whole life had been built around force.
She cupped his face in her hands. "You won't."
"How do you know?"
"Because I know you." She kissed him, soft and deep. "I've seen how you handle my plants. How you handle everything that matters to you. You're the most careful man I've ever met, Davis Holt. Now stop worrying and touch me."
The permission broke whatever final restraint he was holding.
His hands moved with purpose now—still careful, still slow, but no longer hesitant. He touched her like a man claiming territory he intended to keep. Like every inch of her skin belonged to him and he was taking inventory.
And when they finally came together, it was nothing like she'd expected.
She'd thought he would be overwhelming. Consuming. That a man built like a rock crusher would take her apart with the same force he brought to everything else.
Instead, he was gentle.
Impossibly, devastatingly gentle.
He moved with the patience of a man who understood that real pressure took time.
Who knew that the best results came from slow, steady application rather than rushed force.
Every movement was deliberate. Every touch was intentional.
He watched her face, adjusted his rhythm to her responses, built the pleasure in layers until she was gasping, clutching, begging.
"Please—"
"Not yet." He pinned her wrists above her head with one hand, the other tracing patterns on her stomach that made her writhe. "I'm not done with you."
"Davis—"
"I've waited weeks for this." His mouth found her ear, his breath hot against her skin. "You can wait a little longer."
It was torture. Beautiful, exquisite torture. He took her apart piece by piece, finding every sensitive spot, exploiting every weakness, until she was nothing but sensation and need.
And when he finally let her break, he broke with her.
Afterward, they lay tangled together in sheets that smelled like both of them.
Meredith's head rested on his chest, rising and falling with his breath. His arm was wrapped around her waist, heavy and warm, and his other hand traced absent patterns on her shoulder.
"That was..."
"Yeah." His chest rumbled with quiet laughter. "It was."
She tilted her head to look at him. His eyes were closed, his face more relaxed than she'd ever seen it. The tension that lived in his jaw had finally eased. He looked younger. Softer. Almost peaceful.
"You're good at that," she said.
One eye cracked open. "At what?"
"Being gentle. I didn't expect it."
"Because I break things for a living?"
"Because you break things with those hands." She lifted one of them, pressed a kiss to his knuckles. "And then you use them on me like I'm made of glass."
"You're more important than glass." He turned his hand to cup her cheek. "You're more important than anything I've ever touched."
The words settled over her like a blanket. She snuggled closer, pressing her face into his neck, breathing in the scent of him. Sweat and soap and something underneath that she was starting to recognize. Gravel dust. The mineral smell of stone that never quite washed away.
"I should go back to my cabin," she murmured without moving.
"Should you?"
"People will talk."
"People already talk." His arm tightened around her. "Stay."
"Is that an order?"
"A request." He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. "Stay with me tonight. Wake up with me tomorrow. Let me make you coffee and watch you check on your cuttings and pretend we've got all the time in the world."
"We don't, though. Hardt's still out there. The threat hasn't gone away."
"I know." His voice went heavy with truth. "That's why I'm asking. Because we might not get many nights like this. And I don't want to waste the ones we have."
Meredith closed her eyes and let herself sink into him. The solid warmth of his body. The steady beat of his heart beneath her ear. The weight of his arms around her, holding her like she was something worth keeping.
Six years alone.
Six years of empty beds and cold sheets and nothing but plants for company.
Tonight, she had something else. Something better. A man who touched her like she mattered, who looked at her like she was precious, who'd learned to be gentle for her when his whole life had been built around breaking things.
"Okay," she whispered. "I'll stay."
His arms tightened around her, and she felt him smile against her hair.
The compound was quiet outside. The lake lapped against the dock. Somewhere, her cuttings were rooting in their water glasses, reaching for life the way she was reaching for him.
Meredith fell asleep against a chest that smelled like gravel dust, wrapped in the arms of a man who'd spent twelve years breaking things, and knew—with the certainty that came from planting seeds and watching them grow—that she was the first thing he'd touched in years that he didn't have to break.