Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
The gators were restless this morning.
Trent could tell by the way they surfaced—not the lazy, drifting emergence of animals at ease, but the sharp, angled rise of heads breaking water with purpose. Eyes scanning. Nostrils flaring. Something had shifted in the moat overnight, and every cold-blooded creature in it knew it.
He tossed the last chicken quarter to Dolly, who snapped it out of the air with a crack that sent a heron flapping off the dock in protest. She'd been extra possessive of the south bank since the python incident, patrolling the waterline like a twelve-foot security guard, her tail sweeping slow arcs through the shallows.
Clarkson was sunning herself on the flat rock near the east bank, moving more slowly than she should.
Favoring her left side, where the coils had done the most damage, and her breathing had a slight wheeze that Trent didn't love.
But she was eating. She'd taken two chicken pieces this morning without hesitation, snapping them down with the single-minded determination of an animal that had stared death in the face and decided it was hungry anyway.
New gators floated in, and some of the regulars had made their way back out into the wild. It’s how the habitat worked. But a few made this their home, and Trent made them his family.
He crouched at the moat's edge for a long moment, watching Clarkson breathe. If the wheeze got worse, he’d monitor more closely and hope he wouldn’t have to put the creature down.
If it got better, he'd call it a miracle and move on.
That was the deal when you lived alongside animals that had been around since the dinosaurs.
You did what you could. You accepted what you couldn't.
He rinsed his hands in the bucket by the feeding station, dried them on his jeans, and then headed toward the house.
The sky was shifting from black to gray, the sun still crouched below the tree line but throwing its first hints of color—pale pink and amber threading through the clouds like veins of ore in dark rock.
The air was heavy with dew and the distinct green scent the Everglades exhaled every morning, as if something alive were drawing its first breath.
Inside, the house was quiet. Not the terrible quiet of those first weeks after his mother died—the absence that had weight and teeth and lived in every corner—but a different kind. The quiet of something that had been through the worst and was still standing.
He started the coffee, leaning against the counter while the machine gurgled and hissed.
The kitchen still smelled faintly of blueberry muffins.
Two batches yesterday. The first had come out golden and perfect and she'd stared at them like she couldn't remember making them.
The second she'd burned because she'd been crying at the table and forgot the timer.
He'd scraped the blackened bottoms without a word and they'd eaten them anyway.
The machine beeped. He poured two mugs, added a splash of cream to hers, and carried them upstairs.
The bedroom was dim, curtains filtering the early light into a soft gray wash.
Dove was on her side, facing the window, the quilt pulled to her chin, her blond hair fanned across the pillow in a tangle that said she'd slept hard or at least tried.
Twice in the night, she'd jerked awake, gasping, her body going rigid beside him, before she remembered where she was and allowed herself settle back down.
He set her mug on the nightstand and sat on the edge of the bed.
She rolled toward him, eyes opening slowly, bloodshot, heavy with the kind of exhaustion that sleep hadn't come close to fixing.
"Hey," she murmured.
"Hey, yourself." He nodded toward the mug. "Coffee."
She pushed herself up to a sitting position, reached for it, and wrapped both hands around the ceramic like it was the only warm thing in the world. She took a sip and her eyes closed. A small sound escaped her—gratitude and pain tangled up together.
"How are the gators?" she asked.
"Good. Dolly’s standing guard, like she’s waiting for something else to happen and Clarkson’s acting like she didn’t almost die yesterday. Tough little cookie, that one.”
“She gets that from her dad."
Trent chuckled. Even wrecked, even running on no sleep and grief that could swallow a person whole, she could still make him laugh—he loved her a little for that.
"How are you?" she asked, peering over the rim.
“I should be asking you that question.”
“I got there first.”
“I know, but you asked because you don’t want to talk about yourself, and you need to.” He took a sip of his coffee. "How are you feeling? And don't say fine."
Her facial muscles grew tight. Not a wall going up—more like one threatening to. She held his gaze for a beat, then looked down into her mug. "I'm feeling like I want to burn the world down, and I can't because I don't have any fire.”
He understood that. The fury that had no target. The kind that ate you alive because there was nowhere to put it. He'd carried that for years after his father died, and it had turned him into someone he hadn’t liked very much.
"What can I do?" he asked. "With funeral plans. Arrangements. Whatever you need—I'm here." He wasn’t sure when his feelings for Dove had shifted, probably before his mother had died. Maybe before she’d been diagnosed. Caring so intensely for her scared the crap out of him, and he knew it was why he’d pushed her away after he’d been shot.
He’d only loved once, but he hadn’t loved Fallon the way she deserved.
Certainly not in a forever kind of way. And honestly, Fallon had one foot out the front door the second she moved in.
They’d helped each other during a moment in time, and he was grateful they’d always been able to remain friends.
Now, he was treading in waters he had no idea how to navigate but was no longer willing to swim to shore and get out.
Dove shifted against the headboard, pulling the quilt around her waist. "My mom's handling everything. She called last night while you were in the shower." Dove paused, and her eyes lightened as her face relaxed. Not quite a smile, but close. "He’d already laid it all out. Exactly what he wanted. Cremated. Wait a month so people have time to process. Then throw a big ass party and celebrate his life. But he also suggested that they have it wherever it was convenient for them. That the few true friends he had would travel. My mom’s a little confused as to where to have it now, but she said she’d follow her brother’s wishes.
” A breath of laughter escaped her—thin, fragile, but real. “Because Aaron hated funerals."
"Smart man."
"He said funerals were for the living and the living should be doing something better with their time than crying over someone who couldn't hear them anyway."
Trent chuckled. "My mom was the opposite.
She wanted the whole thing. Church service.
Calling hours. The reception afterward with casseroles and people telling stories.
She planned every detail." He stared into his coffee.
“But it wasn’t for her or for people to mourn her.
She did it for me. She wanted to make sure I was fed properly, and I wasn't alone. "
Dove laughed. Quiet. A little broken. "And then you spent a good five days after she died alone anyway."
It wasn't an accusation. It was recognition. The kind that came from someone who understood the difference between what people wanted for you and what you were actually capable of accepting.
"I did," he admitted. "Sat right here in this house with the doors locked and the phone off and convinced myself I was handling it."
“You were a wreck when you finally let me in.” She set her mug down on the nightstand. The click of ceramic on wood was loud in the quiet room. She turned to face him fully, her legs folding beneath her, the oversized t-shirt—his, faded, and three sizes too big—slipping off one shoulder.
Her eyes were different now. The exhaustion was still there, the bloodshot redness, the dark circles that makeup couldn't touch. But underneath all of that, something had surfaced. Something raw and urgent and wide open, like a wound that had stopped pretending it wasn't bleeding.
"I don't want to be alone," she said.
Three words. Simple. But the way she said them—with her voice stripped down to nothing, no armor, no deflection, no Sergeant Quinn standing guard—made his chest crack open.
"You're not," he said.
"I need you." Her hand came up and pressed flat against his chest, right over his heart. Her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt. “Selfish of me. But right now, all I want to feel is you. All I want is your arms around my body. I want to lose myself in you.”
He opened his mouth to say something—he didn't know what, something careful, something that acknowledged the grief driving this and the fact that she was hurting and he didn't want to be something she regretted later—but she didn't give him the chance.
She kissed him.
Not soft. Not tentative. Not the careful, measured kiss of two people figuring each other out.
This was a collision. Her mouth found his with a force that rocked him backward, her hand fisting his shirt, pulling him toward her like she was drowning and he was the only solid thing in the water.
Her teeth caught his lower lip and the sharp sting of it sent electricity down his spine.
He tasted salt. Tears. Coffee. The raw, desperate flavor of a woman who was using his mouth to keep from screaming.
His hands found her waist, steadying her, steadying himself, because the intensity of it had knocked something loose inside him, too. This was just her burying the pain. It wasn’t lust. It wasn’t what he referred to as a little bit of love.
It was real and gut-wrenchingly honest.