Chapter 12
brOCK
We drove to the studio in a quiet that had weight to it now, a different quiet than the causeway. That one had been two strangers letting the road do the talking. This one was two people who'd said a few true things in a loud bar and were sitting with them in the dark of a car.
Wentworth Street. She pointed me to a narrow door beside a shuttered frame shop, a flight of stairs that smelled like old building, and then a single room under the roofline with windows on two sides and the whole city going quiet below.
It wasn't much. A sofa that had clearly been hauled up those stairs by people who'd regretted it.
A hot plate. A sink with a ring around it.
Bad overhead light that did nobody favors.
And everywhere, on every wall and propped against every surface, the work—canvases stacked three deep, paint laid on in a way I didn't have the words for, dark and alive and nothing like the careful, curated woman who'd assembled a wedding for two hundred people.
This was the part of her nobody got to see.
I knew it the second I walked in. You don't keep a thing in a hidden room over a frame shop unless it's the truest thing you've got.
"It's not much," she said, and there it was in her voice—pride, trying to pass for apology.
"It's yours," I said. "That's the whole thing about it."
She looked at me quick, like I'd gotten something right she hadn't expected me to.
The tour took about ninety seconds. The sofa, the corner she worked in, the window with the best light. Then we ran out of room and ran out of words at the same time, and the awkward came down over us like a dropped sheet.
"I'd offer you a drink," she said, "but I haven't made it to the grocery store. There's tap water and—" she opened a cabinet, shut it. "Tap water."
"I'm fine."
"Sit, at least. You've been hauling me around the Lowcountry all day."
So, I sat. The sofa took me low, springs long gone. She stayed standing a second, then drifted toward the window, and I let my eyes go around the room again. My mind went where it always goes when my body finally stops—back to the problem.
The Dane brothers. She'd said it in the bar, plain as anything. Are you in Charleston because of the Dane brothers. And I'd had my tell and moved past it, but now, sitting in the quiet with the whiskey wearing thin, the rest of it caught up to me.
I never gave her my last name.
I'd said Brock and nothing after it, on purpose, the way I do.
She'd pulled Dane out of the Charleston air on her own—the pier explosion, the careful way people in this town said the name.
Which meant the name was loose. Out there.
Circulating among people who weren't us, attached to stories about defense companies and things that blew up, common enough that a development director at a Catholic school knew to be careful with it.
My family had spent a long time being a name nobody outside it knew. If that had changed, if Dane was a thing Charleston whispered now—then whatever Tommy had stepped in was worse than his voice on the phone, worse than him not laughing at the oldest joke we had. The exposure alone. Fuck.
I was halfway down that road, jaw tight, already running the implications when Mary Catherine crossed the room, put a knee on either side of my hips, and sat down in my lap.
Every thought in my head went out at once.
Fuck.
My hands came up to her waist before I'd decided anything, pure reflex, and they settled there and went still, and I had the strangest goddamn feeling that I'd never had before in my life—that this was where my hands were supposed to be.
Like they'd been made for the span of her and had spent all my years not knowing it.
The thought scared me worse than the FBI.
"Is this okay?" she asked. Quiet. Close. Her face inches off mine.
I looked at her. I looked at her and I made the mistake of breathing her in—warm skin and whiskey and underneath it something clean and her own—and she was every single thing all at once, every want I'd spent the day shoving in a box. The box came apart in my hands.
Fuck.
I had to do the right thing.
That was the only clear line left in me, and I held onto it like a rail.
I'd done a lot of things wrong in my life.
A lot. There was a whole back corner of a Texas cemetery that knew how wrong.
But this—this woman, raw and reeling and hours out from the worst day of her life—this, I was going to get right if it killed me. It felt like it might.
"Hey," I said. Low. Easy. The voice you use to talk somebody down. "It's been a hell of a day. Maybe we—"
She pressed forward. Settled her weight down into me.
And I felt it then, under the bravado: she was shaking.
Fine and steady, the same tremor I'd watched come over her outside that blue door.
Scared. Pushing, anyway. The bravest, most reckless thing about her, and the exact thing that told me to stop.
Fuck.
And my body—my own traitor body, that I'd trained to lie still under fire, to hold a position past the point of pain, to do what I told it and nothing else—my body did not get the message.
She felt it. I watched her eyes change, go dark and slow, and she rolled her hips against me, once, unhurried. So unhurried, it was almost cruel.
Fuck. Fuck.
I'd wanted her since the alley. Since the water. Since no place I'd rather be fell out of my mouth and I knew I was already gone. There was no pretending otherwise now, not with her sitting right on the proof of it.
She moved against me again, slower, watching my face the whole time like she was reading the thing she'd suspected all day and finding it confirmed.
Then she leaned in and kissed me—on the forehead.
Soft. Then the left cheek. Then the right.
Like a blessing. Like the gentlest thing in the world laid over the least gentle thing happening between us.
My hands slid from her waist to the curve of her, and I pulled her down into me without deciding to. She rocked against me harder, and a sound came up out of me that I didn't authorize.
Fuuuuck.
She smiled against my jaw. Reached down between us, her hand finding me through the denim—
—and I caught her wrist.
Stopped her. Just stopped her, gentle but absolute, the grip of a man who can stop almost anything.
She went rigid. The whole warm forward motion of her locked up at once.
"I don't think this is a good idea," I said.
"Okay." It came out small and scraped. She started to lift off me, pulling back, her face already closing. "Okay, sorry, I—"
"No." I caught her hips. Held her right where she was. "That's not—listen to me." She went still, hovering, eyes wide and stung. "I want you. Bad. In case you couldn't tell." I let out a breath that shook on the way out. "You have no idea."
Something flared in her face, relief and heat both, and she dropped back down and started moving on me again—
I stopped her a second time. Both hands. Steady.
Fuck.
"Then what," she said. Sharp now, embarrassed, the hurt cutting through. "What is the problem?"
"You were getting married." It came out rougher than I meant.
"Twelve hours ago you were in a white dress.
You're shaking right now, Mary Catherine.
You're scared and you're hurting and you've had a day that'd put any sane person on the floor.
I'm not gonna be the thing you grab for in the dark and hate in the morning.
You deserve better than that. You deserve—" I stopped, because I didn't have the rest of the sentence and didn't trust my voice to carry it.
For a second, she just looked at me. And I watched the shaking she'd been hiding finally win, watched her face do something it had probably spent twenty-nine years not doing in front of people.
"Right," she said. Brittle. Bright. The curated voice slamming back down over all of it. "No, of course. God. I can take a hint."
"Mary Catherine—"
But she was already off me, off the sofa, up and across the room with her arms wrapped around her own middle. She went into the little bathroom and shut the door, not a slam, worse than a slam, a careful quiet click.
And I was left sitting on a busted sofa in a room full of the truest thing she had, hard as a teenager, heart going like I'd just run a mile under fire, staring at a closed bathroom door.
I put my head back against the wall and shut my eyes.
In my whole life, I'd never had trouble knowing the right thing.
The trouble was always doing it. I'd just done it—the rightest, hardest, most decent thing I'd managed in years—and I felt like the lowest son of a bitch in South Carolina.
Somewhere, on the other side of that door, a woman I'd known for one single day was crying as quiet as she knew how.
The FBI was circling my family. My name was loose in a city I'd been in for a day. My brother had stopped laughing.
And the only thought I had room for, sitting there in the dark with my pulse in my ears, was what in the hell have I gotten myself into.