Chapter 33
MARY CATHERINE
Dominion Hall arrived the way things arrived in dreams—gradually, and then all at once.
The drive had been long live oaks, moss-hung, the kind that made you feel you were traveling backward in time, and then the gates, and then more oaks, and then the house itself, lit against the sky in a way that made no sense for a building that was also, apparently, an operational center for a private defense organization staffed by armed men.
It looked like somewhere a big family had been collecting money and oil paintings and had run out of walls.
Which, I was beginning to understand, was more or less accurate.
I registered it from the vehicle window the way I'd been registering most things—at a remove, through glass, images arriving without their proper weight attached.
Columns. Piazzas stacked two stories. Wrought iron.
A fountain I could hear before I could see it.
Men at the perimeter who looked at the car and then looked away, which was its own kind of language.
Brock helped me out of the vehicle.
He didn't ask if I needed help. He came around, opened the door, and put his hand out.
I took it because my legs had not yet fully rejoined my body from wherever they'd gone on that crosswalk.
We went up the broad stone steps together and through a set of doors tall enough to ride something through.
The inside was—
I stopped walking.
Brock stopped beside me without comment and let me look, which was considerate of him because looking was the only thing I had the capacity for.
A great hall, two stories, a staircase that split and curved up both sides like an embrace.
A chandelier throwing light across stone floors.
Oil paintings the size of barn doors looking down from the walls with the stern authority of people who had owned things and expected that to continue.
The smell of beeswax and something older underneath it—old wood, old stone.
It was extraordinary.
It was also, apparently, where Brock's family lived.
I thought about a horse ranch in Valentine, Texas. About seven brothers scattered. About a man who'd grown up in the hard, dry country and had come to Charleston for the first time yesterday and was now standing in the entry hall of a mansion that bore his name.
I looked at his face.
He was looking at the paintings with an expression I recognized—too much, arriving too fast, with no preparation.
I took his hand.
He looked down at it. Then at me. Something in him settled, slightly.
A man appeared—older, precise, in the kind of clothing that managed to be both formal and entirely unobtrusive. He had the face of someone who had been managing complicated households for a while and had made peace with all of it.
"Mr. Dane," he said to Brock. "I'm Teddy. I've been asked to show you to your suite." A slight pause, calibrated to just the right weight of acknowledgment. "Miss Donovan. Welcome. I'm very sorry for what you've been through."
He said it the way a person said something true. The plain fact of it, offered and not expanded upon. I was grateful for that.
"Thank you," I said.
He led us up the right side of the curved staircase, down a corridor that was wide enough to drive a small car through, past doors and side tables with flowers on them. Teddy stopped at a door near the end and opened it.
"Your brother is in the suite next door," he said to Brock. "He said to tell you he'll be available when he returns."
Brock nodded once.
"There are clothes in the wardrobe," Teddy said, looking at me now with the same careful neutrality. "Various sizes. Please take anything you need. Is there anything else I can bring you?"
"No," I said. "Thank you. Truly."
He nodded and went. Brock and I stood in the doorway of the suite and looked at it.
It was not a room. It was a suite in the way that word meant when it was used by people who had the square footage to justify it—a sitting area, a bedroom beyond, tall windows overlooking the grounds, evening light coming through in long gold bars across a floor that had actual rugs on it, the kind that had probably been made by hand in countries I'd never visited.
A fireplace. Fresh flowers. The bathroom door ajar showing marble and the gleam of fixtures.
"This is yours," I said. Not quite a question.
"Apparently," he said, in the tone of a man who was still working out the implications of that.
He picked me up.
Not dramatically—no sweeping gesture, no announcement. He simply bent and got an arm under my knees and one behind my back and lifted me. I let out a breath that had some surprise in it and wrapped my arms around his neck.
"I can walk," I said.
"I know," he said. He carried me through the sitting room and into the bedroom and set me down at the foot of the enormous bed with the gentleness of a man who understood he was handling something that had been through a great deal.
The bathroom had a shower the size of my studio bathroom twice over.
Brock reached in and turned the water on and then turned to me and helped me out of my clothes—methodically, carefully, the way he'd done everything today except the things that had required the opposite of methodical.
He folded what was salvageable and set aside what wasn't without comment.
I looked at myself in the mirror while the shower heated.
I had dried blood on my cheek. I had known this since the vehicle, since understanding whose hands had been on my face.
I had left it there because addressing it had been a task too large for where I was.
Now, I looked at it and thought about Daniel and pressed my lips together hard for three seconds.
Then, I stepped into the shower.
Brock undressed and stepped in behind me.
The water was very hot and very good. I stood under it and he stood behind me and he washed my hair—both hands, careful, working through it with the same focused attention he brought to everything.
I stood with my eyes closed and felt myself begin, incrementally, to come back into my body. Not all the way. But closer.
He washed the blood from my face himself. I kept my eyes closed for that part. He was very gentle.
When we were both washed clean, he turned the water off and wrapped me in a towel that had clearly been laundered by someone who took laundering seriously.
He dried my hair and found a robe in the wardrobe that fit and helped me into it.
The entire time, he said almost nothing, which was exactly right, which was so exactly Brock.
He found clothes for himself—a shirt that fit, jeans—and came to sit on the edge of the bed where I'd settled, and he looked at me in the particular way he had.
"I'm going to talk to Tommy," he said. "Here at Dominion Hall.
I won't go anywhere else tonight—I'll be close and I'll hear you if you need me.
" He paused. "You're safe here. These walls are—" He shook his head slightly, something wry in it.
"These walls are about as safe as walls get. Nobody's getting in here."
"I know," I said. And did. The quiet of the house was the quiet of a very defended place.
"Okay." He looked at me for another moment. "Try to sleep."
"Stay," I said.
He looked at me.
"Just—" I moved back on the bed, toward the far side. "Stay until I'm asleep. Then, go talk to your brother."
He sat with it for a moment. Then, he came around and lay down beside me. I curled toward him and he put his arm around me, and the room was very quiet.
I thought about Daniel.
I thought about his face in the car, the road, the three backup copies of a pub name.
I thought about what kind of bravery it was to cover someone with your body without a moment of hesitation, someone who had left you at the altar the day before.
I thought that there was a kind of love that didn't ask anything in return for itself, that gave without keeping score, and Daniel had had it.
I had not fully understood how rare it was until I was lying in a room full of gold light in an enormous house called Dominion Hall trying to understand why I was alive.
I'm sorry, I thought. I am so sorry. You deserved all of it. The yard and the Sundays and someone who could be fully present. You deserved everything.
I felt Brock's arm tighten slightly, the involuntary response of a body to another body's grief. I turned my face against his chest and breathed.
After a while, I became aware that I was not falling asleep. I was aware of him—of the length of him beside me, the warmth, the heartbeat under my ear that had gone slow and steady and was the most grounding sound available. I was aware of his hand on my back, not moving, just there.
I lifted my head.
He was looking at the ceiling with the expression of a man thinking about many things and choosing none of them.
"Brock," I said.
He looked at me.
I kissed him.
Not urgently—nothing like the morning, nothing like desperation.
Slowly, intentionally, the way you did something when you had decided to do it and were not pretending otherwise.
He received it for a moment, still, and then he kissed me back in the same register—slow, deliberate, with his hand coming up to my face the way it always came to my face.
"You don't have to—" he started.
"I know," I said. "I want to."
I wanted to feel alive.
He looked at me in the low light. "It's been a bad day."
"It has," I agreed. "And you're the best thing in it."
Something cracked open in his face then. Something deep, the expression of a man receiving something he had not expected to receive and did not entirely know what to do with.
He kissed me again, softer this time, both hands in my hair, and we moved together slowly in the enormous bed, unhurried, none of the hunger of before—something more like tending to each other, the intimacy of two people who had been through a hard day together and needed to remember they were alive.
He was so careful with me. His fingers traced the curve of my throat, then slipped beneath the fabric of my robe to skim over my breasts, fingers circling my nipples.
I arched into him with a soft gasp, feeling the heat of his body press against mine as he peeled away my robe with deliberate reverence, exposing every inch of skin as if committing it to memory.
When his mouth followed the path of his hands—lips closing warm and wet around one sensitive nipple, tongue flicking slowly, then sucking with just enough pressure to draw a moan from deep in my throat—I trembled beneath him.
Every touch considered, every movement deliberate, as if I were something he had decided to be responsible for and was taking the responsibility seriously.
He settled between my thighs, his weight a grounding comfort.
I felt the thick, hard length of him slide against my slick folds, teasing, coating himself in my arousal before he pushed inside me.
The stretch was exquisite, filling me completely in that slow, steady glide until he was buried to the hilt, our bodies locked together in perfect, pulsing heat.
I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulling him deeper. He groaned softly against my neck, the sound vibrating through me.
We rocked together like that—unrushed, profound—his hips rolling in deep, measured thrusts that dragged inside me with every stroke.
His hand slipped between us, fingers finding my clit and circling with slick precision, building the pleasure in waves that made my breath hitch and my inner walls clench around him.
I clung to his shoulders, nails digging into muscle as sensation coiled tighter, my body surrendering to the steady rhythm of him moving inside me, over me, surrounding me.
The wet slide of our joining, the heat of his breath on my skin, the way his eyes never left my face—watching every flicker of pleasure, adjusting to draw it out—made me feel cherished.
When release finally broke over me, it was slow and shattering, my body pulsing around his cock in long, rippling waves that pulled a ragged groan from him.
He followed moments later, burying himself deep as he came, his come flooding me in hot pulses while he held me close, trembling with the force of it.
When it was over, we lay still. The room held us in its gold-lit quiet. After a long time, he said—low, into my hair—
"I love you."
The words arrived and I went very still.
He felt it. "I know," he said. "I know it's—I know what it sounds like.
Two days." A beat. "But I've spent my whole life knowing exactly one thing about myself, which is that when I've decided something, I've decided it.
I decided it in an alley yesterday and I've been watching it be true every hour since.
" He paused. "When you know, you know. That's the one thing my mother always said.
I thought it was horseshit." Another pause, shorter. "It wasn't horseshit."
I lay against him in the dark and felt the words settle through me.
"I love you, too," I said. "Which doesn't make logical sense."
"No," he agreed.
"I left my wedding yesterday. I was a runaway bride.”
"I know."
"I barely know you."
"I know that, too."
I tilted my head back to look at him. The jaw, the eyes, the carved face that had been through things and wore them honestly.
The man who had sprinted toward the thing that was trying to kill me.
Who had asked what do you want like it was the only question that mattered.
Who held my hands and said yes when I couldn't finish the sentence.
"But you feel like—" I stopped, looking for the right word.
"Like something that was already true," he said quietly. "Before you knew it."
"Yes," I said. "Exactly that."
He pulled me back against him.
Outside the tall windows, Dominion Hall's grounds lay dark and quiet under the Carolina night. Somewhere in this house, his brother was waiting with answers Brock needed, and somewhere in the city, our families were working through their own particular devastations.
My phone was gone. I hadn't called anyone, hadn't told my parents or Colleen what had happened, hadn't reached the contact in New York to say we wouldn't be coming, hadn't done any of the things that needed doing.
All of it was out there, waiting. The thought of it pressed at the edges of the room.
I let it press and did not open the door to it, because I did not have it in me.
Later, all of it would still be there, all the unresolved and the unfinished and the impossible.
But for now, there was just this room and this man and the slow, certain settling of something that had arrived without asking permission and did not appear to be leaving.
I closed my eyes. Sleep found me quickly.