Chapter 11
MAGNOLIA
Imade it exactly to the end of the drive before my hands started shaking on the wheel.
Not a delicate tremor. A full-body adrenaline crash, the kind you get after you've nearly been in a wreck, except I hadn't nearly been in a wreck. I'd just thrown myself, bodily, across a courtyard at a man and climbed him like a tree.
There was no dignified way to say it. I climbed him.
The second my brain caught up to what my body had already decided—that the dark shape against the glare was Cash, was actually him, here, real—I was already moving, already running across that fortress courtyard full of strangers in front of God and Claire and a bunch of tier-one operators, and I left my feet. I just left them.
I launched at him like a Labrador who'd heard the garage door. He caught me out of the air without so much as rocking back on his heels, one arm coming under me like it had been waiting there the whole time. I wrapped around him—legs, arms, the works—and held on like the courtyard was on fire.
I pulled into a gas station I didn't need and put the car in park and sat there and let myself, for one minute, just feel it again, because I hadn't let myself feel it while it was happening. I'd been too busy doing it.
He was so solid. That was the first thing, the thing my body kept handing back to me on a loop.
I'd built him up in my memory, and somehow the memory had still undersold him—the sheer density of the man, all that quiet strength gone suddenly real and warm under my hands.
Catching me hadn't cost him anything. I weigh what I weigh, and I'd hit him at a dead run, and he'd absorbed all of it like I was nothing, like I was a thing he'd been made to hold.
My face had gone into the side of his neck on pure instinct and he smelled like—God.
Clean and warm and a little like cedar and salt and something underneath that was just him, just male.
I'd had my mouth an inch from his pulse.
I'd felt it going, steady and slow, while mine tried to jump out of my chest.
And his hands. One flat and huge against my back, the other under me, holding me up like I weighed nothing at all.
I'd thought, with the functioning part of my brain, oh no, because I knew those hands.
I'd spent a long time thinking about those hands.
They'd closed my fingers over a coin and ruined me for every set of hands since.
When he'd finally set me down—slow, both my feet eased back onto the stone like he was reluctant to give the contact back—I'd gotten my first real look at him in the morning light. That had been its own kind of disaster.
Because the man was unfairly, stupidly good-looking, and not in any way that photographed. It was all presence. He'd aged the way good leather ages, a little more weathered, a little harder around the jaw, a few days of dark stubble.
His eyes had landed on me and stayed.
I'd felt it everywhere. Down my spine. Low in my belly, a slow, heavy pull I had not felt in so long I'd half forgotten my body could even make it.
He looked at me like I was the only thing in that whole courtyard worth looking at.
The sheer voltage of being looked at like that, by him, after all this time, had nearly taken my knees out.
I'd flirted shamelessly with that man in Virginia Beach and gotten a closed door. But now, when I touched him, he'd held me like he never intended to put me down.
"Okay," I said out loud, to my empty car, at a gas station, like a lunatic. "Okay. Okay."
I pulled back onto the road and tried to drive like a person.
It was somewhere along the harbor, with the water flashing silver through the trees, that the other thing caught up with me—the thing I'd been too busy combusting to deal with. The wall. The photographs. The brass plate. DANE.
He'd walked into Dominion Hall. With those men. He'd gotten out of one of those blacked-out SUVs in that courtyard like he'd been born to it. The guards hadn't stopped him, and Claire had known his name before I'd said it.
The story I'd told myself earlier—that my Cash couldn't possibly be one of these Danes, that the man who lived out of one bag and brought me cheap takeout had nothing to do with marble and gates—came apart in my hands like wet paper.
He wasn't connected to that family. He was that family.
The fortress on the wall full of disapproving soldiers was his fortress, his soldiers, his blood, and I had stood in his house before he drove up to it, run my eyes over his kin, and talked myself out of the truth because the truth was too big to hold.
Nothing about him was what I'd thought. And the part that scared me, sitting at a red light with my heart going, was that it didn't change a single thing about how much I wanted him.
If anything, the not-knowing made it worse.
There was a whole man under there I'd never been allowed to see.
I wanted to see him so badly, it frightened me.
I called my mother. I don't entirely know why. My thumb just did it.
"Magnolia." She picked up on the second ring, brisk, between things. "I'm about to round on a post-op, you have ninety seconds. What's wrong, you sound like you ran here?"
"Nothing's wrong. I—" I laughed, and it came out wobbly. "I ran into someone. Today. From Virginia Beach."
A pause. My mother does not waste pauses. "Which someone?”
"Mom."
"Magnolia Bennett, I have delivered worse news to families than whatever you're about to dance around. Which someone?”
"Cash," I said. And then, because the name by itself wasn't enough to explain the state of me: "The one. The one I—"
"The one you mooned over and pretended you didn't," my mother said. "Yes. I remember. I'm a physician, not a stone." Another pause, and her voice changed, came down a register into the careful place. "And how did that feel? Running into him."
"Like getting hit by a truck I'd been hoping would hit me."
She didn't laugh. That's how I knew she was taking it seriously.
"Magnolia." A breath. "Be careful with that kind.
I'm not telling you not to—God knows I'm the last person who gets to lecture anybody about wanting a man she shouldn't.
I'm telling you to keep your eyes open. The quiet ones who feel like weather—they're the hardest to leave, and they almost never stay.
I married one. I know exactly how good it feels right up until it doesn't."
"He asked me to dinner," I said, small.
The silence on the line that time was long enough that I checked to see if the call had dropped.
"Then wear the green," she said finally, and there was something in it, some old wistfulness I couldn't name, the sound of a woman remembering her own version of this. "And call me again when you can. I love you. I have to go."
She hung up. I drove the rest of the way to work with my whole chest aching in a direction I couldn't have pointed to on a map.
Walt took one look at me when I came through the kennel and didn't ask. He just tipped his head toward the back, and went back to his paperwork, because Walt knew the difference between a woman who needed to talk and a woman who needed a dog.
I went to Max.
He was at his gate, where he lived now, ears up.
When he saw me come down the aisle, something in him brightened—not much, Max didn't do much, but a flicker, a lift.
I let myself into his run and sat down on the concrete the way I had a hundred times.
This time, he came to me without a negotiation.
Just walked over and folded himself down against my side and put his heavy head in my lap with a sigh that went all the way through his body.
I sat there with one hand on his ribs feeling his heart go, and I finally let it land.
"I did something stupid today," I told him. He didn't argue. "I let a door open. I've been standing in front of it so long, I forgot it could."
His ear twitched. Out in the yard, a dove was making its sad, warm sound.
"That's what you're so afraid of, huh," I said, smoothing the fur between his eyes the way he liked.
"Letting the thing back in. Because if you let it matter again and it leaves again, you don't survive it twice.
" I knew what I was doing. I was talking to the dog about the dog and meaning every word about myself.
Max, who'd lost the one person who was ever coming and stood at his gate for weeks refusing to believe it, leaned his whole weight into me like he understood the assignment.
Here was the thing I couldn't say to my mother and could only say to a war dog on a concrete floor: I was more afraid of how much I wanted it than I'd ever been afraid of being alone.
Alone, I knew. Alone, I was good at. Alone, nobody got to set me down slow and then drive back out of my life across an ocean to do work he'd never name.
I'd spent my whole life loving things that came home broken or didn't come home at all.
I had finally, finally gotten comfortable being the one who stayed.
And one stupid blonde launch across a courtyard had cracked the whole thing wide open and reminded me I was still in there, still wanting, still that girl who jumped before she checked for a net.
"You make it safe, and then you wait," I told Max, trying it on. "You can't hurry a living thing into trusting you."
Max sighed again. The light moved on the wall.
I didn't know if I was the one doing the waiting or the one who needed to be waited on.
Maybe both. Maybe that was the whole trouble with men like Cash and dogs like Max and women like me—we were, all of us, standing at our own gates, weight on our toes, watching a door, too scared of the wrong answer to go find out the right one.
But he'd asked me to dinner. And I'd said yes. And for once in my careful, leave-before-you're-left life, I wasn't going to talk myself out of finding out.
I stayed with Max until the light went out of the windows. Then, I went home to get ready, my heart pounding the whole way.