Chapter 12
Tiernan
Getting used to Jack sleeping in my bed is a recipe for the kind of heart ache that goes scorched earth. Watching her also makes me a creep, but I can’t make myself stop, even if the thought makes me smile.
She sleeps the way she does everything, completely and without restraint. Her raw lips part as soft snores leak out. She grips the pillow and presses her face deeper while her messy hair tangles on my pillow. Her foot hooks around my ankle like I’m a teddy bear she doesn’t want to need.
I shouldn’t enjoy it. I should be exhausted from the most emotionally intense sex of my life. Instead, I’m deciding whether running my fingers through my hair will wake her up and if it’s worth it anyway. I could offer her my chest as a better pillow.
The radio hisses. Grey is coming up at the window. I have not slept and I am not going to, and for the first time in eight years that has nothing to do with work.
I built this life to ensure there were no soft places. I want to be clear about that, even to myself, especially to myself, while lying here with her hand open on my chest and her charm gone warm between us. The walls, the locks, the rule that I decide and no one else, all of it was engineering.
A man who needs nothing cannot be made to give anything up. I have watched what happens to the ones who let someone matter. I learned the lesson young and I built accordingly and it has kept me alive and on top of half a city for eight years.
She walked in and started taking the load-bearing walls out one at a time, and she didn't even know she was doing it. It’s who Jack is, infuriatingly, and I fucking let her.
I saw the way the guys bent around her. I felt myself slipping from my routine, and told myself that denying her the key code for the garden gate meant I was in control.
I think about the contract. Seventeen pages I had drawn up because solving is the only way I know how to love a thing.
Then she looked at me across that desk and said, I see you now.
The worst of it is that she did. She saw the whole mechanism.
She processed it for two days while I folded in on myself, close to questioning the foundation of my life, then she came back down to the kitchen at four in the morning.
I’d prepared to explain with logic, to give her my history, but all she wanted was a question.
She demanded a say in her own life with phrasing that made me feel like a guilty ass for ever drafting a contract between us.
So, I learned a method in one night. I am going to have to learn it again every day, I expect, badly, for a long time. I might even have to use ‘please’ on occasion in ways other than ‘I’m going to please you until you can’t walk.’
The thing I keep turning over is my own laugh and her answering smile.
When the chain caught on her shirt and she just gave up, I couldn’t help myself.
I have not made that sound in front of another person in longer than I can name, and it got out of me before I could decide if it was safe to voice.
That unquestioning trust should frighten me.
It’s small. I haven’t divulged every secret or every memory that’s built me into the man I am.
Hell, laughing is something the guys do regularly here and elsewhere.
I don’t, but I did with her. Which means she’s already tunneled past my defenses and wormed her way into my life beyond the medical room or my bed.
That should terrify me more than the idea of Emilio. He or anyone else could use her if he ever understood what she is to me. The want I could manage. A man can hide want. He can find ways to murder potential, passion, and even routine if he’s smart enough and determined.
He cannot hide that he's stopped being afraid of the quiet.
I have spent eight years certain that wanting something is just telling your enemies where to put the knife. I am still certain of it. I have simply stopped being able to make the certainty matter enough to do anything other than shield Jack.
Exhaling tightly, I stroke my fingers through her hair, drawing it back from her face so I can see her fully relaxed. Instead, her nose wrinkles, her brow furrows, then she stirs. After a few blinks, she realizes I’m right here and awake.
A soft groan leaves her throat, then she glances at the window while sitting up. She drops back down, now laying on the inside of my shoulder. She gently pats my abdomen.
“Tiernan,” she grumbles in a sleep-heavy voice.
“Yes?” I ask.
"You're staring," she says, not opening her eyes.
"It's my room. I’m allowed to stare however I please.”
"Go to sleep, boss man."
I don't. But I close my eyes, and I let her think I have. I lie there with her hand over my chest and pretend my heart is steadier than my pulse reveals. I breathe in our cologne and perfume mixing while her bare body warms mine. Together, we ignore the house waking up and diving into routine like nothing’s changed at all.
Everything has. And I’m finally ready to act like it.
She’s snoring again, so I open my eyes and gently brush my thumb over her lower back. I lower my voice and whisper in Irish, just to ensure that some secrets stay mine. “You’re more dangerous than you think, but I still can’t let you go. You’ll be the death of me yet.”
That’s reason enough to get up and move on, but death comes for everyone. It comes earlier for those in the mafia. If I’ll die for her or die because of her, at least it’ll be a sweeter fate than most get.