Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
HARPER
He lasted six days.
Six days of sitting in the hallway. Six days of walking me to the diner and positioning himself between me and the window.
Six days of checking the inn's back entrance every night and fixing the latch on my bathroom window without being asked and bringing me coffee at seven because he learned I wake up at six thirty but don't speak until caffeine enters my bloodstream.
Six days since he kissed me and said it couldn't happen again.
He's been perfectly professional. Perfectly controlled. Perfectly maddening.
We're at a barbecue at Blackwood Ranch because Sophie Blackwood invited me, and Sophie Blackwood is the kind of woman who makes refusal feel like cruelty.
She showed up at the inn with her daughter Charlotte on her hip and said, "You're coming to dinner.
Bring the bodyguard. Eli's making brisket and there's enough to feed a small army, which is basically what our family is now. "
So now I'm sitting at a picnic table on a ranch in the Colorado mountains eating brisket with people who don't know I've sold forty million records, and Dominic is standing by the barn with a beer he's barely touching, watching me the way he watches everything.
Carefully. Constantly. Like the world is a series of calculations and I'm the variable he can't solve.
Sophie catches me looking at him and grins.
"He's been staring at you for twenty minutes."
"He stares at everything. It's his job."
"He's not on a job."
I take a bite of brisket to avoid responding.
It's obscenely good. Everything about this ranch is obscenely good.
The late summer light turning the mountains gold.
The sound of kids laughing near the barn where a woman named April is chasing a teenager and a younger girl through the hay bales.
The easy, worn-in comfort of people who have built lives in one place and let those lives grow roots.
I've never had roots. I've had tour buses and hotel suites and a house in LA that a designer chose every piece of furniture for because I was too busy to have opinions about where I sat.
"He reads poetry," Sophie says.
"What?"
"Dominic. June told me. He reads poetry on her porch every morning. Has a book with a cracked spine he carries everywhere." Sophie bounces Charlotte on her knee. "My husband doesn't read anything that isn't a livestock report, so I notice these things."
I look at Dominic again. He's talking to a tall man with dark hair and a scar through his eyebrow. Cole, I think Sophie said. The man laughs at something Dominic says, and I realize I've never seen Dominic make someone laugh before. I didn't know he was funny.
I didn't know he read poetry.
The barbecue winds down at dusk. Dominic drives me back to the inn in his uncle's truck, and neither of us speaks for the first three minutes because the silence between us has become its own language.
Comfortable but charged. The quiet of two people who know what they want and are pretending they don't.
"You were good tonight," he says.
"Good how?"
"Relaxed. You ate two plates of brisket, told Betty Russo her pie was better than anything you've had in Paris, and let Sophie Blackwood's daughter grab your hair without flinching."
"Charlotte is adorable."
"You laughed."
I turn to look at him. The dashboard light cuts shadows along his jaw, and his hands are steady on the wheel, and he's not looking at me but he's seeing me. Always seeing me.
"You say that like it's significant."
"You don't laugh much. Not the real kind. You do a version of it that sounds right but doesn't reach your eyes. Tonight it reached."
He pulls into the inn parking lot and cuts the engine. The silence expands. Night insects. The creek somewhere behind Main Street. His breathing and mine.
"What poetry do you read?"
He looks at me for the first time since we got in the truck. "Who told you that?"
"Sophie."
"Wendell Berry. Sometimes Mary Oliver. Sometimes Rumi when I'm feeling dramatic."
"Are you feeling dramatic tonight?"
His jaw flexes. "Getting there."
I unbuckle my seatbelt and turn in my seat to face him fully. "You said it couldn't happen again."
"I did."
"Did you mean it?"
"At the time."
"And now?"
He reaches across the console and takes my hand. Turns it over. Traces a line down my palm with his thumb, and the touch is so deliberate, so achingly slow, that the heat of it rolls all the way up my arm.
"Now I think I've been lying to myself for six days and you've been kind enough not to call me on it."
I lean across the console and kiss him.
He meets me halfway. His hand comes up to the back of my neck, fingers threading into my hair, and he kisses me like he's been holding his breath since the last time and his lungs just gave out.
I grab his shirt with both hands and pull him closer, and the console between us becomes the only thing keeping this from going exactly where we both want it to go.
"Inside," I say against his mouth.
He's out of the truck before I finish the word. Opens my door. Takes my hand. We walk through the inn's lobby, past June's empty front desk, up the stairs that creak on the fourth and seventh steps, and down the hallway where he's been sleeping on the floor for a week.
I unlock my door. He follows me in. Closes it. Locks it.
Then he presses me against the door and kisses me until I forget my own name.
His mouth moves down my throat and I arch into him, gripping his shoulders, feeling the muscle shift under his shirt. He grips my hips and lifts me, and I wrap my legs around his waist, and the hard length of him pressed against my center makes me gasp into the dark room.
He carries me to the bed. Lays me down. Pulls his shirt over his head, and the sight of his bare chest in the lamplight stops my breathing entirely. Broad shoulders, defined abs, a body built for function and power. A scar along his ribs I want to ask about later.
I pull my own shirt off. His eyes drop to my breasts and his expression tightens with want so raw it makes my skin flush.
He kneels on the bed between my legs and unclasps my bra.
Slides it off my shoulders. Bends down and takes my nipple into his mouth, and I arch off the mattress, my fingers digging into his scalp.
He sucks gently, then harder, then uses his teeth just enough to make me moan, and his hand slides down my stomach to the waistband of my jeans.
He unbuttons them with one hand. Pulls them down my legs along with my underwear in a single efficient motion that tells me he knows exactly what he's doing.
I'm naked beneath him, and he's looking at me like I'm the only thing in the world worth seeing.
"You're beautiful." His voice is low and rough and stripped of every professional boundary he's been hiding behind.
He kisses down my stomach. My hips. The inside of my thigh. Then his mouth is on my pussy, and his tongue slides through me in one long, devastatingly slow stroke, and I grab the sheets with both fists.
He eats me like he does everything else.
Methodical. Thorough. Attentive to every signal my body gives him.
When my thighs tighten around his head, he pins my hips to the mattress with both hands and works my clit with his tongue until I'm shaking.
When I get close, he backs off just enough to drag me to the edge without pushing me over, and the frustration and the pleasure blur together until I'm begging.
"Dominic. Please."
He seals his mouth over my clit and sucks, and I come so hard my vision whites out. He works me through it with his tongue, gentler now, pulling every aftershock from my body until I'm boneless.
He kisses his way back up my body. I reach for his belt, unbuckle it, unzip his jeans. He pushes them down and I wrap my hand around his cock, thick and hard and hot in my palm. He groans against my neck, and the sound reverberates through my chest.
He pulls a condom from his wallet. Rolls it on. Settles between my thighs with his weight braced on his forearms, and when he pushes inside me, we both go still.
Full. Deep. The stretch of him makes my breath catch, and he holds there, forehead pressed to mine, waiting for my body to adjust.
Then he moves. Slow at first. Deep, rolling thrusts that hit a spot inside me that makes stars burst behind my eyes. I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him deeper, and his pace picks up, and I can feel the restraint cracking in the way his arms shake and his jaw clenches.
"Harder," I whisper.
He gives me harder. His hips snap against mine, driving into me with a rhythm that's relentless and precise, and I'm moaning into his shoulder and raking my nails down his back and feeling the second orgasm build from somewhere so deep it scares me.
He shifts his angle, lifts my hips with one hand, and the new position sends him impossibly deeper.
I cry out, and he kisses me to catch the sound, and I come again with his tongue in my mouth and his cock buried inside me and his hand gripping my hip like I'm the only thing anchoring him to the earth.
He follows me over seconds later, thrusting deep and holding there, his whole body rigid, my name coming out of his mouth like a prayer he didn't know he was saying.
We lie there after. Tangled. Breathing.
His hand finds mine on the pillow above my head. Laces our fingers together.
"For the record," I say, "I knew you were lying for six days."
"For the record, so did I."
I roll onto his chest and press my ear to his heartbeat. Steady. Strong. The rhythm of a man who knows how to keep things safe.
"Tell me something nobody knows about you," I say.
He's quiet for a moment. His hand moves through my hair, slow and absent.
"I send my mother flowers every Friday. She thinks they're from the shop's weekly delivery service. They're not. I call the florist in DC every Thursday and choose the arrangement personally."
My chest aches. Not with pain. With the specific tenderness of discovering something soft inside someone who presents as all edges.
"What did you choose this week?"
"Sunflowers."
"Why?"
"She says they make the kitchen feel like summer even when it's not."
I close my eyes against his chest and listen to him breathe and think that I've been famous for eighteen years and I've never felt this seen by another human being.
He pulls the quilt over us and reaches for the lamp.
"I'm not going back to the hallway," he says.
"Good."
He turns off the light. Wraps his arm around me. Pulls me against his chest with my back to his front and his mouth against my hair.
I fall asleep in under a minute.
No checked locks. No phone under my pillow. No light left on.
Just his arm. His heartbeat. The quiet certainty of a man who chose to stay.