18. Famous Last Rules
FAMOUS LAST RULES
Felicity
The morning after the blackout was one of those days that required a complex, ongoing negotiation between pretending to be normal and keeping my mind from replaying every single vivid detail of last night in a continuous, mortifying loop.
For most people, Monday mornings were a struggle.
Mine involved hosting a two-hour strategic planning session with the entire special events team, followed by an impromptu drop-in from Selma Lockhart—who happened to be the single most intimidating woman in all of coastal Oregon.
She swept in, smelling vaguely of strong coffee and the salty ocean breeze, and parked herself on the edge of my desk with her usual effortless confidence.
Selma was five feet of kinetic maternal energy, always with a hand on your shoulder and an arch in her brow that told you she already knew the punchline of your story and was waiting for you to catch up.
Today, she wore a navy blouse that made her olive skin seem to glow, and her shiny dark hair was pulled back in a low ponytail that could have been described as “severe” if she hadn’t paired it with her sweetheart shaped face.
Two of her four dogs trailed behind her. Her yellow labs Lady and Duchess both came to greet me with wet noses and wagging tails before settling on the floor next to the desk.
Earlier today, I woke in a state of anxiety so profound I half convinced myself I’d invented the entire night with Dean Lockhart.
Surely, my brain reasoned, it was a stress-induced hallucination, a narrative cobbled together out of equal parts sleep deprivation and unrequited thirst. The only evidence to the contrary was the persistent memory of his hands on my skin playing in my mind on an endless loop, and the fact that even after my shower, I could still smell him, somehow—his laundry detergent, his aftershave, and that unnameable masculine inevitability that seemed to have wormed its way into my bloodstream, clogging all my neural pathways.
Neither caffeine nor urgent emails could erase the memory.
Even a two-hour special events team meeting—usually the kind of all-consuming, PowerPoint-fueled hellscape that could dissolve any romantic fantasy—did nothing to dull the edge.
I barely remembered what we discussed. I only knew that every time someone said “crisis management,” my mind detoured to last night’s blackout, to the soft cadence of Dean’s voice in total darkness, to the momentary loss of boundaries so thorough it felt like I’d stepped out of my own life and into a fever dream.
Then to the lights flickering back on thirty minutes after we’d done the deed.
We both dressed, and Dean walked me to my SUV.
We didn’t say anything other than goodnight, it was surreal.
I didn’t know what last night meant, if anything. I hadn’t been able to process what happened or speak to Dean in the light of day. So when Selma Lockhart materialized in my office at exactly 11:06 a.m., I wanted to hide beneath my desk.
If Valentine Bay had a saint, it was Selma Montez-Lockhart.
She was the kind of matriarch who could end bar fights with a single look, organize a meal train for three different families simultaneously, and rock a pair of Levi’s like a woman half her age.
Her love was encyclopedic and sometimes terrifying.
From the second day of my relocation, when she hired me, she’d made it clear that my son and I were Lockhart Ranch family now and therefore under the umbrella of her protection and love.
“So,” she said, crossing her arms and leaning in like a confessor, “how are you holding up after last night’s little adventure?”
My face went hot so fast I felt like I’d been hit with a steam wand. “Adventure?” I repeated, desperate to sound casual, as if I routinely spent my evenings getting accidentally locked in with men who could hypnotize me by the light of a cell phone and then undo me with a single, devastating kiss.
Selma gave a noncommittal hum. “The blackout. I heard you got stuck in the storage building with my Dean.” She said “my Dean” not like a possessive mother, but like a world leader remarking on the strategic positioning of her favorite general.
Her eyes glinted with enough maternal curiosity to fuel rumors the size of the Grand Canyon.
I scrambled for a plausible narrative. “It wasn’t a big deal, really.
I mean, I hate the dark, so at first, I thought I was going to have a panic attack, but you know Dean was there and he, um, yeah, he distracted me…
” I trailed off, realizing that I’d just walked tee’d up her being able to question how had he distracted me.
She smiled as she reached out, straightened the edge of a Post-it note on my desk, and fixed me with a look of such ruthless affection that I felt my entire life was laid bare.
“Well, I’m glad he was able to help you through that, and you weren’t stranded alone.
And it’s nice to have an adventure sometimes. ”
Adventure?
No, no, no. There was no way. No way she could know. Unless…unless Dean told her? Or someone saw us? Or maybe I was just so obviously reeling that I projected “I hooked up with your son and I can’t stop thinking about it” like a sandwich board sign.
I tried to steer the conversation elsewhere. “How’s the rest of the ranch? I heard the power was out clear up to the north bluff.”
“Everything is good, the storage building is the only one that doesn’t have a backup generator, so everywhere else had power,” she answered as she gave me a slow, knowing once-over that had all the subtlety of a polygraph test. She was about to say more when a knock at the door made us both turn.
And there he was. Dean Lockhart, larger than life, standing in my doorway with a file folder and a face that gave nothing away. He looked like he hadn’t slept, but in a good way, his jaw was dark with stubble and his hair was just messy enough to make my heart rattle unpleasantly against my ribs.
“Hey, Mom,” he greeted her as if this was a perfectly casual visit, as if less than twelve hours ago he hadn’t stripped me naked and been inside of me.
“Dean!” Selma exclaimed, with the kind of delight only mothers can channel. “Come in, come in. Your timing is perfect. I was just checking in on Felicity after hearing about you two getting locked inside the storage warehouse. She assured me you kept her distracted.”
If I had been drinking, I would have done a spit take. Did she know what happened between us and was just toying with me?
Dean didn’t respond, but that wasn’t uncharacteristic for him.
Instead, he dipped his chin in acknowledgement while I was begging the earth to open up and swallow me whole.
Then his eyes met mine for one electric second, and that was it, my internal hard drive crashed, and all I could see or hear was the memory of his mouth on mine, his hands on me, the weight of his body on top of me.
For a moment, the office felt too small, the oxygen scarce.
I looked away, my heart pounding wildly against my chest.
“Just needed to drop off the revised numbers for the fall festival fundraiser.” He set the folder on my desk, careful not to touch me, but still close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his skin.
Selma watched the exchange like a hawk, her eyes narrowing. She stood, smoothed her blouse, and patted her hand on the desk twice. “Well, I’ll let you two get to it. Don’t work too hard, Felicity,” she said, and then, with a parting look at her son, “And don’t give her too much trouble, Dean.”
“I won’t,” he agreed, but he looked at me as he said it, and I had to wondered if he meant it as a promise or a dare.
The moment the door clicked shut behind Selma, the temperature in my office shot up ten degrees.
All at once, the air thickened with the weight of everything we’d done—and everything we were supposed to pretend we hadn’t.
I stared at the folder Dean had left on my desk as if it was a bomb ticking down.
In reality, the dangerous, uncontainable thing in the room was Dean, standing there, hands in his pockets, gaze boring through me with that impossible combination of patience and predatory focus.
He didn’t speak right away. Neither did I.
It was, by far, the longest stretch of silence I’d endured in my professional life.
If I wasn’t careful, I was going to start narrating the events of last night, live and uncensored as they played back in my mind, because that was all I could think about.
I tried to play it cool, flipping open the folder only to realize I was staring at a spreadsheet upside down. Subtle.
“Distraction, huh?” he repeated, this time with a half-smirk that made my stomach do a triple axel.
“I wasn’t…it’s not how it sounds…I was just saying…because I’m afraid of…I didn’t mean it to sound like that, I was just saying you helped distract me from my fear of the dark,” I finally was able to complete a single coherent thought.
The corners of his mouth tilted upwards. “I’ll take the compliment.”
This needed to stop before I started rating his performance on a ten-point scale. I snapped the file shut and forced myself to look him in the eye. “Listen. About last night—”
He took one step closer, leaned his knuckles on the edge of my desk, and dropped his voice. “About last night, what?”
My entire body went traitorously hypersensitive. The office, which normally smelled like coffee and toner from the copy machines, now radiated whatever aftershave he’d used plus the faintest whiff of hay and wind and something uniquely him.
I scrambled for professionalism and failed. “I’ve been thinking,” I said, trying to sound brisk and in control. “This thing between us, I don’t know what it is.”
I paused, hoping he would fill in the blanks for me so I didn’t have to ask him outright. He didn’t. Dean Lockhart was perfectly comfortable in prolonged silences.