Chapter 17 RONAN
Ronan
I’ve spent thirty-two years believing efficiency solves most things.
It turns out efficiency has no answer for a woman walking barefoot through my kitchen.
She’s carrying both mugs because she won’t let me carry one while I’m on the cane, and she’s in the thick blue sweater she pulls on after her swim, sleeves shoved over her hands, hair still damp from the water.
Six o’clock, out and back, same line every day.
I drank my coffee on the terrace and watched, and neither of us pretended I wasn’t.
She sets mine down black, hers pale, and catches me looking.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“I learned from the best.”
Her mouth tips before she can stop it, and she hides it in her coffee. I win. Barely.
* * *
The gym used to be mine. Weights before dawn, five miles on the beach before my first call, every morning I spent under this roof.
Now there’s a row of resistance bands where the barbell rack was and a schedule taped to the mirror in her handwriting, and this morning is the first morning it smells like a place I’m coming back to instead of a place I lost. After yesterday’s beach, nothing hurts worse than it should, which I take as a green light, which is why at nine I’m in there alone, curling the ten-pound weight with the bad arm.
I hear her stop in the doorway. I keep curling.
“Ronan.”
Another rep.
“Ronan.”
“I know what I’m doing,” I say.
“You’re doing it with the ten.”
She crosses the room and takes it out of my hand mid-rep. She sets it back on the rack and puts the five in my palm like she’s handing a toddler a crayon.
“I could curl this with my little finger.”
“Today you’re working your shoulder, not your ego.”
I do the reps. She does her chart. I wait until her head is down over the clipboard, and I trade the five for the ten, quiet as a man can be. One rep. Two.
“Put it back.”
I freeze. “You’re not even looking.”
“I heard the rack.”
I look at the weight. I look at the back of her head, bent over her chart, not one muscle of her turned toward me, and I put the ten back on the rack.
Not because the shoulder can’t take it. Because she asked. Somewhere in the last three weeks her asking started outranking my wanting.
Standing balance after. She spots behind me, close, hands ready and not touching, and I stand on the bad leg and hold it while the count runs. Halfway through the second set I reach back, find her hand, and squeeze it once. Then I let go and finish the count.
I don’t look at her. I don’t trust myself to. I can feel her behind me—her breath gone uneven, that hand still warm where mine left it—and finishing the count instead of turning around costs me more than the leg does.
Twice today she’s left the room without moving—gone somewhere I couldn’t follow. I notice. I don’t ask. Whatever it is, she’s holding it alone, and I’m not going to reach for what she hasn’t offered. I meant what I said on the beach. I know how to wait.
Frank calls at noon.
“Valence bought it,” he says, no hello. “Petra’s people watched that call like a jury, and you looked like a man who’d never left and never needed them. The clause conversation got easier overnight. They want the language softened by Zurich, and I think we get it.”
“Good.”
“You sound different.”
“Recovered.”
“That’s not what I meant.” A pause, and I can hear him deciding whether to say it. “Is the nurse still there?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Frank says. And then, because twenty years buys a man exactly one more sentence, “About time something in Maine was worth staying for.”
“Goodbye, Frank.”
He’s laughing when I hang up on him.
I find Knox after lunch and tell him what I want.
“Yes, sir.” Level as always. Then he turns for the door, and he’s grinning before he’s halfway through it.
Apparently everyone on my payroll has developed a sense of humor this week. I should look into it, but I’m in too good a mood to care.
* * *
By the time the sun starts dropping, a fire waits in the old stone ring at the top of the beach, two folded blankets on the driftwood log.
“Get your shoes,” I tell her.
She looks up from the chart, and this time she doesn’t ask. She sees my face and goes for her sweater.
The air off the water has teeth after the storm, cold enough to make the fire honest. I light it and it takes fast, dry wood snapping, sparks going up into a sky just starting its colors. She watches from the wind, arms crossed, and doesn’t offer to help. She’s learning.
We sit on the blanket with the log at our backs, close, and for a while neither of us says anything. The fire fills the quiet. So does the tide. Her shoulder settles against mine, and I sit very still, the way you do when something wild finally comes to you on its own.
“You didn’t have to do all this,” she says.
“I know.” I look at her when I say it and don’t look away.
She smiles. “You’re sweet.”
“That’s between us.”
She laughs into the wind.
“Yesterday I stepped back,” she says, to the fire.
“I noticed.”
“I’ve been thinking about it since.” She turns her head, and the firelight catches her face, and she’s so beautiful I lose the thread of what patience was even for. “I’m not stepping back tonight.”
I stop breathing.
“Tessa. We don’t have to do anything.”
“I know.” Her eyes are steady on mine, green gone gold in the light. “That’s not what this is.”
“Then tell me what it is.”
“It’s me choosing,” she says. “While I can.”
I don’t understand the last part. I don’t ask, because she’s already moving, and what happens next is hers to give, and she gives it.
The kiss from the storm found us. This one is a choice.
She comes up onto her knees on the blanket and takes my face in her hands and kisses me.
Slow at first, sure of herself, her thumb finding the scar, the same touch that started everything two nights ago.
I let her set the pace. She tastes sweet, and the kiss deepens when she decides it does, her fingers sliding into my hair, and when I groan she smiles against my mouth and kisses me harder.
I pull her in with the good arm. The sweater’s cold from the wind, but she’s warm underneath it. She makes a low sound against my mouth, and my patience is done.
I ease her back onto the blanket, careful of my ribs, keeping my weight off the bad shoulder. The fire washes over us in slow waves. Her hair spills across the wool, and she looks up at me, warm and unguarded.
No hesitation in her. Just want—and enough cold in the air to give her a reason to reach for me.
We kiss until I lose track of time. Easy at first, then deeper.
Her mouth opens under mine while her fingers slip beneath the hem of my sweatshirt, palms sliding over my stomach, around my side, flattening against my back.
They’re cold from the wind, and the shock of them makes every touch land harder.
Even now she’s careful—she finds the bandage at my ribs and the healing shoulder without looking and stays clear of both.
I learn her through the sweater first. The shape of her under thick wool, the heat coming through it. My hand closes over her breast and her breath breaks against my mouth, her body rising into my palm. Over the wool until she’s pressing up into my hand, the sounds she makes spilling into the kiss.
Then under it. Bare skin, warming against my hand. She arches and laughs into my mouth, surprised and breathless, and I can’t help smiling back.
My palm fills with her, soft. Every slow pass draws another breath out of her, and a small sound she doesn’t bother to hide. I want her enough that it hurts.
I lift my head and search her face.
“Tell me where the line is.”
“Nowhere near where you are now.”
“Tessa.”
“I’ll tell you,” she says, fingers in my hair. “I promise. Don’t stop.”
So I don’t.
My hands go everywhere the firelight can’t reach, learning her by touch until her breathing goes uneven beneath me.
She shoves my sweatshirt up as far as it’ll go, impatient now, her hands greedy on my skin—my stomach, my back—pulling me down against her like she’s been wanting this as long as I have. I’ve been counting too.
A shiver runs through her.
“Cold?”
She smiles without opening her eyes. “No.”
I pull the blanket higher around her anyway and kiss her until it fades.
My hand drifts lower. Her stomach, her hip, then lower still, until I’m cupping her through the leggings, and her hips find my palm before she seems to realize they’re moving. The wind takes the sound she makes, and I catch only half.
I keep her there, aching, until she’s moving against my palm on her own.
“Ronan.” My name barely exists.
“Tell me.”
Her nails dig into my back. “Take them off.”
I ease the leggings down her legs. The night air moves over her skin, and she pulls in a breath.
Then I touch her.
She shudders around my hand.
So ready every muscle in my body locks.
I make myself go still, my hand where it is. “Hey. We don’t have to do this.”
She blinks at me, then surges up and kisses me hard enough that my balance nearly goes. One hand fists in my hair. “Don’t you dare stop,” she says against my mouth.
The relief hits so hard I almost laugh. Instead I kiss her back.
I lay her down again, slower this time, worshipping every inch between her ribs and the inside of her knee, feeling her tremble beneath every kiss.
When I’m finally where she wants me, I stop one last time. I need to be sure.
“Still with me?”
A breath—she almost stills—then her eyes find mine.
“Yes.”
I put my mouth on her, and she jolts, a gasped “Oh—” torn out of her and lost to the wind.
Her knees fall open. I settle on my good side between them, no hurry anywhere in me, and I take her apart with my mouth like I do everything I intend to be the best at.
Slow, until she swears at me. Then not slow.
She’s loud in a place with no neighbors and I want her louder, her heel digging into my back, her hands fisting the blanket and then my hair, pulling.
“Don’t stop, don’t—” She breaks off. Says my name once like a warning. Then again like it isn’t.
When she comes apart she pulls me in by the hair and rides it out against my mouth, shaking, the stars coming up over the water, and I work her through it and past it until she’s breathless, pushing weakly at my head, too much, and I press one last kiss to the inside of her thigh, and it is the single best deal I have ever closed.
After, she pulls me up and kisses me, slow and thorough, tasting herself, shameless. Then her hand slides down my stomach, south, intent in it.
I catch it. Bring it up. Kiss her knuckles.
“Not tonight.”
She blinks at me, flushed, unsteady. “Ronan.”
“Tonight was yours. All of it.”
She stares at me, and a woman who has spent her whole life being the one who gives genuinely does not know where to put this.
“That’s not fair,” she says finally, weakly.
“Take it up with management.”
She laughs, and folds herself against my chest under the second blanket, and we lie there breathing while the fire burns down to work its coals.
The leg aches. The shoulder too, a low honest throb from the whole day, the weights and the fire and her. I’m still hard enough to ache. That’ll keep. I’d do all of it again twice.
“Your leg,” she says finally, drowsy, a nurse to the last.
“Never better.”
“Liar.”
“I learned from the best.”
She laughs into my chest, and I feel it more than hear it, and I lie there on my own beach with this woman against my heart and do the thing I do. I count.
Five weeks. Thirty-five days. I’ve built companies on worse odds. I’ve walked away from better investments. I’m not walking away from this. I don’t know what she’s carrying. I don’t know what’s waiting for her in that envelope. But she chose this, tonight, while she can, whatever that means.
Whatever it means, I’m choosing it back.
I pay her a salary. The thought is almost funny tonight. There’s no number on any ledger I own that gets a woman to choose you at a fire.
The fire settles.
She’s asleep before the coals are, tucked against me, trusting me to watch the tide.
So I do.
Every wave.
All the way in.
All the way out.
Holding the only thing on this coast I didn’t buy and can’t afford to lose.