Chapter 21 RONAN
Ronan
I wake in my own bed for the first time in nearly two months, and I don’t count a single thing.
Not the days since the accident. Not the hours until the call.
Not the stairs between me and the cane I dropped yesterday for the best reason of my life.
The sun is barely up. The ocean is turning gray to silver outside the windows, and Tessa Quinn is asleep on my chest with one hand curled over my ribs, palm flat on the scar, guarding it even in her sleep.
Her hair is everywhere—my shoulder, her face, one strand rising and falling with her breath. I move it off her cheek. She murmurs something and burrows closer without waking.
This is the happiest morning I’ve had in years.
I don’t wake up with women. Never have. This should be the part where I’m already dressed and gone.
I keep waiting to want that. I don’t.
She wakes when the light reaches the foot of the bed, stretches against me, then lifts her face for a slow, sleepy kiss. She shifts, winces, and buries her head in my chest. “Ow.”
“Sore?” I ask.
“You first.”
“I’m fine.”
“You climbed a staircase on a healing femur and then had—” she lifts her head, hair wild, eyes half asleep and already laughing at me, “—an extremely thorough afternoon.”
“I remember the afternoon.” I run my hand up her spine, just because I can now. Because she’s mine. “You didn’t answer me.”
My hand comes to rest at the back of her neck.
“And I hate that it hurt.”
“It hurt,” she says. She doesn’t dress it up. “It still does. And I’m not sorry about a single second of it, so don’t you dare be.”
My hand goes still.
She props her chin on my chest. “I’ll live. You, on the other hand, are going to feel those stairs the second your feet touch the floor, and I want you to know in advance that I’ve retired for the weekend. If you need a nurse, the agency’s number is on the fridge.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“Me. Off duty.” She pats my chest. “Or you could always call Brielle.”
“Who?”
“Nice try.”
“You’re going to be a problem.” I go for her ribs.
She yelps and swats at me.
Noted.
She starts to climb off me. I catch her wrist, pull her back, and kiss her, one hand in all that hair, until she’s smiling against my mouth.
“You have a board call,” she murmurs.
“I’m aware.”
“You have to shower.”
“I’m aware of that too.” One more kiss. Then I let her go and get up first, which is a mistake I commit to.
The leg doesn’t want to take weight. The shoulder hurts before I even use it.
Everything I did yesterday is still in my body this morning, and I stand beside the bed in the gray light, breathing through it while the room levels out.
She’s watching me from the pillows. I can feel it.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re about to.”
Then she’s out of bed, wrapped in the sheet. She comes to me, settles both hands on my waist, and presses a kiss to my jaw, right where the scar begins.
“Grab some ibuprofen before you shower,” she says, and lets me go.
She wanders while I find the ibuprofen and my dignity.
Barefoot, trailing white cotton, taking inventory of a room I haven’t set foot in since the night before the crash.
There isn’t much to take. The bed. The windows.
A dresser with nothing on it. Two novels on the nightstand I don’t remember buying, a lamp, a clock.
Years of money, and nothing in this room would tell a stranger one true thing about the man who owns it.
She doesn’t say a word about it. I could kiss her for that.
She walks into the closet still wearing the sheet. A minute later the sheet comes sailing back out through the open doorway and lands on the floor.
My last coherent thought goes with it.
Thirty seconds later she comes back out wearing my sweater instead. Gray cashmere, falling past her thighs, sleeves swallowing her hands.
“Fuck,” I say. Quietly. With feeling.
She smiles. “You were saying?”
“I was.”
“What?”
“No idea. Keep the sweater.”
I grab my pants off the floor and the quarter rolls out of the pocket, across the hardwood, and stops against my foot.
I pick it up. Twenty-one years it’s ridden in my pocket.
She’s asking me something from across the room—whether the bacon smell is real or wishful—and I answer her, and the quarter goes on the nightstand next to the clock.
I shower and dress—charcoal pants, a white shirt I leave open.
When I come out of the bathroom, she’s cross-legged on the end of the bed with one of the nightstand novels, back in her leggings and my sweater. She’s not reading it. She’s looking at me over the top of it.
“Good book?”
“Riveting.” She hasn’t turned a page.
I’m at the dresser hunting socks when she comes up behind me. Her hands slide around me to reach inside my shirt and down my chest. I turn. Her face is already tipped up.
I kiss her, and it gets away from us fast—my hand under the sweater, her palms sliding up my bare back beneath the shirt, pulling me in. She makes a low sound into my mouth and I go after another one.
“I always knew I liked this sweater,” I say against her jaw.
The bed is six feet away and neither of us is thinking about anything else. I make myself stop, an inch from her mouth.
“Keep that up and I’m not making that meeting.”
She sighs. Then she steps back, looks me over once, and starts doing up my buttons instead.
“You know I can dress myself.”
“I know.” Another button. “But if I don’t keep my hands busy, we’re not leaving this room.”
Her knuckles graze up my chest a button at a time, and she’s humming under her breath while she works, and I know the tune.
Somewhere in the last few weeks I learned it whole without trying—I could hum the next line before she gets there.
I don’t. It’s hers. I stand there being buttoned into my own shirt, listening. I could stand here all day.
The right cuff she does last, without being asked—the one button that’s still beyond me—and then the collar, and then her palms smooth down the front of the shirt and stay there.
“I’m going to be late,” I say.
“You are.”
I kiss her anyway. Soft, once.
“Worth it.”
The stairs down are worse than the stairs up. She puts herself under my right arm at the top, exactly where she fits, and we go down together.
Mrs. Vale is at the stove, and the kitchen smells like bacon and coffee and Friday. She hears us on the stairs and doesn’t turn around until we’re both on level ground. Then her eyes go from me, to Tessa, to the sweater, to the staircase, and back to the pan.
“There’s a cane in the middle of my kitchen,” she says. “I swept around it in case it was making a point.”
Tessa, pink to the ears, crosses the kitchen and picks it up herself, and leans it against my stool with tremendous dignity. Mrs. Vale cracks two more eggs. “Sit. Both of you.”
We sit. Under the island, her ankle hooks over mine and stays.
Mrs. Vale carries the compost out the back—forty seconds, maybe less—and I lean over and kiss Tessa in broad daylight, coffee on her mouth, her hand coming up to my jaw, sure of its welcome.
“We’re going to get caught,” she says against my lips.
“Probably.”
Footsteps on the porch. We’re two feet apart and innocent by the time the door opens, and Mrs. Vale looks at the two of us, and then at the ceiling, and serves the eggs.
It happens over breakfast. I catch myself smiling at nothing—at the eggs, apparently—and Mrs. Vale sees it and stops, pot in hand.
“He’s smiling at his plate,” she says to Tessa. “Should I be worried?”
“It’s the new medication,” Tessa says, and doesn’t look up.
And I laugh. An actual laugh, loud in my own kitchen, before I know it’s coming—and it surprises all three of us. Mrs. Vale nearly loses the pot. Tessa’s fork stops halfway to her mouth, and the look on her face is worth the whole morning.
I’d forgotten I could sound like that.
After, she leans against the counter with her refill. Hair that hasn’t met a brush, my sweater, bare feet. She reaches over and takes the last piece of bacon off my plate, and she’s standing in my kitchen like she’s been living here for years.
I built this house because I wanted somewhere nobody could get to me. Somewhere along the way it became the place I hope she never leaves.
Her phone lights up on the island.
She looks at it. Turns it face down and comes back to me half a step slower than she left, smiling like nothing happened, which is how I know something did.
I notice. I don’t ask. I learned yesterday what her trust looks like when it’s ready.
* * *
At eight I stand in front of the camera in the study and become, for twenty-two minutes, the man they’re all terrified of losing.
Petra’s people open with the clause. I close it.
I walk them through the integration timeline from memory—dates, deliverables, names—because I wrote it, because it’s mine, because flat on my back in Maine never once meant I stopped holding every number in this company where I could see it.
One of Valence’s lawyers starts a sentence with “our concern remains,” and I finish it for him, accurately, and then I take the concern apart in front of the people who pay him.
By minute fifteen the board has stopped looking at their notes.
By minute twenty, Valence’s counsel is saying “path forward.”
“Gentlemen.” I let the room hold still. “I’ll see you at integration. On my feet.”
This isn’t over. Valence doesn’t blink twice in one week. But the panic is out of the room, and everyone on that call knows whose room it is again.
The screen goes dark. When I turn around, she’s in the doorway. Two mugs, shoulder against the frame.
“Well,” she says. “That was unfairly attractive.”
I cross the room—no cane, leg aching, don’t care—and take my coffee out of her hand. She’s looking up at me, and it isn’t the numbers she’s proud of, or the save, or the man on the camera.
It’s me.