Chapter 35 TESSA
Tessa
The lights are off when I come up the drive.
The afternoon has gone gray, clouds sitting low and heavy over the water. I park and shut the engine off and sit there with my hands on the wheel and my heart racing.
Then I see him.
He’s on the terrace. White shirt, sleeves rolled.
I flip the mirror down. My hair is still pinned up the way it was for the board. I pull it loose and let it fall. Lip gloss from the bottom of my bag. My hands aren’t steady and my stomach is somewhere around my knees.
Sensible women do not fix themselves up in a parked car for a man who has every reason to send them home.
I do it anyway.
I can do this.
I get out of the car.
He doesn’t turn at the sound of the door, though I know he hears it.
He lets me cross the whole terrace to him, and I’m shaking before I’m halfway, and the closer I get the more of it I see.
His tie abandoned on the table. A bottle of scotch beside it.
The glass at his elbow. And his right hand working something across the backs of his fingers.
The quarter.
I know that coin. He set it down in the candlelight the night of the storm and told me about the morning his father lost everything—the last thing that never left, the weight he’s carried since he was a boy so he’d never forget what needing people costs.
I watched that quarter disappear from his pocket over the summer, a little at a time, so gradually I don’t think he noticed it happening.
It’s back.
I did that.
And when he finally looks at me his face is the one from the hearing room. Polite. Empty. A stranger wearing the mouth I’ve kissed a hundred times.
“You’re cleared,” he says. “Congratulations.”
“Ronan—”
“Denise has all the paperwork. You won’t see a bill.” He picks up the glass and takes a long pull, his eyes on the water. “Go home, Tessa.”
I don’t move.
“I am home.”
The glass comes down hard on the table. He stands, taller than the gray sky behind him, and the quarter disappears into his fist.
“Then why did you leave it?”
“Ronan—”
“I thought this was real.” It comes out of him low and hoarse, and it’s worse than shouting, so much worse. “Whatever we built in that house all summer. I thought it was real.”
“It was.”
“No.”
“It is.” I watch his jaw work under the scar. “Ronan, it is—”
“I asked you.” His voice drops lower. “On the terrace, the day before you left. I could see something was wrong, I asked you to talk to me, and you looked me in the eyes and said you were tired. Then you let me carry your bag to the car, and you kissed me goodbye, and you drove off to lose your whole life alone forty minutes up the road—and called me every night to ask about my exercises.”
His fist tightens around the coin. He laughs, one short, ugly breath. Then he shakes his head and looks back out at the water.
“Why, Tessa?” He turns back around, and he’s quieter now. “Was it me? Was I something you were managing? A patient you were seeing through to the end of his—”
“Don’t.” It cracks out of me. “Don’t you dare finish that sentence.”
I have to look away from him for a second. When I look back, I’m not shaking anymore.
“Managing you?”
I close the last of the space between us.
“Ronan, I gave you everything. Things I never gave another living soul. Twenty-five years, and I never trusted one single person enough to let them all the way in—not one, not ever—and then I handed the whole of me to you. First. Only. And you’re standing there asking me if you were my patient?”
“Then how could you do it?” He’s not quiet anymore, and the hand around the coin is shaking. “You trusted me with that. With you. The one thing you never gave anybody—you put it in my hands without blinking. And then a letter comes, and I’m not worth a phone call?”
I reach for him. He steps back. My hand hangs there between us before I let it fall, and I swallow hard.
He doesn’t stop. “You gave me everything except the one thing that was actually hurting you. Why?”
The sky opens.
No warning, no thunder. The rain just arrives, all at once, hard and loud, coming back up off the terrace. I’m squinting through it, and neither of us moves one step toward the house.
“Because you’d have come!” I’m shouting it over the rain now, and once it starts it doesn’t stop.
“You’d have come, Ronan. The second you knew, the very second, you’d have been on the phone to Frank, you’d have had lawyers before I finished the sentence, you’d have dropped Synapse and the recovery and every single thing you almost died getting back, and you’d have thrown all of it at my problem without blinking.
” I’m crying now. I can’t help it and I don’t try.
“I watched you almost die on that study floor. I had my fingers on your pulse and I counted it getting away from me and I begged you to breathe. And then you got better. You got better, and it’s the only thing I’ve wanted since the day I met you, and I could not—I could not be the reason you lost it.
I wasn’t going to let my disaster cost you your life twice. ”
He doesn’t answer. He stands there in the rain and takes it, all of it, his breathing gone uneven and his jaw locked.
I think I’ve reached him.
Then he turns away.
He walks to the railing and takes hold of the wet iron with both hands, and his head goes down between his arms, and he doesn’t say a word.
So I say the rest of it to his back.
“I know exactly who you are, Ronan Sinclair. You’d have picked all of it up, the hearing, the lawyers, me, weeks out of a hospital bed, and never once counted the cost. So I carried it myself, same as I’ve carried everything my whole stupid life.
And I lied to the person I love most in the world to protect him. ”
His head comes up.
“And I have hated every second of it.”
He turns around.
Something gives in his face.
He stands there looking at me, rain pouring off him.
My throat closes. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I hurt you.”
He comes at me.
Three strides, full force, and he grabs me and kisses me—hard, his mouth crashing down on mine and his arms locking me against him, and I moan into his mouth and take his face in both hands and give all of it back.
His fury and mine. Eight weeks of us. A week of missing him so badly I couldn’t breathe.
All of it meeting in the middle of one kiss in the pouring rain.
He pulls back an inch, breathing hard, and looks at me, his eyes moving over my face.
“I love you too.” His voice breaks on it. “More than you will ever know.”
And this time I’m the one who pulls him back in.
He picks me up, effortlessly, both hands under my thighs, no flinching, no favoring the leg, nothing left of the man who needed a cane.
My legs go around his waist because they know the way, skirt dragging up my thighs, and he carries me across the terrace kissing me the whole time, rain streaming off us both, and gets the door open without putting me down.
My back meets the wall inside and he kisses the sound right out of me.
“Ronan—”
“You gave yourself to me.” His fist closes in my wet hair and tips my head back. “You don’t get to take it back.”
“Then take me again.”
“Fuck, Tessa.” His mouth drags down my throat, rough and starving. “I need to be inside you. Right now.”
He keeps one arm under me the whole time. He is not putting me down.
We go for each other’s buttons at the same time—his one free hand on my blouse, both of mine on his shirt, clumsy with rain and want, fingers slipping on soaked fabric, neither of us willing to stop kissing long enough to look at what we’re doing.
He gets two of mine. I get one of his. He growls low against my mouth and gives up on finesse, and one hard pull sends the rest of my buttons scattering across the floor.
I try to return the favor and get exactly nowhere.
He pulls back just far enough for me to see the smirk—slow, wicked, mine—then reaches back with one hand and drags the whole shirt over his head, buttons and all, and then wet cotton is peeling off wet skin, sticking, fighting us every inch, and we’re laughing into each other’s mouths, breathless and shaking.
He’s bare-chested in soaked dress pants, rain still shining on his shoulders, and it is outrageously the best thing I have ever seen.
Then there’s nothing between my hands and his skin, rain-slick and warm underneath, his heart slamming under my palm, alive, alive, alive.
I press my mouth to it. He makes a low sound.
His hips press into mine, and he’s hard against me, all of him, and my whole body clenches around the promise of it.
His hand finds my breast, thumb dragging over my nipple through wet lace until I arch off the wall, and then the lace is gone too and his mouth replaces it, hot after the cold rain, hungry, nothing patient anywhere in him, and I bury my hands in his wet hair and hold on.
He shoves my skirt up around my hips, impatient, and his palm slides up my thigh, big and sure, and stops just short of where I’m dying for it.
“Tell me what you want,” he says against my skin.
“You,” I get out. “Please. Just you.”
“Just me.” It comes out of him low, half growl, all satisfaction.
I feel him smiling against my lips as his hand finally moves that last inch.
He pulls the soaked lace aside and finds me, slick and desperate for him.
Then he slides one thick finger into me, his thumb working tight circles right where I need him most.
My head goes back against the wall. The sound I make is indecent and I could not care less, my hips riding his hand, and he gives me a second finger, curling them exactly right, until my legs are shaking around his waist and I’m panting, right there, right on the edge of coming apart in his arms.
That’s when he pulls back to look at me. Keeps his hand where it is and watches my face, his eyes gone almost black.
“Only me,” he says. “Nobody else has ever had you, Tessa. Nobody else will.”
“Only you.” I can barely get the words out. “Only you, Ronan.”