Chapter 37 TESSA
Tessa
By the time I pull into the driveway, my feet are killing me.
Twelve hours in trauma, and I left the house before the sun did, and every muscle in my body is complaining at once. I climb the porch steps already picturing a hot shower and that gray sweater of his I stole in July and never gave back.
It’s a good ache, though. It always is now, because there are lights on downstairs and somebody in there who’s been listening for my car. We packed up my apartment a few weeks ago, and I haven’t looked back once.
Synapse still needs him in Boston a couple of days a week. He runs the rest of it from here, and nobody down there questions it anymore. When our schedules line up, I go with him, and when they don’t, he complains the entire drive back to Maine.
The house is quiet when I let myself in.
“Ronan?”
Nothing.
I kick off my shoes, drop my bag by the island and head for the fridge. I’m halfway through a bottle of water when I hear it.
Not footsteps.
The humming.
I smile into my water. He doesn’t know he’s doing it. He never does.
He rounds the corner into the kitchen and stops when he sees me.
He comes straight to me, both hands wrapping around my waist and drawing me against him. I tip my face up, and his mouth claims mine, slow and lazy, and I still can’t believe I get to wake up beside this man.
“Hey,” I murmur when he finally lets me breathe.
He starts to pull back.
I catch the front of his T-shirt before he gets very far and tug him back to me. My hands slip beneath the soft cotton, finding the warm muscle of his back.
His smile brushes my mouth.
“Missed me?”
I pull him in by the shirt and don’t bother answering.
A quiet laugh rumbles in his chest.
“Greedy.”
I smile against his lips.
He steals one more slow kiss before easing back just enough to meet my eyes.
“Keep that up,” he murmurs, “and we’re never leaving this kitchen.”
“Promise?”
One corner of his mouth curls.
“That’s the plan after we get back. Get your shoes. Something warm.”
I know what that means. I’m in and out of the shower in six minutes and down the stairs in jeans and his gray sweater, and I get exactly the look I was hoping for.
* * *
He takes my hand at the top of the ramp and walks me down the dock.
There’s no cane. No hitch. Nothing left of the man who needed my shoulder to get down a hallway. Just a big man in a plaid jacket going down his own dock, my hand swallowed up in his.
We do this most weeks now. Out past the point and back before dark, enough times that I know these boards and the sound my sneakers make on them, and the exact place where the path drops away and sixty feet of white hull comes into view with his mother’s name across the stern.
Finn isn’t here. Nobody is. It’s the slap of water against pilings and the smell of salt and diesel and the sun already low over the water, and Ronan goes aboard first, one hand on the rail, easy as walking into a room. Then he turns and reaches back for me.
I go straight up to the helm and take the seat beside his, because it’s mine and has been for weeks. High enough to see everything, near enough to reach him without leaning.
He casts us off himself. Then he swings up into the seat beside me and puts his hand on the wheel. The engines turn over under my feet, and we pull away from the dock.
And I do what I always do, which is turn sideways in my seat and watch him drive his mother’s boat.
His eyes go over the gauges and back out to the water, quick, hardly stopping anywhere.
He eases the throttle up. Taps a switch without looking down to find it.
He runs us out into open water with one hand and reaches over with the other to move a bottle of water before it slides, and the wind gets into his hair and he leaves it, and there is nothing in the set of his shoulders that is proving one single thing to anyone.
He’s just taking us somewhere.
I have to look out at the water for a minute.
“There,” he says.
I blink. “What?”
He nods toward the rocks.
“Your seals.”
They’re all there, sprawled across the ledge, and I laugh—because he’s been watching for them the whole way out while I’ve been too busy watching him.
He runs us east through the islands, the light going long and gold across the water. Nobody tells you October is the best month on this coast. A working boat hauls its string off the ledges, gulls hanging over the stern.
Then the shoreline opens and there it is, the tide low and the water coming in quiet.
The cove.
The engines settle into an idle, and we slow.
I turn to look at him.
“We’re stopping?”
“We’re stopping.”
He takes us in toward the stones. His hand’s been resting high on my thigh since the islands, and he gives it a squeeze before he lets go of me and gets up to drop the anchor.
I get up and go to the rail.
We’ve walked down to this cove more times than I can count, and I have never once seen it from the water. From out here it’s a different place entirely.
“Ronan. Come look at it.”
“In a minute.”
Without the wind it’s warm. He shrugs out of the jacket, drops it over the back of the seat, and pushes the sleeves of his henley up his forearms.
I’ve watched him do that a hundred times. It has never once gotten old.
Then he goes back to it—setting the anchor, checking the line, hauling a fender in over the rail one-handed—and I stop caring about the cove entirely.
“Back in a minute,” he says, and goes below.
I turn back to the cove and stand there smiling at it.
He comes back up with the basket.
He packed it himself. Bread, cheese, the small pink shrimp from the place in town, cloth napkins, the good glasses wrapped in a dish towel so they wouldn’t knock together. A bottle of champagne buried in the ice.
He carries it up to the bow and holds out a hand for me.
We eat up there on the cushions with our backs against the rail and our legs tangled up, the cove laid out in front of us.
He tells me about Frank and a boat show and a purchase he claims he isn’t making.
I tell him about the intake that took four of us and a resident who cried in the supply closet and then came back and did it right.
“You’re good at it,” he says.
“It makes me happy.”
He smiles at that, and reaches over and tucks a piece of hair back off my face, and his thumb stays a second longer than it needs to.
Then he sits up and takes the glass out of my hand and sets it down behind him with his own.
“Tessa.”
Something in his voice has changed. I turn to look at him properly.
“A few weeks ago I threw twenty-one years of my life into that water,” he says.
I follow his eyes to the stones.
“I remember.”
“Figured I should come back.” His mouth tips. “Start the next fifty where I left off.”
I don’t understand for one full second.
Then I do.
He goes down on one knee on the deck of his mother’s boat, and I stop breathing.
He looks up at me, and his eyes are steady and his hand, when he takes mine, is not. “You’ve seen the worst morning of my life from the floor of my study. You know what I’m like when I’m scared, and mean, and wrong. You’ve done your due diligence.” His mouth tips. “I’m asking anyway.”
I’m laughing and crying at the same time.
Then he smiles up at me, the real one, the one that changes his whole face.
“Still with me?”
“Always.”
He reaches into his pocket and brings out the ring, no box, just the ring between his fingers, and it catches the light the same as the quarter caught it going the other way.
“Marry me.”
“Yes,” I say, through the tears. “Yes.”
He slides it onto my finger with both hands, careful, thorough, a man completing the most important paperwork of his life.
Then he’s up, and I’m off the deck, my legs around his waist and my hands in his hair, and now I’m the one looking down at him.
He’s grinning up at me. I’m crying and grinning back, and I lean down and kiss him, over and over, on the deck of his mother’s boat.
“I love you,” I say into his mouth.
His arms lock around me. “I love you too.”
Then his mouth drifts to my jaw, and along it, to my ear.
“I believe I made you a promise about that kitchen.”
My hands tighten in his hair.
“You did.”
“I’m not waiting that long.”
He hoists me higher and spins, fast, and the squeal that comes out of me is not dignified. I’m still laughing into his neck when he carries me below.
Teak and lamplight and a bed built into the curve of the hull, and we have put it to work more times over the last few weeks than I’m ever going to admit out loud. Tonight is different. I feel it the second he sets me down.
He undresses me piece by piece, and when I reach for him he catches my hand instead and brings it up to his mouth. Kisses the ring. Then my knuckles.
“Ronan.”
“Stay there. Let me see you.”
So I let him. Bare on his sheets in the lamplight with nothing on me at all but that ring, his eyes going over me while his hand follows.
Then I sit up and go after his belt.
He helps. The henley comes off over his head, the rest of it goes, and there he is. All of him. Healed, whole, and mine.
I push him onto his back and go down his body.
I take my time about it. I’m good at this now and I know it, and the sounds he makes are worth every second—his hand fisted in my hair, his eyes on me the whole time because he has never once been able to look away from this, my name coming out of him like it’s being dragged.
I get maybe two minutes before his hand tightens.
“Off.”
“No.”
“Tessa.” He pulls me up over him and rolls, and I’m on my back with him above me, his forearms caging my head. He’s breathing like he ran here. “Not like that. Not tonight.”
Then his mouth is on my breast and I stop arguing.
He works me over slowly. One and then the other, his tongue and the flat of his hand, until I’ve got a fistful of his hair and his name keeps coming out of me.
The ring catches the lamplight when I reach for his jaw.
He sees it. He turns his face into my palm, then comes up and kisses me deep and slow, his tongue against mine, his hand sliding into my hair.
I get a hand between us and wrap it around him, hot and thick and already slick at the tip.
He swears into my mouth and lets me, for about three seconds.
Then he turns me and draws me back against him, until I’m sitting up in his lap with my spine flush against his chest, and pushes up into me slow.
One arm locked across me, holding me there.
My hand goes back and up, fingers sliding into his hair at the nape of his neck, and I hold on.
He takes my weight and works me up and down on him, taking his time now that he’s got me exactly where he wants me. His mouth is at my ear the whole time—his teeth on the shell of it, then lower, biting soft at the spot under my jaw that has never once failed him.
“That’s it,” he says against my skin. “Feel what you do to me.”
“Ronan—”
“You’re going to marry me.”
“Yes.”
He finds my left hand where it’s braced on his thigh, laces his fingers through mine, and brings both of them up flat against my stomach.
He holds it there.
His other hand slides down between my legs, and I come apart sitting up in his lap with my fingers crushed in his and my head back on his shoulder. He goes right after me, deep and hard, my name torn out of him against my neck.
Somewhere in it the last of the sun goes off the water outside the porthole, and we don’t notice it go.
* * *
He runs us home in the dark.
I come up in his sweater and find him already at the wheel, instrument lights low. He looks me over once, reaches for the jacket on the back of the seat, and puts it around my shoulders. Then he puts his arm out, and I fit myself under it, and he puts our nose west.
There’s no moon. Just the running lights and the far-off blink of something on the mainland, and Ronan taking us through it with one hand on the wheel and the other spread warm across my hip.
I look at my hand in the glow off the instruments. Platinum. One stone, and it is not a modest one—it throws little pieces of light around the helm every time I move. So I keep moving it.
My eyes are closing before we’re halfway home. Twelve hours on my feet and half a bottle of champagne, and I’m gone, leaning into his side with the engines thrumming up through the deck.
He feels it happen. He pulls the jacket up and tucks it in against my neck.
I turn my face into his shoulder.
“Wake me when we’re home.”
I don’t ask if he’s tired, or if his leg’s holding. I don’t look at the water once.
He brings me in closer without taking his eyes off it.
The last thing I hear is him humming.