She laughed at me.
“What are you trying to tell her?” Locke’s lips were close to my ear, his warm chest the best pillow in the world. “I can type it for you.”
I passed him the phone. “Just tell her I love her.”
“Pretty sure she already knows.” Locke took the phone anyway and composed a message.
He sent it and slipped the phone into my pocket. “Don’t fall asleep.”
“That’s my line.”
He tickled me.
I didn’t mind, too hazy and stoned to react, and for a while, I drifted. All the shit we’d brought with us was still there, but it was distant, a crisis for another day. For now, it was just me, my brothers, and the man who’d taught me how to lie on top of him in a public space and not give a single fuck about it.
How much that mattered—how much it meant to me—hit me suddenly.
I sat up and twisted around.
In the low light of the fire, Locke’s gaze had turned hooded and lazy, heavy with tranquillity he deserved. I had so much to fucking say to him, but the quiet of this moment felt too sacred to break.
I don’t want this night to end.
I stood and held out my hands to him. “Come with me?”
He rose without question and followed me away from the crowd—away from the safety of our brothers. The soldier in me knew it was reckless, but the man Locke was letting me become couldn’t contemplate waiting another second to be alone with him.
Or maybe I was just drunk and stupid.
Either way, we left.
Away from the event, we meandered across damp fields, the glitter of an autumn frost in the air. In my pocket, some dickhead was blowing up my phone, but unless it was Orla—and it wasn’t—they could fucking wait.
“Are you gonna tell me where we’re going?”
I glanced at Locke. We were walking so close to one another that our fingers kept brushing.
Holding hands with a dude hadn’t been on my radar for the longest time, but I remembered watching Saint and Alexei do it during that weird church session we’d held in Embry’s bedroom way back when. How I’d struggled to look away from their twined fingers and never known why until Locke had become so special to me.
I took his hand. “Somewhere quiet.”
He accepted my answer, squeezing my palm against his. “You okay?”
“Course I am.” Course I was. I was with him. I missed Orla, but I hadn’t realised how deeply I’d craved this solitude with him until I’d hopped a fence and put my boots to wet grass. “How about you? We can go home if you want.”
“That what you want?”
“Not right now.”
Locke hummed a low laugh and let me lead him through the mud until we reached civilisation again—Fernton, a small town that bordered Devon and Cornwall, all picture-book cottages and holiday flats by the sea.
The ocean was loud. Waves crashing against the cliffs like they did near Cam’s house. For a second, it felt like home. Then I realised it was Locke who made me feel that way, even when my woman was elsewhere.
Ourwoman. At some point, that conversation needed to happen. With her. With him. I knew where I was on it. What I wanted—how Ifelt—and I wasn’t a man who needed to know what the rest of my life looked like, but this... fuck. I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t as scared as I was happy.
Can’t lose him.
The painful thought took me back to that horrible night on the road with Ranger and Saint, and the reality that we were all so fucking lucky we hadn’t lost Locke before we’d ever known him. That if we didn’t find Priest and his surviving band of Crows soon, we still might. But...
