Vik was grinning so wide his face couldn’t hold it. “The dispatch also names her cargo officer. I can cross-reference Confederate treasury disbursement records. If the gold was assigned to a specific officer—”
“Vik.” Marley put her hand on his arm. “Can I take this?”
“It’s a photocopy. The original stays in the archive.” He was already reaching for a folder.
We left an hour later with the dispatch and a look on Marley’s face that I was starting to understand meant everything had just shifted. She was incandescent, walking fast, talking faster, connecting details with a velocity that left me two steps behind and content to stay there.
She stopped on the sidewalk outside the museum. The evening light was going gold, and the live oaks along Main Street threw long shadows across the pavement.
“A direct order.” She shook her head. “Two years I’ve been modeling approach vectors, and the answer was sitting in a dispatch file the whole time.”
“Vik found it. You built the context that made it matter.”
She looked at me, and I couldn’t read everything in her face but I caught the part that mattered. The part that wasn’t about the wreck.
THE BOATHOUSE WAS STILLwhen we got back. Evening air through the open windows, the creek running its tidal rhythm beneath the floor, and the sky outside going from gold to deepblue. She spread the navigational charts on the kitchen table and stood over them, tracing the old channel with her finger.
She looked up. Neither of us spoke. The air held still the way it does before weather changes: heavy, charged, waiting. She straightened from the table.
“You’re staring.”
“Yeah.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Several.”
She crossed the room. No rushing. She stopped in front of me and put her hands flat on my chest, palms warm through my shirt.
“This isn’t adrenaline.”
“No.”
“Good.” She kissed me.
Different from the first time. That had been a detonation. Everything we’d been holding back igniting at once. This was slow. Her mouth was warm and deliberate, and she was choosing to be here, choosing this, and that distinction mattered more than I’d expected.
I pulled her in. My hands found her waist, the strip of bare skin between her tank top and shorts, and she pressed into me with a sound that was low and certain. I walked us backward until my shoulders hit the wall, and she followed, her body flush with mine, her fingers sliding up my neck into my hair.
“Take your shirt off,” she murmured against my mouth.
I pulled it over my head. Her hands moved across my chest, my ribs. She pressed her lips to the shrapnel scarring on my shoulder, and my breath caught hard. Nobody had touched those scars without flinching. She kissed along them as though they were just another part of me, which, I was starting to understand, was how she saw it.
I reversed us. Put her back to the wall, gentle, took her face in both hands and kissed her until she was breathing hard and her fingers were hooked in my waistband. Pulled her tank top over her head. Her braid caught, and she laughed and tugged it free, and the laugh cracked open my chest in a way the kissing hadn’t. Real. Easy. A woman exactly where she wanted to be.
I kissed down her throat, her sternum, knelt and pressed my mouth to her stomach. Her muscles contracted under my lips. I unzipped her shorts and drew them down, then her underwear, and I stayed on my knees and looked up at her.
“You’re still staring.” Her breath was uneven.
“I’m going to be here awhile. Get comfortable.”
“I’m standing against a wall.”
“I can fix that.”
I picked her up. She wrapped around me, laughing again, and I carried her to the bed and laid her down on the sheets she’d wrecked the night before. I’d made the bed that morning out of habit. She’d noticed.
“You actually remade this.” She smoothed the now-rumpled cotton. “After last night. Quarter-bounce tight.”
