"Then you're in good hands," she said, and the words seemed to carry two meanings and she intended both of them.
She hugged me—quick, genuine, her mouth near my ear. "Call me tomorrow," she murmured. "About the sourdough. And everything."
I pulled back and looked at her and she was smiling the way she'd smiled when she saidmen who walk away like that usually come back.
The quiet, satisfied smile of a woman who'd been right about something and was too gracious to say so out loud.
But only barely.
16
GRANT
The car moved through Charleston like it had nowhere to be. Which was fine, because neither did we.
The driver—different one from earlier, older, with the quiet professionalism of a man who'd driven people home from things before and understood that silence was part of the service—took the long way back. Or maybe it was the short way and the city was just like that at night, the streets narrow and unhurried, the gas lanterns doing their amber work on the old facades, the live oaks overhead turning the road into a tunnel of shadow and intermittent light.
Lou sat beside me. Close, but not touching. Her hair was slightly mussed in a way that said something had happened to it recently, and the black top she'd put back on had a wrinkle at the hem that hadn't been there before. She smelled like me. I could smell it—my soap, my skin, underneath her perfume—and the primitive part of my brain that lived below civilization registered that fact with a satisfaction I wasn't going to examine right now.
We didn't talk.
Not because there was nothing to say. Because everything we could say right now would be smaller than what had just happened, and neither of us seemed willing to shrink it. The silence in the car wasn't awkward. It was full—the fullness of a space occupied by two people who'd been as close as two people could be twenty minutes ago and were now sitting six inches apart, letting the distance do what distance did after intimacy, which was make you aware of every inch.
I watched the city slide past the window and tried to think clearly.
I couldn't.
What had I been thinking? That was the question forming in the back of my skull, pressing forward with the insistence of a headache that hadn't fully arrived. What had I been thinking—at the concourse, in the hallway, in the storage room with a woman I'd met at a bread stall this morning?
The answer was that I hadn't been thinking. I'd been feeling, which was the thing I'd spent three years training myself not to do, and I'd been good at it—disciplined, methodical, the emotional equivalent of a man who'd sealed the windows and locked the doors and then someone had walked in, anyway, because the door had never really been locked. It had just been closed. And closed wasn't locked.
I knew that. I'd known it in the stables with Ethan and the horse. I'd known it at the bread stall. I'd known it at the rodeo, when she'd grabbed my arm and the electricity had burned through every circuit I'd built.
The rodeo. The talk about fathers. The way she'd saidour fatherslike it was a shared room. The heat. The storage room. The wall. The sound she'd made when?—
I shut that down. Not here. Not in the backseat of a car with the woman in question six inches to my left.
But more thoughts were already lining up. The rodeo—the nostalgia of it, the vulnerability of talking about parents, the sheer physical fact of a beautiful woman who'd chased me into a hallway and looked at me like I was worth the trouble. All of it had conspired. And men who got swept up in conspiracies of feeling were men who got hurt.
I knew that. I had the scar tissue to prove it.
I glanced at Lou. She was looking out her window, her chin resting on her hand, the Charleston streetlight catching the line of her jaw. She looked calm. Settled. Like a woman who'd done something she intended to do and wasn't interested in regretting it.
I envied that. The absence of second-guessing. The quiet confidence of someone who made decisions and let them stand.
The car pulled up to the Palmetto Rose. The driver came around and opened the door. Lou stepped out first, and I followed, and the night air hit us both—warm, salt-threaded, carrying the faint jasmine from somewhere in the garden.
The lobby was quiet at this hour. Low lights, the chandelier dimmed to a glow, the marble floors reflecting nothing. But there was someone waiting—a man in a dark suit, mid-forties, the composed bearing of hotel management, standing near the entrance to a hallway I hadn't been down before.
"Mr. Dane," he said. "Ms. Isabel called ahead. If you'll follow me, we've prepared the Azalea Lounge for your use this evening."
I looked at Lou. She raised an eyebrow—the universal expression forI didn't know about this either but I'm not complaining.
We followed him down the hallway, past a set of double doors that opened into a room I hadn't known existed. The Azalea Lounge was small—intimate, really, the kind of private room that hotels kept for guests who wanted to entertainwithout being seen. Soft lighting. Leather chairs. A fireplace that was lit, because Charleston apparently ran its fireplaces in spring, probably because the aesthetic demanded it regardless of the temperature.
And a spread.
The bar was fully stocked—top shelf, the kind of bottles that had age statements and prices that didn't appear on the label because if you had to ask, you couldn't afford it.
