She rises on one elbow and looks at me---really looks---with an expression that's stripped of sarcasm and defense and all the armor she wears so well. Underneath is the woman who writes love stories because she believes in them, even when she's afraid to.
"Don't let me run tomorrow," she whispers. "I'm going to want to. It's what I do. But don't let me."
"I won't."
Her breathing slows against my chest. Outside, the last of Helena scrapes along the coast, dragging its wreckage east.
Tomorrow the roads open. Tomorrow she drives back to Charleston with a manuscript that has my face in it.
I tighten my arm around her. She murmurs something---a character's name, or mine---and presses closer.
Chapter 11
Kassidy
Don't let me run, I told him.
I'm running.
Morning arrives like a spotlight on a crime scene, and the first thing I see when I open my eyes is Tucker Brennan's chest—bare, warm, rising and falling with the deep rhythm of someone who sleeps like the dead. My head is on his shoulder. My hand rests on his ribs. Our legs are tangled in sheets that smell like last night, and the intimacy of the position is so complete, so domestic, that panic explodes in my stomach like a flashbang.
What have I done?
The mental inventory begins before I'm fully awake. Facts first, feelings later—that's the Kassidy Monroe emotional processing protocol.
Fact: I slept with Tucker Brennan. Fact: It was transcendent. Fact: He is a man I've known for five days who lives a different life in a different world and who, by the end of today, will be driving back to wherever Salt & Steel is headquartered while I drive back to my apartment in Charleston with a half-finished manuscript and a full-blown identity crisis.
Fact: I told him not to let me run, and now every cell in my body is screaming at me to grab my suitcase and sprint.
I extract myself from the bed with the careful precision of a bomb technician. Slide my leg free. Lift his arm. Roll to the edge of the mattress and stand without breathing. Tucker doesn't stir. He sleeps like a man accustomed to grabbing rest in hostile conditions—deep, complete, efficient.
In the bathroom, I grip the sink and stare at my reflection. My hair is a catastrophe. My mascara has migrated south. There's a mark on my collarbone—faint, tender—that makes my stomach flip with equal parts arousal and alarm.
"Get it together," I whisper to the mirror. "You are a grown woman. You can handle this."
The mirror doesn't look convinced.
By the time Tucker wakes, I'm dressed, packed, and sitting at the desk with my laptop open, performing a very convincing impression of a woman who did not spend the last forty minutes spiraling. I've brushed my hair, applied fresh makeup, and arranged my expression into something I hope reads as composed and breezy rather than on the verge of a psychological event.
"Morning." His voice is rough with sleep, and the sound of it sends a pulse of warmth through me that I ruthlessly suppress.
"Morning. Roads are open. Renee texted—the group is heading back to Hargrove House to collect our cars, and then everyone's free to go."
He sits up. The sheet falls to his waist, and the sight of him—rumpled, golden in the morning light, watching me with those steady green eyes—is so unfairly beautiful that I have to look at my laptop screen to survive it.
"You're packed," he says.
"I'm an efficient packer."
"You were packed when I was still asleep."
"I'm a very efficient packer."
A beat. He reads the room the way he reads everything—carefully, completely, with an attention to detail that misses nothing.
"Kassidy."
"Hmm?" Eyes on the screen. Typing nothing. The cursor blinks in an empty document like a tiny, judgmental metronome.
