But he didn’t pull away.
Instead, he leaned down and kissed me again. This time, it was different. His brush of lips was soft, slow, almost questioning, completely opposite to the furious passion of moments before. He ran his mouth gently across my jaw, his scruff a pleasant, tingling abrasion, then down to the sensitive skin of my neck, to the hollow of my collarbone. Every movement was tender. A reassurance.
This tenderness, this simple act of staying, was almost more shocking and more intimate than the frantic passion that had preceded it. Hope, fragile and beautiful, bloomed in my chest. Bolstered by his unexpected gentleness, I found my voice.
“Stay tonight,” I whispered in his ear. “With me.”
He pulled back enough to look at me, his eyes dark, still unreadable. But the frantic, panicked energy was gone, replaced by something deeper and more thoughtful. After a long moment that stretched into an eternity, he gave a single, steady nod.
After we gathered our clothes, I reached for his hand and led him from the dusty, chaotic demolition of the Magnolia Suite, down the hall to my bedroom—a temporary island of relative order amidst the glorious mess of Heron House. We fell together onto my bed, and its clean sheets were a soft, welcoming haven.
He pulled me against him, his lips finding mine again in the semi-darkness of my bedroom. His kiss was softer now, a question asked without words. I answered by melting into him, my body boneless and sated. We didn’t speak. There were no words for what had just happened inthat dusty, deconstructed room. No easy labels for the raw, messy, undeniable thing that had exploded between us.
All I knew was that the silence that had so often felt vast and lonely was now different. And as I drifted off to sleep, curled against the warm, solid reality of Austin Coleridge, Heron House didn’t feel quite so daunting anymore.
Chapter Sixteen
AUSTIN
I'd beenawake for at least five minutes, listening to the unfamiliar creaks of this old house. Listening to the soft, even rhythm of Iris breathing beside me. The light in the room was a soft, hazy gray filtering through an unfamiliar window, not the sharp stripes of sunlight that usually cut across my bedroom floor.
I was in her bed. In Heron House.
The fact registered with a dull, heavy certainty, not the sharp panic I would have expected. I turned my head on the pillow. She was a mess of blonde hair and bare shoulders, smelling of sleep and cinnamon. The woman who had bulldozed her way into my life was now curled up in the middle of it.
Iris let out a soft, contented sigh in her sleep. One small hand, which had been resting on the mattress between us, flopped over to land right on the center of my bare chest.
And I froze.
I lay there, rigid, the warmth of her hand a five-pointed brand against my skin, and I waited. Waited for the usual panic to set in, the claustrophobic sensation of walls closing in, the desperate need to escape back to my solitary space where everything was under my control.
But it didn’t come.
Instead, there was calm. Not just in the room, but inside my head. The relentless energy and frustration that had been my unwelcome companions for weeks—the very things that had driven me across the yard and up her stairs yesterday like a man possessed—were gone. It was like a massive pressure valve, one I hadn’t even realized was tightened to the absolute breaking point, had been released in the raw, frantic honesty of last night.
The world hadn’t ended. The sky wasn’t falling. It was just morning.
And I didn’t want to leave.
The realization was as shocking, as disorienting, as our first kiss had been. It was a foreign concept, an alien emotion, and it threw me.
Iris’s eyes fluttered open, the blue hazy and dark with sleep. They landed on me, and for a long moment, there was sleepy recognition and the slow processing of the reality of me, here, in her bed. Then awareness dawned, and a faint, self-conscious blush crept over her face, coloring her cheeks a delicate shade of rose. She looked young, vulnerable, and so devastatingly beautiful in the soft morning light that it made my chest ache.
I cleared my throat, the sound jarring.
Say something, you idiot. Anything other than ‘I need to go check my crab traps.’ Don’t be the asshole you usually are.
“Morning,” I managed.
Her lips curved into a tentative, shy smile. “Hi.” Her voice was soft and husky. “You… you stayed.”
It was both a statement of surprised fact and aquestion filled with a fragile, tentative hope that I felt all the way down to my bones.
“Seemed like the thing to do,” I mumbled, the heat rising in my face.
She propped herself up on an elbow, the sheet slipping down to reveal the graceful swell of her breast. “Did it now? I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for… you know. Post-conflagration snuggling.”
The words, so ridiculously formal and yet so accurate for what had happened between us, had me fighting a smile. “Don’t think there is one.”
