Page 119 of Breaking His Exile

Rainey reached for his face. Her palm cupped his jaw, her thumb tracing the line of his cheekbone where the beard grew in rough. He leaned into the touch. His eyes closed. Just for a second.

“Staying is not a promise that nothing bad will happen,” she said. “It’s a promise that we’ll face whatever happens without abandoning each other first. That’s the only promise that matters.”

His hand came up. Covered hers. His skin was warm. His fingers trembled, just slightly, and she wondered if he knew she could feel it.

“I’m staying at Valor Ridge,” she said. “Long enough to rebuild things with River. Long enough to remember what it feels like to have a brother who shows up.” She stepped closer. Their breath mingled in the narrow space between them. “I also want the mountain. The cabin. My music. Tilly. Sable.” Her free hand found his chest, flat against the gray henley where his heartbeat jumped beneath her palm. “You. I’m not choosing between pieces of the life I want because you believe wanting too much is dangerous.”

Something broke in his expression. Not dramatically. Quietly. The way ice gives when the thaw comes—not with a crack but with a slow, surrendering sigh.

He kissed her.

Slow. Careful of her split lip. His hands came to her waist, light, holding her like something he was afraid to grip too hard. She felt the restraint in him—the constant, habitual restraint—and she kissed him back until it began to dissolve.

They undressed each other without hurry. His cracked ribs, her bruised temple, the zip tie marks on her wrists, the stitch line on his side—they navigated around the damage with a tenderness that felt like its own language. He touched her the way he touched Sable’s leg. The way he handled things that mattered. With patience. With hands that knew how to be gentle even when the rest of him had forgotten.

She told him what she wanted. Explicit. Unembarrassed. His breath caught. He did the same, his voice rough against her neck, and the honesty of it—him asking, him receiving, him letting her give him pleasure without turning it into debt or punishment—was more intimate than anything that had come before.

Afterward, she expected him to move. To get up. To find some useful task that would put distance between his body and the vulnerability of lying still. It was what he did. What he’d always done.

He stayed.

His weight settled beside her on the narrow guest bed, his good arm beneath her shoulders, her head tucked against his chest where she could hear his heartbeat slowing into something deep and steady. Tilly had followed them in at some point—violating every rule Evander had ever tried to teach her—and now lay across their feet with a sigh of canine satisfaction. The room held them. Warm. Quiet. The window showed a slice of dark sky and the distant black shapes of mountains.

Rainey traced the line of his collarbone with her fingertip. Felt the ridge of old scar tissue beneath his skin. The cigarette burns on his forearm. The map of a life written in damage he’d chosen and damage he hadn’t.

“Where do you want to wake up tomorrow?” she asked.

He was quiet for so long she thought he might not answer. His breathing had gone deep. His hand rested on her hip, warm through the thin cotton of the borrowed shirt she wore.

“Here,” he said.

The word landed. Not the cabin. Not the mountain. Not Valor Ridge or any particular patch of ground. Here. Beside her. In a bed he had chosen to share instead of a floor he had chosen to endure.

She pressed her lips to the hollow of his throat where his pulse beat steady against her mouth, and held him while the night settled around them, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, Rainey Beckett did not wonder whether the man beside her would be gone by morning.

thirty-five

He woke to warmth and didn’t move.

The bed held them. Rainey’s back pressed against his chest, her hair a pale tangle across the pillow, one of her hands curled loose around his wrist where it rested against her ribs. Morning light filled the room in a thin gold wash. Outside, a dog barked—Cowboy, probably, Walker’s old man greeting the day with his usual enthusiasm. Somewhere beyond the window, an engine turned over. X’s voice carried across the yard, singing something in Spanish that Troubadour was probably dancing to.

Evander stayed where he was.

His ribs ached. The stitches in his side pulled when he breathed. The concussion Bear had warned him about had settled into a dull pressure behind his eyes that came and went with his pulse. None of it mattered. What mattered was the weight of Rainey against him and the fact that he had not, for the first time in eight years, left a bed before the person in it woke up.

Tilly lay on the floor beside the bed, her massive head on her paws, watching him with the particular judgment only a Cane Corso could deliver. She’d gotten down sometime in the night. Evander hadn’t noticed. He’d been too busy not moving.

Rainey stirred. Her breathing changed. She turned into him, her face pressing against his chest, and her eyes opened.

She found him there. Her mouth curved. “You stayed.”

“I stayed.”

Her palm spread flat against his sternum. “How do the ribs feel?”

“Fine.”

“Liar.”