Page 79 of Presumed Dead

He looked at her in the dark and felt the weight of what he was holding press up under his sternum where her hand was, and he was grateful she couldn't read the thing through her palm the way she seemed able to read everything else through it, because if she could, she'd have felt it kick.

“You keep doing that,” he said. “Giving me room I didn't ask for.”

“You gave me a board that got to just be a board. I'm returning the favor.” Her thumb went still. “Go to sleep, Ethan. The wind's going to do what it does whether we watch it or not.”

She tucked herself in against him, her back to his chest, and pulled his arm over her, and he lay there with her breathing going slow and even against him and the storm working the inlet outside and the thing he was holding lying quiet in him for once, not gone, never gone, but quiet, outvoted for one night by the woman asleep in his arms.

He stayed awake a while listening to the rain. He'd promised her no exit, and he'd meant it, and he understood now that meaning it was going to cost more than the exit ever would have. When the reckoning came, and it was coming inside the week, she'd have this night to set against it. So would he. He held onto that, and the warmth of her, and somewhere in the small hours, with the storm still leaning on the house, he slept too.

Chapter Sixteen

Sloane woke to the weight of an arm across her waist and lay still for a while pretending she hadn't, because the pretending let her keep it a little longer.

The rain had settled overnight into the steady drone the forecast had promised, no longer throwing itself at the windows but leaning on the house in a low, continuous push that meant the front had come ashore proper and meant to stay through the day. Gray light came around the edge of the curtain. Behind her, Ethan slept the way she'd learned in one night that he slept, heavy and quiet and completely, a man who'd clearly taught himself somewhere to take rest where he could get it and not waste it being shallow about it.

His breath moved against the back of her neck. His arm was a warm bar across her, his hand loose and open on the mattress in front of her, and she looked at that open hand in the gray light, at the small white scar across the second knuckle she'd noticed the first morning and pretended not to, and let herself understand that she'd done it. She'd reached for the thing with both hands, and it hadn't dropped her. He was here. The kitchen, the storm, the carrying her down the hall, all of it had happened, and she didn't regret a second of it, and the not-regretting was a sensation so unfamiliar she had to lie there a minute and get used to the feel of it.

She shifted to turn over, and his arm tightened before he was even awake, a reflex, drawing her back, and then she felt him surface, felt the breath change against her neck.

“Don't go anywhere,” he said, his voice rough with sleep. “Marina can wait ten minutes.”

“The marina is underwater, and so are you if you think I keep this schedule for fun.” But she didn't move, and he knew she didn't mean it, and she felt him smile against her shoulder.

“Ten minutes.”

“Five.”

“Eight.”

“You can't negotiate a number that's already going down; that's not how numbers work.” She rolled over to face him and found him watching her, his eyes soft and unguarded in a way she hadn't seen them before, the brown of them dark in the gray light and the green fleck in the right one catching what there was. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“You stayed.” She hadn't meant it as a question, and it came out partly as one anyway.

“I stayed.” He brought a hand up and pushed her hair back off her face, slow, like he had the time. “I'm not a man who leaves at four in the morning, Sloane. Whatever else I am, I'm not that.”

She caught the small flick at the edge of it, the whatever else I am, the door he left open a crack and didn't walk through, and she chose, the way she'd chosen at dinner, not to push it open for him. He'd given her a board that got to be a board. She could give him a morning that got to be a morning.

“Good,” she said, and kissed him, and the eight minutes turned into closer to twenty, and the marina was fine.

They drank coffee standing in her kitchen with the rain running down the glass, and it should have been strange, a man she'd known a short time filling her doorway in yesterday's shirt with a mug she'd pulled from the cabinet without asking which one he wanted, and it wasn't strange at all, and the lack of strangeness was the strangest part.

“I'll follow you in,” he said. “Separate trucks. Your lot's going to be empty in this, but Catherine's eyes work fine, and Margo will have us married off by Thursday if we roll in together.”

“Margo has us married off already. She put two forks in my salad bag yesterday.”

“Two forks.” He considered it over the rim of the mug. “That's a woman making a statement.”

“That's a woman who's been my best friend for a long time, and can read me like the tide chart.” She rinsed her mug and set it in the rack where his plate had dried the night before. “She's going to ask me. Today, probably. She'll come down with cookies and that face she does.”

“What'll you tell her?”

She thought about it, drying her hands on the towel he'd used. “The true part I'm allowed to tell. That I like you. That I stopped being careful. She won't need the rest, and she won't ask for the rest, because Margo knows where the edges of a thing are without anybody drawing them.” She hung the towel. “She's better at that than people give her credit for.”

He went quiet at that, and she watched something pass behind his eyes that she couldn't name, gone before she could ask, and she understood it was one of the things that lived in the locked part of him, and she let it go where the other things went.

His phone buzzed on the counter. He glanced at it, and she watched him read whatever it was, and she watched his face do the thing it did when the work walked into the room, a settling, a flattening, the soft morning man folding himself away and the other one coming forward. He typed a short answer and set the phone face-down.