Page 92 of Colt
“Let me,” I said.
He exhaled. “Yeah.”
I shed my clothes without breaking eye contact. His jaw tightened.
I took my time, lowering myself down onto him. I set the pace and kept it there, slow and deliberate, watching his face—the way his jaw went slack, the way his hands found my hips and gripped without trying to redirect me. He was giving it over. All of it. The control, the vigilance, the weeks of held tension. Everything he’d been carrying, I was taking it apart piece by piece, and I could feel the exact moment he stopped holding anything back at all.
“Lilac—”
“I’ve got you.” I leaned down and dragged my mouth along his jaw, his throat, the curve of his shoulder—felt him shiver despite the heat of us. His hands tightened on my hips like he was trying to anchor himself to something real. “I’ve got you. I’m right here.”
His eyes found mine and stayed there. That was what he needed—not just the release, not just my body, but to look at something he loved and have it look back. To know he’d made it home.
I held his gaze and kept moving, slow and sure, giving him everything I had until the last of it left him—his head falling back, his whole body going still beneath me with a long exhale that felt like it had been waiting weeks to get out.
Afterward I stayed where I was for a moment, my hands on his chest, feeling his heartbeat slow back down to something human. His fingers traced up my spine—not pulling me anywhere, just touching, like he needed the contact to believe it was real.
I moved to lie beside him. Within a minute his breathing had gone deep and even.
I watched him in the fading light. The stillness was still there—even in sleep, every line of his face had let go of something. Helooked younger. He looked like a man who’d finally been allowed to stop.
Chapter 36
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— Lilac —
The night Colt came back, he slept for fourteen hours.I woke before him in the quiet and lay still beside him, listening to his breathing. Steady. Deep. I could feel the difference. This was a man finally putting something down.
I got up without waking him and found my way to the kitchen. Coffee was already made. Handful had texted at seven—he was taking the boys out on the bikes again, giving us as long as we needed.
I poured a cup and sat at the table in the still of the clubhouse and let myself go quiet in a way I’d been avoiding for a week.
Knox was wrong about memory. He had said once, with his particular six-year-old certainty, that you either remember something or you don’t. He was wrong. Some things come back in pieces. Some pieces are light. Some are heavy. Some you hold for a long time before you’re ready to look at what’s inside.
There was one I still hadn’t touched.
Eight weeks.
I would have known. The fatigue, the specific tenderness, the way certain smells had started to land wrong. I paid attention to my body. I would have bought a test. I would have seen those two lines and stood in our bathroom holding a small plastic stick that meant everything was about to change, and I would have been terrified and excited all at once.
And then I would have gone to tell him.
The memory hit me as I was drinking my coffee. Not a full memory. Just bits and pieces.
A ceiling I didn’t recognize. Bright lights. The particular smell of antiseptic.
I had fainted—I understood that without being told, the same way you understand things in the strange calm that follows your own body going wrong. Someone was moving around me. Cold gel pressed against my stomach. A wand. A screen angled so I could see it.
Two separate flickers. Tiny and fast, like candle flames.
The man reading the screen was Doc French. A Death’s Head brother. He’d patched Colt up after bar fights; I’d seen him at the clubhouse dozens of times. He told me what I was looking at in the steady voice of someone accustomed to delivering news, and I lay there staring at those two heartbeats and thoughtColt isn’t here.
That was the first clear thought. He should have been there for it. He wasn’t.
He was due back from a run. He would go to the clubhouse first.
I was in a car. Evening. The light was going gold and warm through the window, and I was buzzing with it—two heartbeats inside me, news too large to hold alone, the specific joy of someone running toward the one person they need to tell first.
