Page 42 of Heat Unscripted

The certainty, right down in the cells, that this skin was meant to be under my hands, landing at the exact moment I realized I had no idea what to do with that. No framework. No protocol. No plan that told me how to steady a person without managing her.

I thought about last night. Her hand in mine. The scents merging. The agreement.

Partnership. Not possession. Chosen every day.

I’d said it out loud. I knew I’d need to learn the difference in practice, and like I told them, I knew I would get it wrong.

I was getting it wrong now. I could feel it. The calls, the breakfast, the tidy little productivity that kept me moving in any direction that wasn’t toward her. Cillian had noticed it. Tuck noticed it the second he came down. Isobel, if she was awake enough to read a room, would notice it too.

And over my head, the sound of two people who weren’t afraid of what they felt kept coming through the ceiling.

I stood up.

My coat was upstairs, round her. My vest hung off the back of a kitchen chair. I was standing in a stranger’s sitting room in my shirtsleeves, untucked, creased, nowhere near the version of myself I put in front of people. I looked, I suspected, like I hadn’t slept. Which was accurate. The hours at the kitchen table with Cillian, going through legal exposure and crisis lines while herscent came down the stairs like something poured, hadn’t been rest.

I needed to leave.

The thought arrived cleanly, the way a conclusion arrived when I’d actually done the work. I wasn’t functioning in a way that helped anyone. My being here wasn’t moving her recovery forward. The thing I couldn’t do, go up those stairs and cross the gap the way Tuck had crossed it, all his feeling laid out flat with no hedge on it, wasn’t something I could solve by standing in her front room making phone calls.

I needed room. Not from her, not from what I’d agreed to. From the pressure of being this close to something I hadn’t learned to hold yet without either crushing it or getting crushed.

I went back into the kitchen. Cillian was still at the table, tablet in hand, the morning light catching the silver in his ear and the sound-wave ink down his forearms.

He looked up. Read me. Said nothing.

“I need a few hours,” I said.

His face didn’t move. The dark eyes just held mine, taking whatever my scent and my posture were putting out, filing it with the same quiet care he gave everything.

“Okay,” he said.

“I’m not—” I stopped. Started again. The sentence I’d been building, I’m not leaving, felt both true and not enough. “I’m not going far.”

“Okay,” he said again. And then, after a beat, picking the words the way he picked where to set a mic, “She’ll understand.”

I didn’t ask how he knew. I didn’t ask whether Tuck would understand. I picked up my phone, patted my pockets for the wallet that was in the coat that was round Isobel, found nothing, and stood there with no way to buy so much as a coffee.

Cillian reached into his jacket without looking up. Pulled out a card. Set it on the table between us.

“Pay me back whenever,” he said.

I took it. The taking cost me something I couldn’t name. Not pride exactly. More the discomfort of needing something from someone in a situation I hadn’t planned.

“Thank you.”

“Text when you’re ready to come back. I’ll let them know.”

I went to the front door and put on my shoes, the polished oxfords that looked ridiculous without the rest of it, without the coat and the vest and all the careful presentation that told people who I was. I stood in her hallway with her scent going into my shirt and Tuck’s rumble still carrying faintly through the house, and I let myself say it, just for a second. I was afraid.

Not of her. Not of the bond. Not of the match Cillian had confirmed with the flat certainty of verified data.

Of wanting something I couldn’t control.

I’d built a whole life around control. Frameworks, hierarchies, every variable managed. I ran campaigns like a man who’d mapped every outcome in advance. I ran production meetings without one second of improvisation. I’d set up my flat for solitude, for focus, for the quiet of a head that worked best when nothing got in.

What I felt for Isobel Gretan got in everywhere.

It didn’t sit inside a hierarchy. It didn’t answer to management. It wasn’t a variable I could map or a beat I could script or a transition I could rehearse until it ran clean.