Page 22 of Working For Her Second Chance

Afterward. Dark. His arm across my waist, heavy with sleep he's fighting. His hand finds the freckles on my shoulder and traces them one by one, connecting dots only he can see.

My forehead against his chest. His heartbeat steady under my ear. The roughness of his hands against my back.

Hitch scratches at the back door. River gets up—the loss of his warmth instant and unkind—and lets the dog in. Hitch pads into the bedroom and settles at the foot of the bed with a contented sigh, and the absolute normalcy of it—the dog, the moonlight, the man climbing back into bed and pulling the quilt over both of us—makes my eyes burn.

I press closer. His arm tightens. My lips against his collarbone.

"River?"

"Hmm."

"I'm sorry I left without saying goodbye."

His arm goes still. Then tightens. His mouth against my hair. When he speaks, his voice is rough with sleep and something deeper.

"You're here now."

Sleep comes in layers. His breathing slowing. His arm growing heavy across my waist. The low hum of the road outside, steady and constant as the man beside me.

The last thing I feel before the dark takes me is his mouth against my hair. And a word—so quiet it might be imagined, so honest it can't be.

Stay.

The first time he said it, I was eighteen in a field. I said "I will." I lied.

This time, I don't answer. I press my face against his chest and breathe him in and let the word sit between us like a live wire—beautiful, dangerous, carrying enough current to light a town or burn it down.

And I don't leave before dawn.

Chapter 8

River

Dawn comes at 5:04. My body is a clock that doesn't have a snooze button, and the light shifting behind the curtain triggers the same response it has every morning for fifteen years: awake. Fully. Immediately.

The difference is that Macy Sinclair is in my bed.

She's on the pillow beside mine, curled on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek. Her hair is loose across the pillowcase. The freckles on her bare shoulder stand out in the gray dawn, and the quilt has slipped to her waist, and the line of her spine in the early light is the most beautiful thing in this house, and this house has my father's maps and a 1972 Triumph Bonneville.

I don't move. Don't reach for her. Don't touch the hair falling across her jaw.

Because the last time I fell asleep with Macy Sinclair, I woke up to cold sheets and a silence where her breathing should have been. Twelve years ago. This bed. This pillow. The same low hum outside the same window. I reached for her and my hand found nothing, and the nothing was so loud it rewired something in my chest that I've never fully repaired.

My hand is halfway to her shoulder before I catch it. The instinct is animal—touch her, make sure she's solid, make surethe warmth is real and not a memory dressed up as a dream. My fingers stop an inch from her freckles. Curl back.

She's here. She's breathing. She didn't leave before dawn.

The relief of that is so sharp it's almost pain.

Hitch is at the foot of the bed. He lifts his head and gives me a look that translates to: She's still here. I've been monitoring the situation. You may proceed.

His tail thumps once. Smug.

I ease out of bed one inch at a time, feet finding the cold floor, weight shifting slow enough that the mattress barely moves. She stirs. Doesn't wake. I pull on jeans and a t-shirt and close the bedroom door behind me carefully, like I'm defusing a bomb.

Coffee. The machine does its diesel impression while the kitchen tells a story in evidence. Her boots by the door. Her keys on the counter. The green dress draped over the back of a chair like a flag. I drop two slices of bread in the toaster and pour the first mug.

The porch is cold. Ridge turning from ash to rose. Power lines running east, catching the first light. My father's lines.