Chapter 3

AURORA

Kieran didn't take me home.

I didn't ask him to. I couldn't form a sentence long enough to tell him where home even was. The rain was coming down so hard the wipers couldn't keep up, and I was shaking so violently that my teeth kept knocking together.

He spoke quietly into his phone. By the time we pulled around to the front of the estate, a different woman in a different apron was waiting with a key.

The suite she led us to was on the far side of the inn. Fireplace. Deep couch. Thick cream rug. A wall of French doors that showed the rain hammering the garden outside. The kind of room that was built for honeymoons and anniversaries and the sort of memories I was never going to make with my husband again.

I walked to the couch. Sat down. Didn't move.

My blouse was still clinging to my skin. My jeans were painting a dark stain into the cushion. I didn't care. I stared at the stone fireplace and let something inside my chest break and re-break and break again in the same tender spot.

Kieran moved around behind me. I heard him light the fire. I heard him speak low to someone on his phone. I heard the clink of a kettle.

He set a cup of tea on the low table in front of me. Steam curled off it.

"Drink."

I didn't argue. I lifted it with both hands because one wasn't steady enough. The heat soaked into my palms and I held on like it was the only solid thing in the room.

I cried without any sound at all. Just tears sliding down my face one after the other no matter how often I wiped them. The kind of crying that doesn't need permission and doesn't stop when you tell it to.

Kieran sat down beside me. Not touching me. Just there.

Minutes passed. Maybe an hour. I lost track.

My shivering was getting worse, not better. The fire was going. The heat was in my hands. But the cold had sunk itself into my ribs on that lawn and it wasn't planning on leaving.

"Come here," Kieran said.

Not a command. Not a question. Just something certain.

I leaned into him before I thought about it. His arm came around my shoulders and pulled me into the warmth of his side. He was dry. He was solid. He smelled like cedar and rain and something darker underneath, something expensive and clean.

I cried a little more.

He didn't shush me. He didn't tell me it was going to be okay. He didn't lie to make me feel better. He just held me and let me be a mess and somehow that was the kindest thing a stranger had ever done for me.

I don't remember closing my eyes.

---

Morning showed up grey and quiet.

I woke up on the couch under a cashmere throw that hadn't been there when I fell asleep. The fire had burned down to embers. The rain had thinned to a steady drip against the French doors.

I sat up slowly. My neck ached. My head ached. Everything ached.

No Kieran. The bedroom door was ajar. I could see the corner of a made bed through it.

I remembered falling asleep against his shoulder. I remembered the slow rise and fall of his chest under my cheek. I shoved the memory into a locked drawer in my head and reached for my phone.

I would call a car. Go home. Decide what came next somewhere that wasn't here.

I was still staring at a dead screen when the suite door opened and Kieran walked in carrying two paper bags.

I blinked at him.

"There's a market in the village." He set the bags on the counter without making it a thing. "Go clean up. Breakfast will be here in twenty minutes. I'll drop you home after I shower."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. "You didn't need to do all that."

"I know."

He said it like it genuinely was that simple, and something behind my ribs squeezed in a way I wasn't braced for.

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded at the bags. "Go on."

---

The toiletries inside were nicer than anything I owned. I stood under the shower until my skin went pink and tried very hard to think about absolutely nothing.

I failed.

Rhett's face kept coming back. The way he had held my sister. The way his hand had known the shape of her hip. The way he had laughed in the rain while I stood in the hedge like a ghost at my own funeral.

I pressed my forehead to the cold tile and breathed through my teeth until the worst of it passed.

When I finally stepped out, I reached for the clothes Kieran had bought.

I unfolded them and let out a short, startled laugh. The first laugh in two days. It cracked out of me and surprised me so much I almost cried again.

The leggings were a size too small. The top was a cropped tank, soft grey, meant to sit snug on a woman built on a much more delicate frame than mine.

I pulled them on anyway. I was going home. It didn't matter.

I walked out of the bedroom tugging at the hem of the tank.

Kieran was at the counter pouring coffee. He turned. His eyes did one quick sweep of me, up then down then back to my face, and then away.

He cleared his throat.

"That was all they had," he said. His voice was perfectly flat.

"It's fine. I'm leaving in an hour."

A dry edge of a smile touched his mouth. "I bought them based on Noelle's measurements."

The name dropped between us and sucked all the air out of the room.

"Of course you did," I said quietly.

He turned back to the coffee like he wished he could take it back. "Eat. Please. I'll be fast."

He disappeared into the bedroom and the shower started up a minute later.

I sat at the small table where a tray of pastries, fruit, and eggs had appeared while I was in the bathroom. I pushed a strawberry around my plate.

My mind kept dragging me back to the lawn. Rhett's hand under her dress. The way she had tipped her face up to him. The way she had laughed, bright and wild, like a woman who had been given the best gift of her life.

They were still here. In this same inn. Two wings away. Probably tangled up in a bed right now, warm and smug and completely sure they had gotten away with everything.

The bedroom door opened.

I turned.

I shouldn't have.

Kieran walked out in a white towel knotted low on his hips. He had clearly left his shirt on the back of the couch and he was headed for it without any apparent self-consciousness, still damp from the shower.

I had not planned to look.

I looked.

He was carved. Shoulders wide enough to block a doorway. A chest that drew the eye to the ridges of his stomach whether you wanted it to or not. A low cut of muscle at his hips that disappeared into the towel in a way that made my mouth go dry around my coffee.

A thought came out of nowhere, uninvited and unkind.

Noelle Vale, you absolute fool.

This was the man who was waiting in your bed every night. And you chose my husband?

Kieran grabbed his shirt off the couch and turned back toward the bedroom. I dropped my eyes to my plate like a woman caught stealing.

"Noelle," I said before I could stop myself.

He paused.

I kept my eyes on my eggs. "What do you think they're doing right now?"

A beat of quiet. I heard him turn. When I looked up, he was leaning in the doorframe with the shirt bunched in one hand, watching me with an expression I couldn't read.

"Sleeping in," he said. "Ordering room service in bed. Enjoying themselves."

I nodded slowly. "We were good to them."

"Yes."

"We were really good to them." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "And they still did this."

He let out a long breath through his nose. "I know."

Outside the French doors the drizzle kept falling. The fire had gone out completely. Inside me, something that had been quietly cracking for twelve hours finally broke clean through.

I laughed. Short. Without any joy in it at all.

"Maybe we should give them a taste of it."

The quiet stretched.

I could feel him looking at me. I kept my gaze on the window.

"You're joking," he said.

I turned my head and met his eyes.

"Am I?"

He held my gaze. Something behind his face shifted. He didn't look shocked. He looked like a man turning a weapon over in his hands, testing its weight.

"What if we weren't?" he said quietly.