"Romantic."
"I've been told."
He looked at me then, one eyebrow raised, the faintest suggestion of humor in his expression, and I laughed. The sound of it filled his small kitchen and he watched it happen with an expression I was starting to recognize. The look of a man encountering a sound he'd forgotten existed.
The second night, I woke at two in the morning and he wasn't in bed. I found him on the porch, sitting on the steps, looking at the mountains under the moon. I sat beside him. He put his arm around me without speaking. We sat like that for a long time, the cold air on our faces, the warmth of his body along my side, the compound quiet around us.
"I don't sleep much," he said eventually.
"I noticed."
"It's not new. Before you."
"I know." I leaned into him. "But maybe I can help."
The third evening, I joined the brothers for a meal. Angel sat across from us at the long table in the common room, his wife Callie beside him, and he looked at me with the same thorough attention Ghost gave everything, but warmer. Less guarded.
"You're welcome here," he said. Simple, direct. Not a speech. Just the president of the Forsaken Angels telling the Jackals president's daughter that she had a place behind his gates.
After dinner Ghost walked me through the compound. Not a tour, exactly. More the quiet drift of a man sharing the place he lived by letting me see it at my own pace. The workshop where Duke kept his tools in the kind of order that bordered on religion. The garage, bikes lined up in a row, chrome catching the overhead light. The vegetable garden along the south wall that Bree had planted and Evie maintained with the focused energy of a woman who needed living things to tend.
It was bigger than I'd expected. Functional, well-kept, lived-in. Nothing like the Jackals' clubhouse with its rough edges and its aggressive energy. The Jackals' place was built to project power. This place was a home that happened to have a gate around it.
"My father built his clubhouse to intimidate," I said. We were standing by the garden, the evening air cold, his arm around my shoulders. “You guys built your club to last."
He looked at me. "Angel built it. I just made sure nobody burned it down."
On the fourth morning I woke to find him dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at me.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing." A pause. "You sleep with your hand on your stomach."
I looked down. My palm was flat against my skin below my navel.
"It's early," I said. "There's nothing to feel yet, but it’s become a habit I guess.”
"I know."
But his eyes stayed on my hand, and I watched him file the moment away in whatever internal system he used to track the things that mattered. My hand. The morning light. Me, still here.
"I need clothes," I said. "I can't keep wearing your shirts."
"I like you in my shirts."
“Ethan! I’m serious. I just need to go back to my apartment and grab a few things. It won’t take me long.”
“Go on then. Take one of the trucks."
He kissed me before I left. Standing in the doorway of his room, his hand on the back of my neck, a kiss that was unhurried, thorough, the kiss of a man who was learning how to say things with his body that his voice couldn't manage yet. When he pulled back his thumb traced along my jaw and he looked at me with the most visible expression I'd ever seen on him.
"Come back," he said.
“Don’t be silly, Of course I’m coming back."
"I know. I just wanted to say it."
I smiled at him. Touched his face. He turned his head and pressed his lips against my palm, a gesture so tender from a man so guarded that it settled into my chest and stayed.
