I looked at them.
Then I picked up the truck keys from the bowl by the door.
I pulled up at her curb at seven and she was already coming out her door.
She didn't wait up top for me to come and fetch her. I was barely out of the truck before she was down the steps and up the path to meet me — jeans, a pink sweater, boots — moving quick, then catching herself and slowing, like she'd remembered halfway that she was supposed to make me work for it. She was smiling — trying not to and not winning — shy with the whole thing, her eyes coming up to my face and skating off the side of it and coming back.
I met her on the path and stopped a foot short.
"Hi," she said. Small.
"Hi." And then I quit pretending I wasn't looking, and I took my fill of her. All of it. Thirteen years of training a face not to do what it wants, and I let it do exactly what it wanted, because she'd earned the truth of being looked at by a man who meant it.
It knocked the words clean out of me. Whatever I'd lined up to say on the drive over was just gone, and my hand had started toward her before I'd told it to. I caught it, left it at my side — the want to reach for her sitting live under my sternum — and stood there and let her see me looking, if not the rest of it.
"You look perfect." I let it sit a beat. "You are perfect. Beautiful."
The color came up out of the collar of that pink sweater and went all the way to her hairline, and she had nowhere on her to put any of it — the same way the coffee had landed.
I came up the path to her, took her hand, and walked her to the truck. It sits high, and she's not tall, and there was a half-second where she eyed the cab and did the arithmetic and came up short — so I put both hands at her waist and lifted her up into it. Her waist is a small thing; my hands went near the whole way around it. She smelled of warm skin and lavender, that close, and somewhere in the lift she made a little startled squeak — the most undignified, least guarded sound I'd had out of her yet — and I got her settled and shut the door fast, before she saw what it did to me.
"Where are we going?" she said as I got in.
"It's a surprise."
"I don't love a surprise."
"I know." I put the truck in gear and checked the road before I pulled out — old habit, and tonight the truest thing I had to give her: look first, so she doesn't have to. "You'll love this one."
I felt her clock it the second we turned in off the county road — the low cedar building, the lit sign, the gravel lot — felt her come up off the seat-back an inch.
"You did not."
"Did I get it wrong?"
"This is — " She had a hand flat to the window. "My family brought me here for my thirtieth. The whole loud lot of them." She turned and looked at me, and there was nothing held back on her face, nothing kept in reserve — just the whole of it, open, the way it goes when a thing catches you before you can dress for it. "How did you — you couldn't have known that."
"I didn't." And I hadn't — I'd booked the best place in forty miles for a woman who needed quiet and walked her straight into the one restaurant that already held the best night of her year, and I couldn't take credit for a thing in it but the luck. "It's the best steakhouse around," I said. "I wanted the best for you."
"You picked it," she said, and shook her head at the windscreen, and the not-quite-laugh came out of her, catching her off guard.
I came around and got her door before she'd finished reaching for it, and as we crossed the gravel I laid my hand flat at the small of her back — and felt the breath go into her, felt her not step clear of it. I'd put myself between her and the dark of the lot without a word, and she let me. I knew enough of her by now to know that wasn't a small thing to allow.
The maître d' had us seated before she'd got her bearings — back corner, near the booth if not in it — and I took the chair that put my back to the wall and the room in front of me, out of a habit I'd stopped apologizing for, and watched her settle across from me in the candlelight.
She lit up telling me about her birthday. Her whole face went — the careful set of her mouth gave out, her eyes creased at the corners, and there was a flash of teeth and something crookedand unguarded under it, the smile reaching all the way up before she could think to ration it. I'd watched her hand that exact smile across a trauma bay to Tuck. She'd never once handed it to me. Now it was pointed straight at me, and I had to remind myself to keep breathing. The Blackwoods weren't blood, she said; they'd taken her and her brother in when she was a girl and made them their own, and kept choosing them for eighteen years. An aunt who cried at everything and fed everybody twice. A brother who worried at her like it was a salaried position. Sunday dinners that ran clean off the rails by the second course.
“What about you?” she said. “You’ve had my whole circus. You don’t talk about yours.”
“Not much to tell.” I turned her hand over in mine, ran my thumb along the inside of her wrist. “After my thirteen years in the navy, I came back home. To my father. The shop. The men I work with, the MC. They’re my family. Brothers, near enough. Rough as you like — you’d cross the road if you saw them coming — and there isn’t one of them I wouldn’t step in front of. We came up together. They’re the reason coming home was coming home.”
Something soft and a little wistful moved over her face — a woman who knew to the cent what it was worth to have people who were yours by choosing. “That sounds like a good thing to come home to.”
“It is,” I said, and meant it. The Iron Saints MC had saved me.
Somehow, the booths, the low music, the kid clearing plates, all faded away until there was only a table with two glasses and her, her hand coming and going from mine as she talked, and the candlelight pooling warm along her cheekbone, soft on a face that had no armor on it to begin with.
She was all warmth and quick hands and that mouth that hid nothing, lit from somewhere inside the more she forgot to guardit. I sat there and let it knock the wind clean out of me and didn’t trouble to hide that either.
