The scent of the room had deepened. Mine, still, the heavy sweetened floral of it, and underneath it the warm outdoor smell of Cole at my side, the faint char of gunpowder that arrived with Wade, and the dark sweetness of black orchid that I had learned to identify without looking. The layers of it sat heavy in the air and I breathed them in on the crest of a wave and let the wave do what it did.
Wade appeared in the doorway with a cloth in his hand.
He moved across the room without announcement, the specific quiet of a man who had made a decision and was acting on it, and he reached behind me and pressed the cloth to the back of my neck. It was damp and cool, faintly scented with something cedar-clean that I recognized from his coat, and the cold of it against my skin was so immediate and exact that I tipped my head forward on instinct, the back of my neck fully open to it. The world, which had been tilting at its edges, steadied. I closed my eyes and breathed and let the cloth do its work.
Rhett sat down to my left.
His shoulder came against mine and he did not do anything about the contact, just let it exist, his warmth a separate and steadying thing alongside the heat still moving through me. He began to speak in a low voice, not quite words at first, just a sound that ran beneath his breath and kept the same unhurried rhythm as my own breathing. A murmur that asked nothing of me. His fingers found the strands of hair that had fallen forward against my face and he lifted them back, one at a time, with the light precision of a person who had decided what they were doing was not a gesture but a practical act, and who did not make more of it than that. His voice kept going, low and steady, and I felt the spiral that had been tightening at the center of my chest begin to loosen its hold.
Cole had moved to the floor.
He had dropped to his knees at my feet without my noticing the movement, and now both of my hands were in his, my fingers loose inside his grip, his thumbs moving in small, unhurried circles across my knuckles. The warmth of his palms was different from the warmth of the cloth, this was a livingwarmth, person to person, and it went through my hands and up into my wrists and I sat there and felt it.
I lifted my eyes to his and allowed my body to take charge.
Chapter Fourteen - Lila
Cole was watching me. His jaw was still held, still carrying that particular controlled quality, but his eyes were soft at the edges in a way that had nothing to do with control.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said.
My voice came out low, the way things came out low when I was being honest about something I had not prepared to be honest about. I meant the heat. I meant all of it. I meant being this far into pregnancy and having this happen and being in this room with these three men who were all holding something back at great effort and also holding me, and not knowing where the correct line was between what I needed and what I was allowed to ask for and whether those were even the same thing.
Cole’s thumbs paused in their circles.
“You don’t have to,” he said.
Three words, plain and certain, with the quality he had when he meant something completely and had no interest in dressing it up. He held my gaze and I held his, and then he lifted my hands, both of them, together, and pressed his lips to my knuckles.
The sound that came out of me was not the composed, managed sound of a woman who had things handled. It was short and involuntary, the sound of something reaching its limit, and it sat in the quiet room without apology. Cole’s lips were warm against my knuckles, and then against the thin skin of my wrist, the pulse beating under them hard and fast, and then he moved to the inside of my elbow. Each kiss was slower than the one before. Deliberate. He was not rushing anywhere. He was going exactly as slow as the pace he had decided on, and I sat there with my forearm cradled in both his hands and my breathheld entirely still, the way breath went still when something was happening that you were afraid to interrupt.
Rhett’s mouth found the curve of my shoulder.
He moved from my shoulder to the side of my neck, unhurried and certain, and I felt his lips at the particular tender skin below my ear, the specific warmth of his mouth there, the dark sweetness of his scent close, and I turned into him without deciding to. Not a collapse. A turning, the way a plant turned toward a window. My body went toward him and I did not stop it, and his arm came around my lower back with the care of a man who knew exactly what he was holding and what it required of him.
Wade’s hands settled at the base of my spine.
He had moved behind me at some point, one knee on the mattress, and his palms were broad and warm against the tight muscles that had been complaining since the fall in the barn weeks ago and had never fully relented. He pressed into them with the steady, firm pressure of someone who had assessed the situation and arrived at the correct response, and I felt the first knot give way somewhere in my lower back, an unwinding that traveled up through my sacrum and into the tight place between my shoulder blades and then out, and a sound slipped free from somewhere low in my chest that I did not try to swallow.
His hands moved up along my spine. Slow and methodical, finding each place the tension had gathered and staying with it until it released. My fingers, which had been gripping the sheet, went slack.
Their hands moved around Hope the way they moved around everything that required real care, with attention and complete seriousness, nothing skipping or glancing past the curve of my belly. When Rhett’s arm shifted, it settled belowthe weight of her, supporting rather than pressing. When Cole moved to kneel closer, his forearms bracketed the space on either side without touching. Wade’s hands on my back worked above and below without force, keeping his pressure where the muscles needed it rather than where the pregnancy made it complicated. They had worked out something between them without talking about it, the particular unspoken coordination of three people who had decided what the situation asked for.
I sat in the center of it with my fingers loose on the sheet and the flush working across my chest and the scent of the room thick and warm around all four of us, and I let them hold me from every direction, and I stopped trying to identify the exact point at which needing this had become something other than a failure.
Outside the window, the frost kept its slow, indifferent work along the glass.
I lay back against the pillows.
It was not a sudden thing. It was the thing that happened after everything that had come before it, the natural conclusion of a body that had been asking for something for hours and had finally been given permission to stop arguing about it. The lamp on the nightstand threw its small, warm light across the ceiling, and the frost at the windows pressed its cold geometry against the glass from the outside, and the room held the heat of four people in it and the particular sweet weight of my own scent and all of theirs layered together into something that had no practical name. I lay back and my shoulders found the pillow and I looked at the ceiling and let myself be there.
Cole settled beside me.
One hand came to cup the line of my jaw, tilting my face toward his with a gentleness that was its own kind of certainty,not tentative, but measured, the way you handled something that mattered without making a performance of how much it mattered. He kissed me slowly. Not the first time his mouth had been near mine that night, but the first time with the full attention of it, no other task being asked of his hands or his mind, just this. His lips were warm and tasted of coffee, the last of the evening’s cup, and I brought both hands up and closed my fingers into the front of his shirt without thinking about it. The flannel crumpled in my grip. He made a low sound against my mouth and did not pull back.
He kissed me the way a person kissed someone they had been thinking about kissing for longer than they had admitted, which was to say: thoroughly and without rushing, with the kind of attention that made the brain go quiet on its own without being asked. My hands loosened slightly in his shirt and then gripped again, and the heat moving through me found a new direction for itself, a channel and a focus, and I kissed him back with the same deliberateness he offered me.
Rhett’s hands found the outside of my thighs.
