Page 130 of Knottingley Ever After
“Mm. Cozy romance. Specifically, badass Omegas willing to bravely dive out of heartbreak, dire circumstances, dramatic small-town inheritance disputes, the occasional dragon, and — the genre staple I personally hold near and dear — the messy emotional aftermath of a divorce.”
“Divorce.”
“Divorce. There is, sir, a thriving market in the cozy-divorce-Omega corner of contemporary romance, and I will fight any man who tries to dismiss it. The world needs stories about women who, having survived the small private catastrophe of a marriage going under, get on a train, move to a small village, open a bakery, find an actual pack of competent Alphas, fall stupidly in love by chapter twelve, and get the version of the ending the previous chapter denied them.”
“Your passion is, in fact, showing.”
“It is. I will not apologize.”
“Do not.”
We stand at the rail. We sip. The sun drops another notch and the strip of copper on the lake compresses into a small bright line on the far edge. The first chill of evening rolls in off the water, and Iris, against the cedar rail, takes a small involuntary half-shiver.
She does not, however, ask me for my jacket.
She simply leans into my side.
The five-degree concession of a woman who has decided that the captain at her elbow is the warmest object in the immediate radius, and that she is, in fact, allowed to use him for the function. Her shoulder fits under mine. Her temple comes to rest just at the seam of my upper arm. The frosted-strawberry of her hair rises into my shoulder. The borrowed jersey of mine on her body presses against the line of my own ribs, the amber-bourbon and the strawberry mixed at the small radius where she has tucked herself in against me.
I shift my arm. I drop it, slow, around her shoulders. I pull her in.
She does not, in any visible way, react. Her cheek simply settles further into my chest. Her hand, the one not holding thebottle, comes up and rests, light, against the front of my shirt. Her breath evens.
The lake, in front of us, goes on being the lake.
Captain.
Captain. Steady. Internal monologue. Maintain.
It is not, in fact, going to maintain.
I have, in the eight weeks I have known Iris O’Shea, been doing the long quiet patient captain math — the same captain math I have been doing on this woman since the morning Matteo first walked into my kitchen and said the wordPinkyout loud, the same captain math I was doing yesterday in a kitchen over a pot of my grandfather’s stew, the same captain math I was doing this morning at the wheel of a Tesla with a sausage in a bun and the small private chamber of my chest already, frankly, gone.
I am, on the back deck of my grandfather’s cabin, in the long copper October light, with a pink-haired Omega in my old varsity jersey tucked under my arm and her cheek against the line of my sternum, prepared to admit the math to the only person in the small private chamber of my own chest who needs to hear it.
You are not in fact still falling for her, Kavanagh.
You are, at this point, simply doing it.
I tip my head, gentle, against the crown of her hair. I let the small honest exhale out into the cool October air over the lake, and I let myself, for one unsupervised forty-eight-hour cabin window, simply have it.
I am, against every patient captain instinct I have trained into myself for fifteen years, really starting to fall hard for Iris O’Shea.
CHAPTER 25
Knottingley Style
~IRIS~
“You are lucky,” I announce, as the Tesla’s rear tires give up on the last forty feet of the driveway and slide, on the precise blade of ice that has formed under the new four inches of overnight powder, the final unhurried slow-motion arc into the open mouth of the team-house garage, “that we survived this drive, Captain Kavanagh.”
Jude eases off the accelerator. The car settles. The garage door starts its slow rumbled close behind us. The dashboard dings, in the small unbothered chime of a vehicle that has, in fact, just landed a six-hour drive home in a snowstorm with the same equanimity it had at the beginning of the trip, and Jude, in the driver’s seat, exhales.
“Dramatic,” he observes.
“Captain. Look outside.”
Outside the small rectangle of the garage window, the back lawn of the team house is unbroken white. The trees are limned in soft hoar-frost. The driveway is a curve of glittering ice. The temperature has, since we crossed the state line two hours ago, dropped forty degrees, and the Saturday-morning autumn that surrounded us on the cabin’s back deck has, somewhere in thepast eighteen hours, evaporated into the precise binary winter wonderland this state is professionally famous for.
