Page 39 of Devoured

"You good here, Lara?"

Her name. In his mouth. In front of a bar full of people who'd known him his whole life. Lara — not Ms. Baxter, not the office, not the wall — Lara, said low and easy and meaning, in front of everyone, the one word he wouldn't say: mine.

The hand on her back was the only thing holding her in the world.

"...Yeah," she managed. Her voice came out lower than she meant it. "Yeah. I'm good."

"Good." Dean's eyes stayed on Grant. He smiled. It was not a nice smile. "Then I'll take her home."

And that was all. He didn't argue, didn't square up, didn't say one hard word, he didn't have to, because the hand on her back had already turned her a quarter-turn toward the door and the whole bar had already understood, and Grant, whatever he was, was smart enough to take his hand off her elbow and lift both palms a careful inch and step back into the crowd he'd come out of.

Dean steered her toward the door. His hand never left her back. And she went — she went, God help her, with the heat of his palm burning through her shirt and her own pulse going off like an alarm she couldn't find the switch for — because some animal part of her had been waiting weeks to feel exactly this, exactly his hand exactly there, and it did not care in the slightest that her pride was screaming the whole way across the floor.

She caught one glimpse, near the door, of Remi.

Dean's sister, planted in the watching crowd with a beer halfway to her mouth and her whole face lit up like Christmas morning, pure, undiluted, front-row delight, the look of a woman who has waited a long time for exactly this show and cannot believe her luck at the seats. Their eyes met for half a second. Remi's eyebrows went up. Lara felt her face go scalding.

Then the door, and the cold.

Main Street hit her like a glass of water in the face.

The night had gone cold the way the desert did the second the sun was fully down, the heat dumped straight up into all those stars, and the shock of it on her flushed skin cleared her head enough to remember that she was furious. The hand came off her back the moment they were through the door, he stepped back, put space between them, and the loss of the heat was its own small insult, and she rounded on him on the empty sidewalk under the buzzing bar sign.

"What was that?"

"You looked like you wanted a hand."

"I did not need rescuing." Her voice was shaking and she hated that too. "I'm a grown woman, Dean. I can have a drink at a bar. I can have a drink with whoever I want. I can do whatever the hell I want with whoever the hell I want, and I don’t need you charging across a room like some arrogant he-man with a god complex to take me home like I'm a — "

"Did you want him?"

It stopped her flat. "What?"

"That man." Dean hadn't moved. He stood there with his hands loose at his sides and the bar sign throwing pink and shadow across the hard planes of his face, and he wasn't cold — that was the thing that undid her — he was the furthest thing from cold she had ever seen him. He was banked, like a fire you'd find still burning at the bottom of an old pit, and his eyes had gone almost black, and he was looking at her like the question actually mattered. "You let him stand there with his hand on you. So I'm asking. Did you want him."

"That is not the⁠—"

"It's a simple question." He took a step. Not a crowding step. Just one, just enough to bring the heat of him back into the cold air between them. "Did you want him, Lara?"

"No." It came out of her before she could dress it. "No, I didn't want him."

"No." Something moved at the corner of his mouth, low and dangerous, the mask sliding clean off whatever had been under it for twelve weeks. "Then who do you want?"

"Dean—"

"No, that's the thing I want to know." His voice had dropped into something she felt in the backs of her knees, in her spine, in the soles of her feet. He took another step and now there was no cold air left between them at all. "Twelve weeks you've been in my house, in my office, at my table, pushing my kid on a swing, and you look at me when you think I can't see you doing it, and I have been…" he stopped, jaw working, and when it came back out it was rougher "…so who is it, Lara? Who do you want? What is it you want to do?"

She should have had an answer. She had an answer for everything; it was the one thing she'd never lost, not through Boston, not through any of it, the ready level word that kept her safe. She opened her mouth for it.

"Nothing to say." His mouth curved. He was close enough now that she had to tip her head back to hold his eyes, and the curve of his mouth was awful and beautiful and knowing, and he leaned in that last inch and said it low, the old word, the wall-word, the jab he'd been hiding behind since the porch:

"Cat got your tongue, darlin'?"

And that — that — was the thing that broke it.

Because it was a dare. Because he'd used that word on her a dozen times to push her back behind the line, and she was so tired of the line, and she was a grown woman who could do whatever the hell she wanted with whoever she wanted, and she had just told him she didn't want the man at the bar, and he was standing here in the cold with his fire showing asking her who she did —

She grabbed the front of his shirt in both hands and kissed him.