Page 44 of Only Mine
Wrenley reaches out, her fingers gently touching a rosemary needle.
“She sounds like she made everything beautiful,” Wrenley says, her voice quiet and imbued with a sincerity that resonates deeper than I expect.
Something in the careful way Wrenley holds herself, in the quiet respect she affords this sacred space and Ivy’s memories, chips away at another layer of the ice around my heart.
Wrenley doesn’t try to fill the silence or offer empty condolences. She simply bears witness, and in doing so, she lightens a burden I hadn’t realized I was still forcing Ivy to carry alone.
I can’t hear everything they say, just fragments carried on the breeze. Ivy points at the lemon verbena, the delicate chervil, and the purple sage. She’s reciting the names, the uses, the little anecdotes I’d shared with her over the years, words I’d spoken to keep Celine’s memory alive for her.
Then Wrenley’s head lifts.
She scans the edge of the garden and finds me. Our eyes connect. The air stills.
The kitchen noise, the distant traffic, even Ivy’s voice recedes to a dull hum. It’s just us, separated by ten feet of fragrant earth.
Her expression is open and unguarded. There’s a question in her eyes, something soft and searching that bypasses all my defenses.
The pull toward her is a physical thing, a tightening in my chest, a sudden, sharp awareness of her scent, subtly tropical.
I should look away. I need to retreat.
This is too much, too fast. But I can’t. Her lips part slightly, as if she’s about to speak, but no words come.
I’m getting the same feeling I did at Noa’s restaurant, but amplified, stripped bare.
Ivy tugs on Wrenley’s sleeve, demanding her attention for a ladybug discovery, and the spell breaks. Wrenley’s focus drops back to my daughter, a faint blush rising on her cheeks.
I push off the wall, the movement abrupt.
Turning my back on them, on the sudden, disorienting warmth that had begun to seep into the frozen corners of my heart, I stride back into the kitchen. The clatter of pans and the sizzle of food are a welcome cacophony, a shield against the quiet vulnerability I’d just witnessed.
And felt.
ELEVEN
WRENLEY
Ijolt awake with Saint’s name on my lips, the dream version of him (all heat and hands and forgotten boundaries) fading into the darkness of the guesthouse.
Did I just have a sex dream?
Oh, I absolutely did.
I can still feel his weight as he pressed me into the mattress. My skin tingles where his dream-hands roamed, where his mouth explored. It had been vivid, overwhelmingly so. Not just the act itself, though that had been… thorough. It was the details, the ones my waking mind has apparently cataloged with unsettling precision.
Like the way his dark hair fell across his forehead when he peeled my nightshirt off. The surprising softness of his lips and the rough scrape of his stubble against my inner thigh.
And the tattoos.
In the dream, his chef’s coat had been discarded, his T-shirt joining it on the floor, revealing the full expanse of ink that usually disappeared beneath fabric. Swirls of black andgray covered his chest, wrapping around his ribs, disappearing lower. My dream-fingers had traced those lines.
I suck in a breath when I remember the silk of his tongue and the way he tasted me like I was the finest delicacy, a dish he’d been starving for. He’d murmured things against my skin in French, words I didn’t understand but felt at the center of my heart, his voice a gravelly scrape against my skin, setting my nerves endings on fire.
“Oh my god.”
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to banish the images and sensations. But they linger, a blush spreading from my chest to my hairline and a desperate, throbbing ache at my core.
I have to take care of it. Otherwise, I’ll be writhing around in this bed for the next few hours until dawn and tangling the sheets around myself more than they already are.
