Page 40 of The Shield
It felt like the whole peninsula had leaned forward, waiting for something to happen.
Rain slicked the marble under my feet and turned the air to velvet. Cameras blinked their small red eyes. Volunteers in yellow slickers wrangled sawhorses into place, and a mounted cop shifted closer, his gelding flicking an ear like it could hear my pulse. I’d just finished another hit—sandbags here, don’t be a hero there—when the sound reached us.
Not sirens. Hooves. Heavy and unhurried, a four-beat you felt through stone.
Heads turned as one, a murmured ripple running the length of Meeting Street. The crowd parted without thinking, a little theater trick Charleston never quite unlearned, and there he was: Ethan, high in the saddle on Flapjack, rain beaded in his hair, jaw rough with the kind of day that didn’t apologize.
He looked like the city had conjured him. Dog tags dark against his throat. The bear claw glinting when the light found it. Flapjack’s ears were pricked, his black coat sheened in theweather, mane stringing rain. They were both ridiculous and right, fairy tale and freight train.
He found me the way a compass finds north—didn’t hurry, didn’t falter—just rode straight to the foot of the steps and reined in. Flapjack blew, a warm little thunder. For a second, the rest of the world fell away, and it was only the two of them framed by white columns and wet sky.
Behind me, Butch made a sound halfway between a laugh and a prayer. “Lord, have mercy,” he muttered, delighted and disapproving in equal parts. “That must be him. So much for discretion, Natty-girl.”
Discretion. Right. The word felt like a coat I’d outgrown somewhere between the shower and the City Hall steps.
Ethan swung down in a smooth, powerful arc, boots hitting marble with that calm finality I’d already learned meant things were about to happen. He came up the first stair, rain running in clean lines off his shoulders, and stopped just shy of me.
“Hi,” he said, like we were the only two people on the street.
I became aware of a thousand tiny things—the red lights on the cameras, Kimmy’s sharp inhale in my ear through the live-pack, the mounted officer’s grin he tried to hide, my granddaddy’s eyebrows heading for his hairline. I thought about pausing, about stepping back to where it was safe and strategic and small.
I didn’t.
Forward only.
I put my palm on Ethan’s chest, right above the tags, and lifted my face. He didn’t ask. His mouth found mine, warm and certain, the city watching, the rain blessing it. It wasn’t a peck. It was a stake in the ground: this is mine, I am hers, we are not pretending.
The crowd reacted like crowds do when they get a better story than they came for—whoops and laughs, a cheer fromsomewhere that turned to many somewheres. Even the cynical clapped. Butch groaned theatrically and then, traitor, clapped, too. The Public Information Officer’s eyes went wide as pie plates: opportunity, hazard, both.
Ethan’s hand cradled the back of my head just long enough to make the ground tilt. When we broke, we didn’t jump apart. We stood close, breathing the same rain.
“What do you need?” he asked, low enough the microphones wouldn’t steal it.
“High eyes,” I said, without hesitation. “Flooded streets, stranded drivers, drains that look like they’re breathing backwards. Flapjack’d make a hell of a patrol.”
“Done,” he said, turning like he’d already decided. Then he glanced back, took me in from ponytail to wet jeans, and tipped his chin toward the horse with a look I hadn’t earned the right to love yet. “Come on.”
“On camera?” I asked, just to say the problem out loud, to taste whether it still scared me.
“If you want,” he said. “If you don’t, I’ll loop back.”
I thought about all the ways the city would try to cut pieces off me the second I ran—my voice, my clothes, who I loved, how. I thought about spending another decade apologizing.
Nope.
“Boost me,” I said.
His hands bracketed my hips, solid and easy, lifting like I weighed nothing. The crowd went very still—then broke into delighted noise as I swung a leg over the saddle. Flapjack shifted beneath me, warm and alive, scent of leather and rain and horse in my head like summer. Ethan mounted behind in one clean motion, the saddle creaking, his chest a hot wall at my back. He took up the reins around me, not trapping, bracketing. His thigh pressed along mine. I exhaled into the new balance we made without working for it.
Kimmy’s voice laughed in my ear. “Nat, I love you. This is insane. You’re trending.”
“Tell them to trend themselves into moving their cars,” I muttered, and heard her cackle.
“What’s his name?” someone shouted.
“Flapjack,” Ethan and I said at once, and the crowd laughed like we’d rehearsed it.
Butch stepped closer, umbrella cocked as if he could keep the rain off a decision. He looked up at Ethan for a long beat, measuring, then nodded once—grudging acceptance from a man who’d never given that lightly. “Don’t drown her,” he said.
