Page 42 of The Shield
“Ethan Dane,” I whispered, trying the name on my tongue. It felt inevitable. Dangerous. Like it had been waiting for me.
He stepped close, rain still beading on his lashes, jaw set hard. “Still just Ethan to you.”
And God, help me, I believed him.
Flapjack blew and shook, scattering rain like coins. A groom was already there with a towel, hands efficient, eyes soft for the animal, not the spectacle.
“Good boy,” Ethan murmured into Flapjack’s cheek, and if there’s a language that makes me weak, it’s men speaking that one.
We stripped tack in a rhythm I didn’t know and somehow did—saddle to rack, pad to rail, girth loosened with fingers and a thumb. The bridle hung from its hook, bit rinsed and dried with a towel that had seen better days. Flapjack ducked his head into a halter with the familiarity of trust. The groom clucked him toward a bedded stall and he went, hindquarters swinging like a dancer, tired but happy.
“Come on,” Ethan said, voice gone lower, edges sanded by work and weather. He led me into the tack room, then past it, into a smaller space lined in shelves and oil and an old chair someone had saved because it fit. The rain was a steady hymn on the roof. My body recognized the quiet before my head did.
I turned to thank him—formal, ridiculous—and that was as far as we got. He crowded me back gently, not trapping, just asking, and when I said yes—with my mouth and my hands and my weight—he took it like a starving man.
It wasn’t pretty. It was greedy and grateful and soaked through, the kind of kissing that has you bracing your palm against a man’s chest not to stop him but to keep yourself vertical. My soaked jacket slid off my shoulders in a wet sigh. He set it on a hook, detail that he was. His hands found my hips and my back, my hair and my jaw, and every point of contact rang like a bell.
“Natalie,” he said, and I was already untying the knot in his shirt where he’d yanked it half-through his belt to ride. Skin met skin—salt, rain, heat—and I breathed like I’d run the whole city.
We didn’t get precious. He had me up on an old work table, wood scarred from years of polishing tack, the smell of oil and horse a drug. His hands slid under the hem of my soaked tee and found skin, found the braid of muscle and want that had been humming all afternoon.
“Tell me no,” he said, even as my knees opened, even as my hands pulled.
“Don’t be an idiot,” I said, laughing—and then not laughing.
We drew it out and we didn’t. Too much day had piled on us to be careful with time. He was thorough where it mattered, a man who took joy in making me shake, and I was shameless in showing him how bad I wanted it.
I didn’t catalog the steps. I let them erase me and draw me back in lines that made more sense. He ruined my mouth and then my breath and then the last place I’d kept neatly guarded, and when I broke, it was with the certainty that this was a thing I did now with him—come apart, come back, no apologies.
“Look at me,” he said, and I did, and that was enough to tip him after me, his jaw clenched and eyes dark, the sound he made burned into the bolt holes in that table as surely as the oil stains.
We were still breathing into each other, forehead to forehead, when the door swung wide.
“Ethan.”
The voice was smooth as a river stone and twice as heavy. I looked up, startled, but Ethan didn’t flinch. A big, bearded man filled the narrow doorway like someone who had spent his whole life practicing the art of arrival—broad shoulders framed in shadow, impossibly dry for a night that had soaked everyone else, expression arranged into a neutrality so deliberate it could only be a choice.
I didn’t know him. Not personally. But I knew of the house—everyone did. Dominion Hall wasn’t just a residence. It was a rumor with a roof, a fortress that cast a long shadow over thecity’s money and muscle. The men who lived here didn’t move through Charleston with names, only with presence—and his was unmistakable.
My hand flew to the edge of my shirt on reflex, tugging the hem lower like it could hide the flush in my skin. Ethan didn’t move in surprise. He moved with intent, shifting just enough to put his body between me and the doorway. The casual certainty of it—like he’d done it a hundred times before, like protecting me wasn’t a question but a fact—made my pulse trip.
It was infuriating. It was intoxicating. It made me want him all over again, right there in front of the man who had just caught us.
“Busy, Atlas,” Ethan said, not moving, not embarrassed, the word so flat it was funny.
Atlas’s gaze flicked to me once—assessing, not unkind—and then back to Ethan. A beat. “Apologies,” he said, and sounded like he meant it. “Two things.”
Ethan didn’t sigh, but his shoulders did something that made me think he wanted to.
Atlas’s mouth twitched. “One: the rain bands are shifting faster than forecast. Your horse has twenty minutes for a hot mash and a rubdown, then he’s off duty until morning. Two—” He paused, something like caution passing under the smooth surface of his voice. “The man we discussed earlier? He was seen near City Hall. With a camera. And a friend.”
The heat of the room changed. Ethan straightened without stepping away from me. His calm sharpened to a blade.
“Understood,” he said.
Atlas nodded once, stepped back, and closed the door as if he’d interrupted a board meeting. The click was civilized. The thud it put in my chest wasn’t.
Ethan looked at me, eyes steady. “You okay?”
