Page 7 of The Shield
“Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t make a thing of the ma’am. Didn’t sugar it. Just said it like breath, letting the syllable settle between us with a weight that felt older than either of us.
I’d never been good at flirting. I was excellent at being direct.
The claw thumped against his chest when he spoke. Close up it was huge, the curve brutal, the color the deep brown of coffee beans. I’d seen black bears twice, once from a car at Cades Cove and once when a yearling had wandered near our cabin farther up in the Smokies on a vacation we took when I was twelve. Their claws were quick little commas. This looked like it could punch through bone.
“What is that?” I heard myself ask. It came out husky. The wind. The grit in my throat. Not the sudden heat coiling low, not the tiny pulse at the base of my spine, not the way my thighs pressed together on their own.
He followed my eyes. “Bear claw,” he said. He didn’t offer more. He didn’t have to.
I didn’t gasp. I didn’t reach for him. I took one step back because my body had decided to wobble, and that was not the message I wanted to send to a man who rode a draft horse into a king tide without checking the posted regulations.
“You can’t have a horse on the beach,” I said again, because I had to say something that wasn’twhat happened to youorwhat does your voice sound like when it’s in the back of my neck.
He nodded once, a soldier acknowledging an order he didn’t intend to obey. “Thanks for the tip.”
He nudged the horse forward. I didn’t call it in. I watched him ride away through the corridor of umbrellas and sunburns, the crowd parting for him like they would for a myth that wasn’t supposed to exist.
I realized my hand was still raised, palm out, like I could stop him by will. I lowered it slowly, my fingers shaking, and told myself it was the wind and the caffeine and not the way everynerve in my body had decided to tune itself to a frequency I’d never been offered before.
Owen drifted up beside me like he’d been there all along. “You just let him go.”
“I’m not Beach Patrol, I’m a planner,” I said. My voice sounded normal and I wanted to shake it for betraying me like that. “And he wasn’t exactly kicking over sandcastles.”
“Uh-huh,” Owen said, with the patient interest of a man who’d learned to recognize when I was lying to myself. “What’s with the jewelry? Looked like a murder weapon.”
“Bear claw,” I said, staring at the line he’d cut through the crowd. I could still see the shift of muscle under his shirt when he’d lifted it. That horrible-beautiful crosshatch on his chest. How his stomach had been all plane and heat and strength without any of the gym vanity Charleston boys wore like cologne.
“Black bear claws aren’t that big,” Owen said. “You know—the Smokies trip you always talk about? Those little trash pandas?”
“I know,” I said softly. “It was something bigger.”
“Grizzly?” Owen whistled low. “Whatever it is, he’s not from around here. Feels … big-country. Western.”
Somewhere far from Charleston, I thought, and swallowed.
I could hear my granddaddy’s front-porch voice in my head, telling a young me how men were made in certain places the way bourbon was—by age and pressure and science you pretend isn’t science.
I’d grown up in Holly Hill, an hour outside of Charleston, where the boys were polite and mischievous in equal measure. I’d learned to kiss on dirt roads and talk my way out of trouble with deputies who knew my family.
In Columbia at the University of South Carolina, the guys wore polos and loyalty to their fraternity. They liked me because I could laugh and keep their secrets and run their group projectslike a campaign. By the time I came back to Charleston for my master’s at the College of Charleston, I’d decided they were all iterations of a theme: decent and charming, but not remarkable.
I’d never dated a military man. Not because I had an opinion. Because they weren’t the ones at my tables.
The horse moved like water down the beach, and the man moved with him the way I moved with a problem when it finally admitted what it was. Efficient. Focused. A little predatory.
My whole body had gone aware in a way that felt embarrassing, given the morning, but it didn’t feel like embarrassment. It felt like being seen. Not grazed by eyes that liked my legs or my laugh. Seen.
“You’re never going to meet anyone if you keep hanging out with married people,” Owen said. “Kimmy and I love you, but we’re terrible wingmen. Maybe ask Horse Guy for his number.”
I snorted, too sharp. “I don’t ask strangers who break the rules for their numbers.”
“You don’t ask anyone for their number,” he said mildly. “And in your defense, most of the anyones around here think a big night out is a second IPA and a story about their boat. You need a different ecosystem.”
“Like what?” I asked, eyes still on the rider because I couldn’t not. The sun sawed silver off the water around him. People kept pretending not to look, which means they were definitely looking. He carried attention the way other men carried backpacks—automatic, unthinking, as if he’d borne weight so long he forgot what it felt like to set it down.
Owen shrugged. “I don’t know. Veterans’ group fundraiser. A hardware store at 6 a.m. A riding stable.”
“I build seawalls and tell rich people to move uphill,” I said. “I don’t … stable.”
