His eyes move across my face the way a man looks at a woman he wasn't sure he'd see again. "Baby."
The way he says it wrecks me.
He bends and kisses the stitches at my temple first, careful, his mouth barely touching me there.
Then he kisses the place under my ear where his thumb was a moment ago.
Then he tilts my chin up with his fingers and brings his mouth to mine.
The kiss is slow.
He kisses me the way a man kisses his woman after he's killed for her—without hurry, without question, with both hands on her face like he's relearning the shape of her mouth.
The taste of him has a road behind it.
Coffee and gas station water and the kind of tired a man comes back to himself with.
His thumb moves on my cheekbone.
My free hand comes up and finds the front of his t-shirt and fists in it the way Nash fisted his hand in the cotton at his shoulder.
He kisses me until I'm breathing through my nose against his mouth, until the heat under my skin reminds me my body still belongs to me, until my pulse comes up under his thumb at my jaw.
When he pulls back, his forehead stays against mine.
His eyes are closed. His breath is shallow.
He swallows once. "I love you, Hadley Cross."
The name on his mouth, the whole woman he's calling, the first time he's said it.
My hand on his t-shirt tightens. "I love you, Silas McCrae."
He breathes out like a man setting something heavy down for the first time in a long time.
He kisses me once more, softly, his mouth lingering at the corner of mine.
Then his mouth finds Nash's hair where it spills across my hip, and then my hand again.
"How is he?" I ask, my voice barely above a whisper.
Silas' hand stays on Nash's back. "He talked a little on the drive. Said Hartley didn't touch him. Said he was scared of the loud noise."
I look down at my son's face turned into my side. "What loud noise?"
"The way Hartley took him out of the kitchen. The way Marlena fired. The bunkhouse goin' up around him." Silas' thumb moves once across Nash's back. "He'll have nightmares for a while, baby. He's six years old, and he watched a man with a gun take him out of a kitchen full of women he loves. He'll remember today for the rest of his life."
I nod into the pillow. "We'll be there for it."
His hand finds mine again on the blanket. "We will."
* * *
I tell him what Phantom told me.
I go through it in the order Phantom went through it.
Marlena.