Page 32 of Lawless (Dauntless Island #2)

Maybe I’d messed things up with Dominic, or maybe he’d give me another chance.

I wouldn’t know unless I tried. And maybe the risk of him finding out about the contraband in the cave was miniscule anyway.

Because we could move that stuff, and he’d never have to know.

My heart raced faster as I thought of it—it was stupid that it had never occurred to me before.

Dominic didn’t know shit about Dauntless Island.

If I told him I sometimes ducked out in the middle of the night to collect orange-clawed sand crabs because they only came out when the exact right tide met the exact right moon, he’d believe it.

I mean, I’d think of something better than that though.

Something not made up. I was a terrible liar, and everyone knew it, but maybe that was only because I’d never had anything worth lying about before?

I ignored the whispering voice in the back of my skull that told me that planning to lie to Dominic was a bad idea, because that voice was wrong. Okay, it was probably right, but I could worry about that part later. For now, I wanted to find out if I still had a chance with Dominic.

I drew a deep breath and headed back inside the church.

Dominic was still standing with Red Joe and Eddie. Tall Tom had wandered off now, and Nipper Will had taken his place. That made me second-guess myself, but only for a moment. I sidestepped a few people to reach them.

“Hey,” I said to Dominic.

He gave me a wary look. “Hey.”

“Can I talk to you outside for a second?” I asked, trying to pretend I couldn’t feel Nipper Will’s gaze boring into me. “It’s about your yard.”

“Oh.” Dominic’s eyebrows shot up. “My yard. Yeah, sure.”

We squeezed our way back to the wide door of the church. I didn’t dare look back to see Nipper Will’s expression.

“I like you,” I said, as soon as we were out in the darkness.

It wasn’t dark enough to hide the surprise on Dominic’s face.

“I thought about what you said, and you were right.” I lifted my chin so that he didn’t know I was shit scared that I was going to spill all my feelings just to get rejected.

“You want to hold someone’s hand in public.

I want that too. And if you still want that hand you hold to be mine, then so do I. ”

He was silent for a long moment, and my guts clenched. Then he let out a breath. “You want to go public?”

“ Yes .” I put as much force behind the word as I could without yelling it in his face. “If you’ll still have me, then yes.”

“I...” He looked stricken. “I don’t want to put you in a bad position in the community.”

“Fuck ’em.”

He swallowed a laugh. “I’m trying to be serious here, Natty.”

“Me too.” I put a hand on his hip, and he didn’t pull away.

I curled my fingers into a fist, grabbing hold of his T-shirt.

A desperate need rose up in me for him to hear me, to understand me even if the words didn’t come out right, and I was afraid I was going to mess it all up.

“Dominic, maybe I made a mistake hooking up with you, because now I know what it’s like, what you’re like, I don’t want to go back to not having you. I want us to try .”

“I want that too,” he said, and my knees almost buckled with relief. “But, Natty, I don’t want that at the cost of you being an outcast, or whatever the fuck happens here to people who date coppers.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s sort of unprecedented. The last copper looked like a praying mantis.”

“Natty!” This time he didn’t manage to swallow the laugh, and it was the most wonderful sound I’d ever heard.

He rested his hand over mine and squeezed.

His laughter faded in the moonlight, but his smile took longer to vanish, replaced at last by a fond, soft expression I wanted to see every time he looked at me. His mouth quirked. “Okay.”

“Okay?” I asked, not certain that I’d heard him, my heart in my throat.

“Okay,” he said again. “If you want to try, then so do I.”

I loosened my grip on his shirt and moulded my palm to the curve of his hip. My eyes stung, and my smile shook. “Okay.”

And then I reached up with my free hand, held the back of his neck, and pulled him into a kiss.

“Well, bugger me!” Fisher Harry Finch exclaimed in his booming voice. “Young Natty Harper’s got his tongue down the copper’s throat!”

And, just like that, the whole island knew.

Dominic had saved my mum. That meant that the Dauntless Islanders were willing to have a drink with him.

It didn’t mean, once they’d all spilled outside the church behind Fisher Harry Finch, that they were willing to welcome him to the family with open arms. Most of the narrow stares and cold shoulders were saved for me, though—you could expect the worst of a mainlander and a copper, but I should have known better.

I should have remembered who I was and where I came from.

I did .

I held my chin up and kept my shoulders back, staring down everyone who was staring at me. I was a descendant of mutineers, and this right here was my mutiny.

“Me and Dominic are together,” I said, my guts twisting like they wanted to leap up my throat and drag the words back down. “And it’s nobody’s business but ours.”

I don’t know what hit harder out of those things—the revelation I was seeing Dominic, or the crazy idea that anything happening on Dauntless wasn’t automatically everyone’s business.

I was pretty sure it was the second one, and nobody had said something as dangerous and provocative in the over two hundred years since the first Josiah Nesmith had announced that things would be better if he was in charge instead of Captain Hawthorne.

And, just like two centuries ago, there was a Nesmith at the centre of things now.

Red Joe shouldered his way through the crowd, murmurs hushing in his path.

He had a face like thunder, but that didn’t mean much, because he’d been wearing that expression whenever he looked at me from the time I was the annoying little kid following him and Nipper Will around.

Red Joe didn’t say anything when he reached us. He didn’t have to. He just clapped me on the shoulder, and then reached out and shook Dominic’s hand soundly. Then he took a swig of rum and said, “Give us a tune, Round Robbie. It’s a party.”

Round Robbie began to play his fiddle again, and it didn’t take long for the others with instruments to join in.

Dominic stared at Red Joe’s broad back as he walked back inside. “Holy shit,” he said. “He is the king.”

I tried to laugh, but the sound came out weakly.

Because Red Joe might have walked over and given us his blessing in front of the whole island, but Nipper Will was still standing just outside the church door, right where the light spilling out from inside met the night.

He’d heard the whole thing, and watched it too, and he hadn’t moved.

He moved when I caught his gaze, though, turning away and going back inside the church.

I don’t know what I’d expected from him, but it hadn’t been dead silence.

Fuck him. I’m a mutineer.

I took Dominic’s hand and squeezed it. Right here in public, with a bunch of islanders still looking on curiously.

Dominic’s smile was worth it, even if his expression was more cautious than happy.

That cautiousness was concern for us, for me , and for what it meant to be known to be with an outsider—and a copper was the worst kind of outsider, second only to a tax man—on Dauntless.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked me, his eyes wide. “Or should we get out of here before someone forms a bloodthirsty mob?”

“They won’t,” I said. “Not after Red Joe.”

“It’s actually terrifying that’s where the line is. Like, was there an actual possibility?”

I shrugged. “We’re unprecedented, remember?”

“Yeah.” He smiled, the tight line of his shoulders dipping as he relaxed. “You and me. Unprecedented. I like that.”

“I want to get out of here,” I said, my chest fluttering. “Can we go to your place?”

The skin at the edges of his eyes crinkled as his smile grew. “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

We escaped out onto the street, which wasn’t much of an escape since the noise from the old church followed us all the way next door to Dominic’s place.

The POLICE sign was hanging at an angle from the front doorknob, and I traced the raised letters with my finger while Dominic hunted in his pockets for his keys.

He hadn’t figured out yet that you didn’t need to lock your doors on Dauntless.

He found the key at last and turned it in the lock.

“Hey, so me and Eddie are going to look for those gun post things tomorrow. You should come with us. We can have a picnic or something. That’s romantic, right?

” The expression on my face made his brows tug together.

“I mean, I thought it would be fun, that’s all. ”

“I...” I struggled not to let my panic show. “Tomorrow? I’d rather do something that’s just us , you know?”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “I guess the first official outing of the Dauntless Island Amateur Historical Society isn’t exactly great first official date material.”

My stomach flipped, oscillating wildly between dread and delight. First official date! That was everything I wanted to hear, except it would also be our last official date if Dominic had to arrest me.

“Um, yeah,” I said, and smiled too wide when Dominic looked at me curiously.

He was trained to spot liars, right? And I was already a terrible liar.

I just had to tell this one convincingly though, and I’d have some breathing room.

“I should probably go and help get Mum home and settled. But I am coming back,” I said, to forestall his disappointment.

“Like in an hour or two at the most? She’s sometimes really hard to settle down. ”

“Oh.” His eyebrows rose. “Yeah, sure. Of course.”

Relief coursed through me.

“Okay! Great!” I pushed him against the door and kissed him.

“Ouch!” He shifted. “Doorknob. Can we try that again, please?”

“Sorry.” I kissed him again, more gently this time, a promise I was making.

I’d be back, and then we’d... Well, I hoped Dominic had some ideas, because I wasn’t sure I could say mine out loud.

I wanted him to fuck me. Except I didn’t like thinking of it that way.

I wanted him to... make love to me? Now I really sounded like one of those soap opera characters.

I just wanted Dominic . I wanted him in me, and I had about an hour and a half to figure out a way to say that. “I’ll be back soon.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

I almost tripped over my own feet at the way he said it, his voice low and hungry. Button John was so fucking wrong—Dominic was totally hot.

I darted down the side of the old church in case he was still watching me, dodging the kids playing hide and seek around the fallen headstones, and then stepped over the fence into the street behind the main street.

And then I ran.

The moonlight illuminated the old, familiar path up the hill, and the island opened up around me. The breeze was cool, and tasted like salt, and my feet knew the way. They would have known the way even if I’d had my eyes closed.

Thirty minutes later, the incoming tide carried me inside the entrance to the cave at Mayfair Bay.

It was pitch black inside, but I ran my hand along the rock wall to find my way.

The lapping waves echoed inside the belly of the cave, and I shivered.

It was cold here; I’d left my shirt and shorts under a rock on the beach, and I was rocking the wet underwear look.

If there’d been a glimmer of light to show me off, the crabs would’ve been getting an eyeful.

I just had to get up the path, grab the packages we’d stashed there last time, and dump them at Young Harry Barnes’s house to worry about some other time. If Dominic and Eddie found the cave tomorrow, there’d be nothing up there but footprints.

Simple.

My foot slipped on a wet rock, and I hissed at the sudden, sharp pain as rock scraped my ankle bone.

Fuck.

I tried to pull my foot free, but it was wedged. I leaned down and felt my way around my ankle. Yeah, no. It was stuck in there real good.

A little wave hit the back of my ankles, salt water stinging.

I braced myself on the wall and tried to pull my foot out.

Nothing, except more stinging pain.

Oh shit.

I was stuck, and the tide was still coming in. Cold dread drowned me as the truth of the situation hit me.

I was stuck, the tide was coming in, and not a single soul on Dauntless knew where I was.

Oh no .