The air smelled like salt and gasoline, the way it always did in the Outer Banks when summer stretched long and hot across the coastline. Rafe Cameron leaned against the side of his pickup, the paint chipped from too many sun-bleached years, arms crossed, watching her.

She was barefoot again—never gave a damn about shoes. She was sitting on the edge of the dock, her legs swinging, tan and scraped up from whatever wild thing she’d done earlier that day. Probably climbing fences or racing some grom kid down a dune like she wasn’t a hurricane bottled in a girl’s body. That’s what she was. A hurricane. His hurricane.

Rafe lit a cigarette with shaking hands. Not from nerves—just from being near her too long without touching her. That was always the problem.

He wasn’t supposed to fall in love. That was for soft people. For Pogues and kids who didn’t know what the real world was. But she looked at him like he wasn’t broken. Like he was just a guy who liked boats, who surfed early and drank late and didn’t have a father who made everything bleed.

“Are you just gonna stand there brooding, or are you gonna come sit next to me?” she called, turning to glance back at him with a smile. That smile—that’s what ruined him.

Rafe flicked the cigarette into the sand and moved toward her like he didn’t care, like the space between them wasn’t sacred. When he sat down beside her, their knees touched. She didn’t flinch. She never flinched.

“I was watching you,” he muttered, eyes on the water. Boats skimmed the horizon, the sun dropping lower and hotter in its last stretch of gold.

“You always watch me,” she said, leaning into him.

He could lie. Say she was pretty. Say she was wild. Say something dumb like you make me feel normal.

But this was her, and she wasn’t a Pogue or a Touron or a girl he’d forget. She had calluses on her hands and sand in her hair and knew how to gut a fish faster than most guys on Figure Eight.

“’Cause you make this place feel like it’s mine again,” he said finally. “Like it’s not just ghosts and expectations and all the shit my name comes with.”

She looked at him like she saw right through him—and liked what was there.

“You are this place,” she said softly. “You just forgot it.”

Rafe didn’t know what to say to that, so he kissed her. Not rushed. Not angry. Just honest. The way you do when you’ve been falling for someone so slow and deep that you didn’t realize you were already at the bottom.

And for a moment, the world stopped spinning. The gold light stuck to the water, the air buzzed with distant music and motorboats, and Rafe Cameron wasn’t the rich kid with blood on his hands. He was just a boy in love, on the edge of a dock, in the only place that ever made sense.

The Outer Banks. His home.