He didn't move. I didn't want him to. I held him there, my fingers tracing slow lines down his spine, and felt his breathing even out against my neck. His lips pressed against my shoulder. Then my collarbone. Then the hollow of my throat.
"Don't move," I said.
"Wasn't planning on it."
I smiled against his hair. He smiled against my skin.
He kissed my forehead and eased out of me and I made a small sound at the loss and he brushed his thumb across my cheekbone and said, "One second" and disappeared into the bathroom.
I heard the tap run. He came back with a warm washcloth and sat on the edge of the bed and parted my thighs gently and cleaned me. Slow. Careful. His other hand resting on my hip, his thumb stroking the bone there. It was the most intimate thing anyone had ever done for me. Not the sex — this. The quiet attention of a man who thought about what came after. Who touched me like I was something precious even when the urgency was gone. I watched his face while he did it — the concentration, the tenderness, the way his jaw was soft now instead of clenched — and my throat ached with something I didn't have a word for.
He tossed the cloth toward the bathroom and lay back down and pulled me into him. I curled against his side, my leg over his, my hand on his chest, my cheek against his shoulder. He pulled the sheet over us and wrapped his arm around me, and his fingers found my hair and started moving through it, slow and absent, the way you touch something just because you can.
The house was quiet. Maisie asleep down the hall. The porch light throwing a warm stripe down the hallway from the front door.
"I started a law school application," I said.
His fingers stopped in my hair. His chest went still beneath my cheek — a held breath, the full-body pause of a man absorbing something enormous.
"Say that again," he said.
"UT Law. Part-time program. I can do it while I work. It might not — "
His arms tightened around me so hard I lost the end of the sentence. He pressed his lips to the top of my head and held them there, and I could feel his breath stuttering against my hair, the effort it was costing him to keep it together.
"You're going to be terrifying in a courtroom," he said.
Savannah's words. But from Clay, they sounded like a promise.
I pressed my face into his chest and smiled, and the smile was wet because I was crying again — not the airless grief of the kitchen floor but the specific, disorienting relief of a woman who had walked back into her own life and found it waiting for her. The boots would be back by the door. The mug on the counter. The man in her bed with his fingers in her hair and his heartbeat under her ear.
"I'm going to be terrifying everywhere," I said.
He laughed. Low, quiet, the laugh I'd been missing. His chest rumbled under my ear and his fingers resumed their slow path through my hair and I pressed closer and tangled my legs tighter with his and breathed him in.
I fell asleep in his arms. In my bed. In my cottage in Copper Creek with the porch light on and the law school application saved and the man who'd waited. Who'd waited even when I told him not to. Who'd waited because he meant it.
I didn't check the locks. I didn't dream.
For the first time in a week, the house felt like home.
Chapter 22
Clay
I woke up, and she was there.
Her leg hooked over mine, her arm across my stomach, her face pressed into the curve of my neck. Her fingers were curled against my ribs like she'd fallen asleep mid-grip and her body hadn't gotten the memo to let go. She smelled like sleep and shampoo and underneath all of it something sweet I'd never been able to name and had spent the last week aching for.
I didn't move.
My body was already responding to her. The press of her breasts through the thin cotton of my shirt she'd pulled on sometime in the night, the weight of her thigh draped across mine, the heat of her skin everywhere it touched mine. A week without her and my body was starving — every point of contact greedy, desperate, lit up like a livewire.
I pressed my lips against her hair. She shifted closer. Not awake — just instinct, her body finding mine the way it always did in sleep. Her thigh slid higher across mine, and my breath caught. Her fingers flexed against my ribs, loosened, then curledtight again, and the small unconscious grip of her hand against my bare skin made my chest ache.
I wanted to wake her up with my mouth. I wanted to roll her onto her back and press my face into her neck and feel her arch against me the way she had last night. I wanted to hear that sound again — the breathless, broken one she'd made when I pushed inside her. My whole body was taut with it, thrumming, every nerve ending tuned to the woman wrapped around me.
But I didn't move. Because this — her weight against me, her breath on my neck, the morning light coming through the curtains, and the house quiet and her body pressed into mine like it was the only place she wanted to be — this was enough. After a week of cold sheets and an empty bed and the ache of missing her so deep it sat in my bones, just having her here was everything.
