I found my shirt on the floor — she'd pulled it off me, I remembered that, her hands on the hem, lifting — and pulled it on. Maisie took my hand, just reached up and grabbed two of my fingers like it was the most natural thing in the world, and led me out of the bedroom and down the hall with the quiet authority of a little girl showing a man around her domain.
"The pancake stuff is in the tall cabinet," she informed me. "Mommy keeps the chocolate chips on the top shelf because she says I 'lack portion control.' I don't know what that means, but I think it means she's scared of my power."
"Reasonable fear."
"I know."
I set her up on her step stool, and we worked in tandem — me cracking eggs and measuring flour, her stirring with the whisklike her life depended on it, Horsey propped on the counter as supervisor.
Flour went everywhere. The counter, her pajamas, my forearm, somehow the ceiling. I made the pancakes the way Momma made them — buttermilk, a pinch of cinnamon, butter in the pan until it foamed. Maisie declared each one as it came off the griddle: "That one's a circle. That one's a heart. That one's... a potato? Clay, that one looks like a potato."
"It's a map of Texas."
"It's a potato."
I was flipping the last one when I heard the footsteps. Soft. Bare feet on hardwood. I looked up.
Callie was standing in the kitchen doorway.
She was wearing the oversized t-shirt from last night and nothing else that I could verify without getting myself into trouble. Her hair was a wreck, and her eyes were still soft with sleep, not yet sharpened into the careful blue she wore like armor. She had a pillow crease on her cheek. She looked like she'd been put together by someone who wasn't quite awake yet and had given up halfway through.
She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life.
"Mommy!" Maisie waved the whisk. "We made pancakes!"
Callie blinked. Looked at the flour. Looked at Maisie. Looked at me — standing barefoot at her stove with a spatula in one hand and batter on my forearm and her daughter on a step stool beside me — and something moved across her face that she didn't try to hide. Something wide open and wondering and terrified.
"There's tea on the counter," I said.
Her eyes went to the counter where I'd set her tea, steeped the way I'd watched her do it, strong with a little milk. Learning how this woman took her tea felt like the most important skill I'd ever acquired.
She wrapped both hands around the mug. The two-handed grip. Took a sip. Closed her eyes.
"Sit," I said. "Eat."
She sat on the bench. I set her plate down — three pancakes, butter, the syrup already out because Maisie had informed me that syrup deployment was "time-sensitive, Clay." Callie picked up her fork. Looked at the plate. Looked at me. Her eyes were wet, and she was trying very hard to make them not be, and I pretended not to notice because that's what she needed.
She ate. Maisie chattered. I leaned against the counter and drank my coffee and let the morning be what it was — ordinary, domestic, the three of us in a flour-covered kitchen while the sun came through the window and Horsey supervised from the counter.
Then Maisie announced she needed to get dressed because today was library day and library day required "a specific outfit, Clay, you don't understand," and she disappeared down the hall in a blur of flour-dusted penguin pajamas, and it was just us.
Callie was still at the bench. Fork down. Hands around her mug. That pillow crease still on her cheek.
I walked around the counter. Stood in front of her stool. She looked up at me — chin tilting, eyes wide, sleep still clinging to the edges of her — and I cupped her face in both hands. Thumbs on her cheekbones. Fingertips in her hair. Tilted her face up to mine.
"Good morning, beautiful," I said.
And I kissed her.
Not the forehead. Not careful. I kissed her the way I'd wanted to kiss her since I'd opened my eyes and found her sleeping beside me — slow and warm and thorough enough that her hands left the mug and found my wrists and held on, and a sound came out of her that was half sigh and half surrender, and I felt her smile against my mouth.
When I pulled back, her eyes were still closed. Her lips were parted. The flush was climbing her neck, and her fingers were still wrapped around my wrists like she'd forgotten to let go.
She opened her eyes. Looked at me with an expression that held everything she wasn't ready to say out loud.
"You are lethal, Blackwood," she whispered.
And I grinned. The full-voltage, Clay Blackwood signature grin. Only this time it wasn't for show, wasn't performance, wasn't the rodeo smile or the press smile or the bar-at-closing-time smile. This one was just for her. And it had never, in all my years of deploying it, felt this good.
