She was asleep in eight minutes. Out cold, bear tucked under one arm, book open across her stomach, the wooden spoon on the floor where she’d dropped it.
I stood there watching her for a minute. My daughter. That thought still hit me sometimes—out of nowhere, in quiet moments, when I wasn’t braced for it. My daughter, in the apartment we’d expanded above the bakery on Main Street in a town I’d chosen to stay in, with a woman I’d carried out of a fire and never stopped holding.
I’d sold the house two years back. The one I’d rebuilt with my own hands, the one that had been mine. Brenna had told me I didn’t have to—she’d said it twice, gently, with her hand on my arm. I’d told her the house had been the first place that felt like mine, but this place was the first place that felt like ours, and I knew which one I’d choose every time.
I heard the kitchen door downstairs open and close. Then footsteps on the stairs—light and quick, Brenna moving with theenergy of a woman who’d been up since four and still had more in the tank.
She appeared in the doorway and looked at Eliana in the playpen and then at me, and something in her expression shifted. Her eyes went soft and her lips parted and she leaned against the door frame with her arms crossed and just looked at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just looking.”
“At what?”
“At you watching her.” She pushed off the door frame and crossed the room to me. Her hands found my shirt—fisted in the cotton, the same way she’d done that first night in the hallway—and she pulled me down toward her. “She’s asleep.”
“I can see that.”
“Forty-five minutes.”
“You said you needed to finish a batch.”
“I lied.”
Her mouth found mine, and the kiss was nothing like the quick, warm one in the bakery. This one was slow and deep and deliberate—the kind of kiss that communicated exactly what she wanted and left no room for misunderstanding. Her hands slid up my chest and over my shoulders and into my hair, and she pressed her body against mine in a way that made rational thought difficult.
I pulled back just far enough to look at her. “Eliana’s right there.”
“Eliana is unconscious. She sleeps like you—a freight train couldn’t wake her.” She tugged my shirt. “Kitchen.”
She grabbed the handheld monitor off the side table on the way past. I followed her downstairs—past the dark front of the shop, curtains pulled, the deadbolt already thrown from her early-morning prep—and into the kitchen. It was warm andsmelled like cinnamon and brown butter. The morning light was pouring through the window above the sink. She walked straight to the oak table in the corner and turned to face me, and I crossed the kitchen to her.
She pulled my shirt over my head. I let her. She ran her hands down my chest and hooked her fingers in the waistband of my jeans and pulled me forward. I went, because I’d been following this woman since the first morning she’d opened her eyes on a curb across the street and I’d forgotten how to breathe.
I lifted her onto the table. Her legs wrapped around my waist. My mouth found her neck—the spot below her ear, the one that made her arch into me, the one I’d mapped that first night and revisited every night since.
“We’re in the bakery,” I said against her skin.
“It’s my bakery. I can do what I want in it.”
“The front windows?—”
“Curtains are drawn. Door’s locked.” She pulled back and looked at me. Her eyes were dark and warm and certain—no hesitation, no fear, no exit strategy. Just Brenna, wanting me, the same way she’d wanted me on this table almost five years ago in a smoke-stained apartment while the world fell apart around us. “Gabriel.”
“Yeah?”
“Stop talking.”
I kissed her harder, tasting coffee and buttercream on her tongue. Brenna’s legs unwrapped just enough for me to unfasten her shorts and drag them down her legs, along with her underwear. They dropped to the floor with a soft thunk.
She leaned back on her elbows, watching me with dark, hungry eyes as I knelt between her spread thighs. I pressed my mouth to her inner thigh, then higher, breathing in the warm, sweet scent of her. The first slow lick pulled a quiet gasp fromher throat. I licked her again, deeper this time, then closed my lips around her clit and sucked gently.
“Gabriel…” she whispered, voice strained with the need to stay quiet. Her fingers tangled tight in my hair.
I worked her with my tongue and two fingers, stroking that spot inside her that always made her thighs shake. She was soaked, hot and slick against my mouth, and every tiny, stifled moan she tried to hold back made my cock throb painfully against my zipper.
I devoured her—slow, focused, relentless—until her back arched off the table and her pussy clenched rhythmically around my fingers. She came with a silent cry, hips jerking against my tongue as she rode it out, one hand pressed over her own mouth—old habit from the early baby days, even now that the monitor was a one-way speaker.
