5
CORY
Iwake up with Shelby Cruise in my arms and the blizzard still howling outside and a feeling in my chest I haven't experienced since before the Teams.
Peace.
Not the manufactured kind I build through routine and discipline and keeping my world controlled to the inch. Real peace. The kind that comes from holding something warm against your body all night and knowing it's still there when you open your eyes.
She's curled into me with her back against my chest, her hair fanning across the pillow in copper and gold. My arm is wrapped around her waist, my hand flat against her stomach, and she's breathing in that slow, deep rhythm that tells me she's out cold. Truly sleeping. Not the restless, half-alert kind of sleep I've gotten used to. The kind where your body trusts the person next to you enough to go completely offline.
I don't move. I lie there and listen to her breathe and feel her heartbeat under my palm and something enormous shifts inside me. A wall I built so carefully that I forgot it was there. I just feel it going, brick by brick, and in its place there's something raw and exposed and terrifying and good.
I press my lips to the back of her neck. She makes a soft sound and pushes back against me, still asleep, and my body responds instantly. I'm hard against the curve of her ass, and the heat of her skin through the thin sheet is making it very difficult to be a gentleman about this.
She stirs. Her hand finds mine on her stomach and her fingers thread through mine.
"What time is it?" Her voice is sleep-rough and warm and I want to hear it every morning for the rest of my life.
That thought should terrify me. It doesn't. It lands in my chest like a compass needle finding north.
"Oh five fifteen."
"You don't own an alarm clock, do you."
"Don't need one."
She rolls in my arms until she's facing me. Her eyes are still drowsy, her cheeks creased from the pillow, and she's smiling. That open, unguarded smile that rearranged something in my chest the first time I saw it in the parking lot.
"Hi," she whispers.
"Hi."
"The storm's still going."
"Sounds like it has another twelve hours at least."
"So we're trapped."
"Appears that way."
Her fingers trace the scar on my collarbone, a souvenir from a training exercise in Norway that involved a rock face and an equipment failure. Her touch is light and curious, like she's reading braille.
"This one?" she asks.
"Norway. Rappelling line frayed."
Her fingers move to my ribs. A puckered mark from shrapnel during a classified operation I'll never be able to tell her about.
"This one?"
"Can't say."
She nods, no frustration, no pushing. Just acceptance. Her fingers drift lower, tracing the ridgeline of muscle along my obliques, and my stomach tightens under her touch.
"And these?" Her hand flattens against my abs.
"Those are just from carrying heavy things up mountains."
