He keeps looking at me, calm on the surface, but I know him too well now not to feel the tension under it. He may look steady, but this cost him. Roman has always carried love like something dangerous, something that could be used against him if it ever took full shape in the open.
Now it has.
I put my glass down before I drop it.
“You can’t say things like that while I’m holding wine.”
That gets the smallest flicker of a smile out of him. “Why not?”
“Because now I’m emotional and unbalanced.”
“You were already emotional and unbalanced.”
“Roman.”
He laughs softly, but his eyes stay on mine. “I love you,” he says again, quieter this time. “I’ve loved you for so long I can’t even separate the feeling from the rest of my life anymore. It’s just there. In everything.”
My throat tightens so suddenly I have to look away.
All these years, all the pain it took to get here, and he says it like that. Plainly. No ornament. No defense.
He touches my chin and brings my face back toward him. “You don’t have to say it because I did.”
I let out a shaky laugh. “That’s good, because I’m still trying to recover from your timing.”
His mouth curves.
Then I say, because now there’s no point keeping any of it hidden, “I think I’ve loved you in every wrong way for years.”
Something hot and bright moves through his face at that. Relief, maybe. Or recognition. “You think?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “I’m being modest.”
That breaks the last of the tension.
He kisses me then, and it starts soft. Not because He isn’t hungry. Because he is. Because we both are. But there’s too much feeling in the room now for either of us to rush past it. His mouth moves slowly over mine, one hand at my waist, the other sliding up into my hair, and I melt into him in a way I never could have in the beginning, back when wanting him still felt too much like falling with nothing under me.
Now there is something under me.
Him. The children. This house. The life we built with bruised hands and stubbornness and an unreasonable amount of luck.
I kiss him back and feel him smile into it, just once, before the kiss deepens and turns warmer and heavier. My hands slide up his chest under the open collar of his shirt, and when I touch bare skin, he lets out that low sound that always goes straight between my legs.
“That’s unfair,” I murmur.
“What is?”
“Saying you love me and then kissing me like that.”
He brushes his mouth along my jaw. “I can do worse.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
His hand moves lower over my hip, drawing me closer, and now the softness is burning into something else. Something familiar and beloved and still powerful enough to make my breath catch. I can feel his body changing against mine, the hardening heat of him, and I smile against his throat because some things, thankfully, never become ordinary.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. “I should take you upstairs.”
