Finn pulls back the covers and gets into my bed like the answer's too obvious to say, and hauls me into him, my back to his chest, one arm heavy over me.
His hand splays flat on my sternum. Right where I pressed mine at the stoplight, like whatever I've been holding up alone, he's got a hand on it now too.
That's that. That's the answer.
I lie there in the dark while his breathing slows, and my body hums, low and warm and unfinished, wanting what it didn't get. I should be terrified.
There's a plan two feet from my head in a drawer, and a man wrapped around me who isn't in it. My suppressants are failing. There's a name for what's happening to me, and I keep that in the drawer too.
And then it starts.
Low. Under my ear, through his chest, through the length of my back. A slow, deep, rolling rumble, completely involuntary, the sound an alpha makes only when everything in him is settled at once.
Finn Morrow is purring.
Finn Morrow is purring, wrapped around me in my bed, dead asleep, and I lie very still in the circle of him and let it move through my bones like weather.
There's a name for this, too.
I don't finish the thought. I've kept that streak alive for four weeks and two miles and one whole impossible Monday.
But lying here, in the dark, in the sound of him, for the first time I can't remember why.
Chapter 26
Josie
Iwake up warm for the first time in five years, and my omega body knows exactly why before my brain catches up.
Not sun-through-the-curtains warm. Not extra-blanket warm.
Warm from the outside in. A furnace at my back, a heavy alpha arm across my middle, a hand splayed flat over my sternum like it got there on purpose and decided to stay. And for one long, stupid, perfect moment I don't remember why this is a problem.
Then I remember all of it, and I still don't move.
Finn Morrow is asleep in my bed. Dead to the world, breathing slow against the back of my neck, woodsmoke and clove gone soft with sleep and all through my sheets now. At some point in the night his knee came up under mine and his body curled around me like punctuation at the end of a sentence I didn't know I was writing.
He runs hot, the way alphas do. Everything about him that looks cold up close turns out to be the opposite.
I should get up. I have a garden to not-plant and a plan to panic about and a body doing something no suppressant issupposed to allow. I should slide out from under this arm, make coffee, be a person.
I stay exactly where I am and watch the light come up gray-gold on my ceiling and let myself have four more minutes of a thing I'm going to have to give back.
Five minutes.
Okay, ten.
Behind me, the breathing changes. A hitch, a slow inhale, the arm over my waist going tight as the rest of him surfaces.
He doesn't startle. Finn wouldn't startle if the house came down. He wakes the way he does everything, all at once and complete, and I know the exact second he remembers where he is, because his hand flexes against my sternum and goes still.
“Morning,” I say, to my bedroom wall, because I cannot look at him yet.
A pause. Then, gravel-rough with sleep, close enough to stir my hair, “Morning.”
“So this is my ceiling. You've seen it now. There's a water stain shaped like Ohio if you look.”
“Josie.”
