Page 206 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

And wonder.

“I love you,” he said, low and certain. “I love you in the way that means I want the hard parts. Your apartment and your ambition. Max’s food containers in my refrigerator. Your thrift-store scarves in my entryway. Your family, if they’ll have me. Your work, your stubbornness, your terrible habit of risking your life when a better plan is available.”

A laugh caught in my throat, dangerously close to a sob.

His hands tightened at my waist. “I don’t want to make room for you as if you are an interruption. I want my life to fit you. I want to build it that way, if you’ll let me.”

I rose on my toes and kissed him.

This kiss wasn’t like the one in Dimitris’s gallery. That had been relief and terror, two people grabbing for proof of life while the room fell apart around them. This was slower. Worse. Better.

His hands settled at my waist, firm enough to make my pulse trip, then gentled as if he had to remind himself I was real and tired and recently injured. I slid my arms around his neck, and he made a low sound that seemed to come from somewhere dragon and man met inside him.

Then his hands tightened again.

He paused there, forehead against mine, giving me one breath to understand what he wanted.

I nodded.

He lifted me like I weighed nothing.

My legs wrapped around his waist on instinct, and the sound he made this time wasn’t restrained at all. He kissed me harder, one arm locked beneath me, the other braced along my back, holding me so securely that for once my body didn’t have to do anything but want him.

“Tell me to stop,” he said against my mouth.

“No.”

“Tell me if anything hurts.”

I drew back enough to look at him. “I want you. I trust you. And if you keep checking in every six seconds, I’m going to start feeling like a municipal project.”

His eyes warmed. “You are more complicated than most municipalities.”

“That wasn’t sexy, but I respect the accuracy.”

He kissed me again, and this time I felt him smile.

We made it to the bedroom slowly because neither of us seemed willing to stop touching long enough to move efficiently. He set me on the bed, fingers sliding beneath the hem of my borrowed sweater, then pausing at my ribs. I covered his hands with mine and kissed him again before either of us moved farther.

My hands moved and settled against his shirtfront, careful over the injury beneath it. I kissed the edge of the bandage.

His hand came up to the back of my head. “Quinn.”

“I’m okay.”

“I know.”

“You’re allowed to be cared for too.”

He went still.

Then his forehead lowered to mine.

The room seemed to draw in around us: firelight moving over the walls, clean sheets turned down at the edge of the bed, the hush of a house large enough to hold grief and history and still somehow make space for this.

For us.

Rafe lowered me to the mattress carefully, one knee pressing into the bed beside my hip, his hands still at my waist as if he could not quite convince himself to let go. His gaze moved over me, not hurried, not casual. He looked at my face first, then the bandage near my collarbone, then lower, his attention darkening in a way that made my skin feel too sensitive for the room.