Page 57 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

He must have seen it, because a faint flush crept up his own neck, a shy little smile tugging at the corner of his mouth even as his gaze stayed dark and hungry. Cute and filthy all at once. It made me want him even more.

“Condom,” I managed, reaching for the nightstand. He leaned over with me, grabbed one from the drawer, tore the packet open with his teeth, and rolled it on with steady, practiced hands, his jaw tight with restraint as he gave himself one firm stroke before looking back at me.

He paused, hovering above me, thumb brushing my cheek. “You sure, sweetheart? You’re not too sore? We don’t have to—if it’s too much after last night…” His voice was rough but so gentle, the concern clear in his eyes even as his cock nudged against me, thick and ready.

The care in his voice made my heart squeeze. “I’m sure,” I whispered, pulling him closer. “I want you again. Now.” The words felt like a promise I was finally brave enough to make.

He sank into me in one smooth thrust, both of us groaning at the slick, perfect fit. This round started with him on top—deep, rolling strokes that had me gasping—but I wanted more control. I pushed at his chest, and he let me roll him onto his back without resistance, eyes blazing with heat as I straddled him.

I sank down onto his cock slowly, taking every inch until I was fully seated, both of us moaning at the new angle. Bracing my hands on his chest, I rode him—slow at first, grinding deep, then faster, hips rolling as he gripped my thighs and thrust up to meet me.

“That’s it,” he breathed, the dirty talk still surprising both of us but flowing easier now, low and wrecked. “You feel so good.” Sunlight poured over us, highlighting every flex of muscle and the raw pleasure on his face. “You’re so damn beautiful, Elizabeth. Gonna make me lose my mind.”

I came again with a sharp cry, clenching around him, and he followed right after, hips jerking as he groaned my name.

After, sprawled across him, boneless, my ear on his chest listening to his heart bang its way back down to a lawful speed, I did what I have done in every room I have ever entered. I checked for the exits.

Old habit. Automatic.

The floor plan lights up, and I know where the door is, how many steps it takes, what I’d say on my way through it—I have run that check my whole life, as automatic as breathing. Except this time it came back strange. I found the door fine. What I couldn’t find was the part of me that wanted to know where it was. And in the spot where that cold little sentry usually stands, there was something else instead—something enormous and sunlit and completely unsupervised, rising through me slow, like the light climbing his bedroom wall. It had a name. I knew its name. Everybody knows its name. I wasn’t going to say it—not yet, not out loud, not before coffee—but it wasn’t asking my permission, either. It had already hung up its coat.

Matt pressed a lingering kiss to my temple, his hand stroking slow circles up and down my back. “Shower’s all yours if you want it,” he murmured, voice still husky. “Take your time, sweetheart. No rush at all. I’ll get coffee and breakfast going.”

I slipped out of bed on shaky legs and padded to his bathroom, the warm spray hitting my skin like a gentle reset. Standing under the water, letting it soak my hair and wash over the pleasant ache in my body, I felt it hit me all at once: I was gone for him.

Completely, stupidly, irreversibly gone. The careful walls I’d built for years had crumbled overnight, and instead of panic, all I felt was a deep, glowing certainty. This man—steady, protective, unexpectedly filthy and sweet—had me. And for the first time in forever, that didn’t scare me. It felt like coming home.

I came out wearing nothing but his gray Henley, the hem brushing mid-thigh, nothing underneath. Matt looked up from the stove the second I stepped into the kitchen doorway. His eyes darkened instantly, a slow, appreciative smile spreading across his face.

“Hungry?” he said, voice still a little rough, pressing one more soft kiss to my lips before reluctantly letting me go.

“Obscenely.”

“Good. Sit.” He gestured to a stool at the counter and turned back to the stove. He was barefoot, in nothing but last night’s jeans riding low on his hips, making breakfast in a sun-flooded kitchen, and my stomach did something low and swooping that had nothing to do with hunger. “Stay put,” he said, without turning around. “I’ll pour the coffee.”

And I sat, and I felt it land somewhere underneath my ribs before I had the words for it.

Because this was the thing I never got. I am the one who pours the coffee. I am the one who knows your order before you order it, who’s already moving toward the thing you need before you’ve finished asking, who has spent her whole life a half-step ahead of everyone’s wants so that nobody ever has to wonder whether I noticed. Nobody stands me at a counter and tells me to stay put. Nobody hands me the morning already made. A few weeks ago I’d fed this man dumplings on the worst night of his year, and now here he was at his own stove doing the exact same thing back, and the reversal of it went through me warm and disorienting.

I didn’t have to earn this. That was the part that got me, sitting there in his shirt with the sun coming across the counter. I didn’t have to be useful for it, or manage it, or orchestrate it, or clock what he needed so I’d be allowed to want something back. He’d simply looked at me and decided to take care of me, and all I had to do was sit on a stool and let him. And he was so unfairly beautiful doing it—the bare back, the low jeans, the ordinary domestic focus of a man cracking eggs into a pan for a woman he wanted fed—that the wanting and the something-tender got tangled together in my chest until I couldn’t have said where one stopped and the other started.

The shoulders on that man—wide and powerfully built, shifting and flexing under sun-gold skin as he cracked eggs one-handed with quiet efficiency. The long, muscled line of his back tapering to a trim waist, arms corded from years of early-morning discipline and real work, hair deliciously wrecked by my hands, jaw rough with morning stubble that I suddenly wanted to feel against my skin again. All of it moving around that kitchen with the same easy competence as ever, coffee brewing, butter for the eggs sizzling in the pan, bread toasting, like the grand finale of a contest nobody had told me I’d already won.

The sight of him—so solid, so quietly happy in his own space—made my throat tighten with a wave of longing that felt dangerously permanent.

He caught me watching. Didn’t say anything. Just looked at me standing by the counter in his shirt, and something went over his face like sun over a field, and he pointed the spatula at me.

“That’s my shirt.”

“It’s my shirt now. I won it.”

“Won it, did you?”

“Spoils,” I said, sliding onto the counter stool, hooking my bare feet on the rung. “You can file a report.”

“I’ll allow it,” he said, in a dead-on Grandma Iris impersonation that made me bark laughing, and set a mug of coffee in front of me—and then he leaned across the counter and kissed me once, slow, tasting like morning, and went back to the eggs like a man who intended to do all of this every day for the rest of his life.

My phone buzzed on the counter, where it had spent a very neglected night. My mother. I braced and opened it.