Page 65

I wake slowly and all at once.

For a moment, I truly do not know where I am. Then masculine strength warms my side and a hot rush of memory fills the space responsibility usually occupies.

Poet.

The farm.

The shower.

The bed.

A smile pulls at my face. I open my eyes to a room washed in pale morning light not bright enough to wake the man beside me, but enough to show me the masculine lines of him.

Poet is on his stomach, one arm stretched across the mattress, lashes long and fanned against his tanned face. I’m instantly hooked and I stare at him as I continue the hazy journey from sleep to fully awake. The curves and ridges of his strong frame, faint scars scattered across weather-stained skin. A face that’s somehow younger while he sleeps.

He is so peaceful like this. Safe, and it makes the thought that crosses my mind all the more dangerous.

Mine.

My brain scrambles to dissect it. But Poet stirs before I can make much sense of it, and the shift in him is a perfect balance of subtle and sudden. The tightness in his shoulders. The crease between his brows.

The snatched breath too quiet to be a gasp, and yet…I remember what he told me so long ago.

I don’t like that moment before everything settles. When I forget I’m different now and reach for things that aren’t there.

The memory is vivid. Poet stirs again and I am ready.

I do not wait. I reach across the bed and lay my hand on his shoulder before his eyes open. An anchor as he wakes. As he stares somewhere beyond me, confused and afraid, for a moment so long I feel it in my own flesh and bone.

Aš čia.

His gaze lands on my face. Recognition arrives and the furrow between his eyes disappears. “Oscar?”

“I am here.”

He nods.

I smile.

He stares at me for another long second before he smiles back and covers my hand with his own. “You remembered.”

“Of course.”

Something soft flickers across his face, an expression so fleeting I almost miss it. But the moment fades and as the morning light grows stronger around us, reality sets in.

I am low again. Not as low as I was in the night, but it is enough to require my full attention as Poet rises from the bed and leaves the room.

He really has left everything I need on the bedside table. I stabilise as he returns with coffee and a look on his face I can’t entirely decipher. “You are okay?”

Poet crouches beside the bed. “I’ve never slept with anyone before. The last person I woke up with was my sister and she had her foot in my face.”

I absorb that, taking a sip of coffee that bears little resemblance to the Lithuanian powdered instant I usually drink. “I have not slept with someone I have been…intimate with since I lived in Lithuania. Many years ago. Too many to count. I did fall asleep on the couch with Rubi a while ago, but there were no feet involved.”

Poet nods, still deep in thought.

And I am still naked and I wonder if that is what’s bothering him.

But that’s fleeting too.