All three giggled and flailed like overturned beetles.
Erin sighed, love and terror and bone-deep fatigue folding together in one complicated exhale.
“You all right?” Alex’s voice came from behind her, warm and amused.
Erin turned. Alex was standing in the doorway, framed by tall stone and spilling lamplight, cloak falling open to show the dark green jumper underneath. Snowflakessparkled in her golden hair. Her cheeks were pink from the cold too, lips curved in that small, real smile that belonged only to family, not cameras.
Even wrapped in three layers of wool, she still moved like royalty—like someone who had never been told to make herself smaller or quieter or less.
It did something to Erin every single time. She was still more beautiful than anyone Erin had ever seen.
“They’re fine,” Erin said, jerking her thumb toward the writhing heap of children. “The snow cushioned their inevitable self-destruction.”
“You say that very calmly,” Alex said, stepping out onto the front step, pulling the door mostly closed behind her. “Given that they’re lying very close to what I’m fairly sure is ice.”
“You have to project calm,” Erin replied. “If they smell fear, they multiply.”
“We only have three,” Alex said, sounding genuinely scandalised.
“For now,” Erin muttered. They had discussed trying for another baby. And maybe they would soon. They had both just been so busy and their schedules already so full.
Florence had managed to extricate herself and was now patting snow onto Matilda’s head. Frank was trying to make a snow angel and, in the process, kicking both his sisters in the shins.
“Boots off before they come in,” Alex said. “If they trail half the Highlands through the hall, Mrs. MacLeod will resign on the spot and I am not doing Christmas without her mince pies.”
“Copy that, Ma’am,” Erin said automatically. It slipped out before she could stop it, the drilled responses from years earlier surfacing.
Alex’s sharp blue eyes flickered at the title. Just a tiny tightening of something around her mouth, there and gone.
Erin felt a small, sharp pang.
She’d been trying to stop with the Ma’ams for years. At least at home. The boundaries had saved them once, clearly defining where Queen ended and wife began. Lately it felt like they’d drifted too far back toward formal, like two magnets turned the wrong way, repelling each other with all the wrong words.
She rubbed a gloved hand over the back of her neck, as if she could smooth the awkwardness away.
“Lex,” she corrected herself quietly.
Her wife’s expression eased. “Yes, Sergeant?”
Erin’s lips twitched. Fair enough.
She stepped closer, drawn like she always was, even under the thin layer of embarrassment. The cold made Alex’s eyes look impossibly blue, snow clinging to her golden lashes. There were faint lines at her brow now too, deeper than the last time they’d been here together. A little more weight on her shoulders. A little more steel in the way she held herself.
Six years ago, Erin had slept outside Alex’s door on tour and dreamed about touching her like this—to be able to reach out without checking for cameras or adjusting her stance because of optics.
Now she could. Now that was the easy part, and somehow… she still hesitated.
She made herself take the last step anyway.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey yourself,” Alex replied, voice softer.
Up close, she could smell Alex’s perfume under the cold and wool, something subtle and expensive and utterly her. It hit Erin’s nervous system like a drug.
There. That heat was still there, humming just under her skin.
It had been so long since she’d allowed herself to really feel it. There hadn’t been time. There was always someone awake, someone needing, someone watching.
