There’s a heavy arm pinned across my waist, warm and muscular. Hale. I can tell by the scent of his cologne and the way his fingers curl like he’s subconsciously keeping guard over me even in his sleep.
His breathing is slow against the back of my neck as I reach out to silence my alarm. I’ve learned that he, more than the other two, sleeps like the dead.
Still, I’m careful as I pry myself out from under his arm. But just as I’m about to make my grand escape, he groans softly and reels me back in.
I giggle.
“You don’t have to get up yet,” he mumbles.
“I have an early meeting.”
His lips brush my bare shoulder, not quite a kiss, but burning with a casual claim nonetheless. “Busy bee…”
I twist as much as I can under the iron grip of his deadweight arm, my eyes adjusting to the dim morning light filtering through the gap in the curtains of his bedroom. He looks so ridiculously good with his tousled hair and faint stubble that I briefly consider canceling all my meetings to spend the day rolling around in the sheets with him.
But duty calls.
“Unhand me, you scoundrel,” I whisper.
“Nooo,” he moans, shoving his face into the crook of my neck.
I giggle again. In recent months, I’ve unlocked a playful side of Hale that has surprised, unsettled, and delighted all of us. He’s quicker to smile nowadays, and I even manage to get at least a handful of chuckles out of him on a daily basis.
But it’d be selfish to think that I’m the sole cause of his happiness.
“I love you,” I murmur. “But if you don’t release me, I’ll have to call the fire department so they can pry your arm off me with one of those metal thingies you use to break down doors.”
“Are you saying you want to invite Old Bill into our bedroom?”
I wriggle underneath him, choosing not to justify that with a response.
He chuckles, but eventually removes his arm. I slip away, but don’t make it far before I hear him calling my name.
Glancing over my shoulder, I blush at the way his sleepy eyes drift up my naked body.
“What, you big oaf?”
Hale smiles. “I love you, too.”
I step back toward the edge of the mattress and lean over to kiss him. He attempts to pull me back into bed, but I swat at him playfully until he relents.
Slipping down the hall to the room that has been designated as my private sleeping quarters, despite the fact that I rarely ever sleep in there alone, I duck into my ensuite and let the shower steam clear all the sleep from my mind.
There’s a scandalous mark on my inner thigh where Hale mischievously nipped at me last night, right next to the fadingbruise that Noah suckled into my skin the night before. And as I shampoo my hair, I have to take extra care to work out the knots that manifested when I told Evan to pull it yesterday afternoon.
An entire year, and they still can’t get enough of me. Nor I them.
Life is utter bliss.
I turn off the shower and wander toward my closet to pick out an outfit. Me and Lou will be meeting with a new client today, which used to be a novelty but is now becoming just another part of our routine. We’ve even had to hire an entire staff to support the massive influx of interest in our services following the success of the Save A Hero campaign.
Humming to myself, I swipe on red lipstick, then flounce back down the hall. When I peer back inside Hale’s room, he’s passed out again. Which is good, because he was at the station until midnight, and then spent over an hour once he got home taking his time with me in his bed.
Noah’s room is already empty when I peer through the cracked door, so he probably left earlier than my alarm woke me to hit the gym. Evan and Leo are gone, too, headed to a Career Day at his school.
Our apartment was a treasure trove we happened to stumble across last month, and even though we’re still unpacking boxes and figuring out how to combine our four separate households into a cohesive living space, it’s coming together well so far.
It’s like this place was made for us. I knew it as soon as I randomly decided to attend the open house and recognized all the charming quirks and oddities of a converted historic dwelling. There’s a separate section with two bedrooms perfectly situated for Evan and Leo, and then Noah gets the entire opposite end of the place to himself, while me and Hale have claimed the leftover rooms that branch off the main hallway.
