Her fingers tightened around mine and felt my dragon finally, finally begin to settle and almost purr. She was here and she was safe holding my hand.
Everything else could wait.
11
KAEL
The second the blankets shifted in the nest, I could tell that Amara was slowly waking up. I heard her exhale and saw her fingers twitch against the pillow. I shifted the weight of my body, and I shook my leg a bit because it’d gone numb. It felt like pins and needles shooting up my calf after sitting still for three hours.
Her eyes opened and she blinked, staring at the ceiling. Then she looked around the room, before slowly peeking over the edge of the nest at me.
"You're awake," I said, because I needed to say something and that was what came out.
She didn't answer immediately. Her eyes moved around the room, taking in the shelves and the photographs and the accumulated evidence of the years I'd spent in this space before I'd become Kael the baker instead of Kael Solas. Then her gaze dropped to what was around her and something in her expression shifted in a way I couldn't quite name.
She touched the edge of one of the cardigans.
Then she reached into the center of the nest and her fingers closed around the tattered paperback I'd placed there without thinking in the dark.
She looked at the cover for a long moment. Long enough that I started to wonder what she was thinking. Long enough that something in her face went very soft and very private, like she was having a conversation with herself that I wasn't meant to hear.
She set it back down carefully, right where she'd found it, and looked at me.
"How long was I asleep?" she asked.
"A few hours. Your heat broke around two."
She nodded slowly and then the full weight of the previous evening moved across her face all at once. I watched it happen.The ballroom. The revelation. Colin. Lila. The heat hitting her on the dance floor in front of everyone she'd been dreading seeing.
She moved to climb out of the nest.
"Amara."
I didn't grab her, just rested my hand against her arm, the lightest possible point of contact, and felt her go still beneath it.
"I'm fine," she said.
"You don't have to be."
She looked at me with those bright brown eyes and I could see her deciding something. Her brain was working through it in real time.
"I've never been in a nest before," she said, quietly, like the admission cost her something.
My dragon vibrated beneath my skin at the omission.
"I know," I said. "I could tell."
She pulled one of the old cardigans against her chest, her fingers working into the soft fabric. "You put cardigans in it."
"I found them in the closet. It just felt right."
She held up the paperback without a word, her eyebrow raised slightly.
I looked at it. Genuinely registering for the first time what my hands had reached for in the dark when I was building the nest on instinct alone, grabbing everything soft and familiar within reach.
Pride and Prejudice.
I didn't have an explanation for that. I'd had a copy since college and it had lived on that bedside table so long I'd stopped seeing it. But my hands had found it anyway and placed it in the center of everything I was building for her.
