AMARA.
I read them all the way to the end, waiting to feel something. Irritation maybe, or maybe that familiar shrinking sensation that Lila had always managed to produce in me without even trying.
Nothing came.
Just a faint distant amusement, like watching something that used to have power over me from very far away.
I typed back two sentences.
I'm fine. I'll fill you in another time.
I set the phone down without waiting for her response and didn't think about her again.
"You're awake."
Kael's voice was rough with sleep, low against the back of my neck. His arm tightened slightly around my waist, a barely conscious pull toward him, and I felt the warmth of the scales against my back, steady and golden even in the morning light.
I rolled over to face him.
He looked absolutely devastating first thing in the morning. Rumpled tux shirt, hair disordered, hazel eyes soft andunhurried, the gold of the scales still glowing faintly across his chest and arms. He looked at me like I was the best thing he'd woken up to in years, maybe ever.
"Hi," I said biting my lower lip.
"Hi," he said back, his mouth curving.
We stayed like that for a while, talking about nothing important in the easy quiet way of people who have run out of things to hide from each other. His thumb moved absently back and forth against my waist and I let myself just exist in it, this warm unhurried morning with this man, without bracing for something to go wrong.
Then his phone buzzed.
He reached for it, read whatever was on the screen, and his expression did something that moved through fond and exasperated and landed on slightly pained.
"What?" I asked.
He turned the phone toward me without comment.
It was a text chain from his brothers. I got the general picture in about four seconds. The words breakfast, nine o'clock, Mother's orders, and don't be weird about it were all I needed.
I looked at the gala dress on the floor. Then I looked at my hair in the reflection of the dark window across the room.
Laughter burst out of me like a busted can of biscuits.
It was a real laugh, the kind that came from somewhere genuinely relaxed, the kind I hadn't produced before approximately ten o'clock on any given morning in recent memory.
"I am not going to breakfast like this," I said.
"No," Kael agreed immediately.
"I need a shower."
"Also yes."
He said it so casually that it took me a second to register the implication and then I looked at him and he looked at me and neither of us said anything else about it.
The bathroom was warm and steamy by the time we got there, the kind of warmth that softened everything at the edges and made the rest of the world feel very far away.
Kael reached past me to adjust the temperature, his chest brushing my back, and I tipped my head to the side when his lips found the bite mark on my neck. Not urgent. Just a quiet good morning pressed into my skin that made my eyes close and my hands find the edge of the sink for balance.
"Still tender?" he murmured against it.
