The palm settles against the curve of it—warm, rough, calloused from years of firearms and tactical equipment and the specific physical demands of a career spent gripping things that were designed to be held by hands exactly like his. His thumb rests at the crest of my cheekbone, just below the shadow of my lower lashes.
I close my eyes.
And I allow myself to feel it.
Not the analytical cataloguing of contact that my officer’s brain performs by default—pressure, temperature, location, duration, threat assessment: none. The actual feeling. The warmth of his skin against mine. The way his palm cradles my face like it was built for this exact purpose, the ergonomic precision of two surfaces that have been separated for a decade and still fit.
The way his scent softens at this distance. The frozen pine losing its defensive edge, the smoked oud coming forward, the peppermint bark settling into something that doesn’t bite but soothes. Close enough that the scent becomes a taste—a flavor in the back of my throat, dark and warm and carrying the specific, devastating familiarity of something I’d forgotten I craved.
I open my eyes.
He’s closer.
Inches. The distance between his face and mine has collapsed while my eyes were closed, his body moving with the gravitational certainty of a man who is done maintaining distance and is operating on the only truth his biology has ever reliably provided.
We share a look.
The kind that contains an entire relationship in its frame. Every tied score and midnight argument and stolen glance across a firing range. Every library session that lasted too long because neither of us could leave without the other leaving first. Every night that the competition dissolved into something that smelled like pine and tasted like hunger and left both of us pretending the next morning that it hadn’t happened.
Every year of distance that didn’t diminish a single thing.
His eyes lower.
To my lips.
The movement is visible—a deliberate, conscious shift of focus from my eyes to my mouth, the universal telegraphof intent that his body is broadcasting without his pride’s permission.
“You already know I’m not good at the romantic shit,” he says.
His voice comes out rough. Frayed. The vocal equivalent of the torn jacket—damaged by the blast and the sleeplessness and the hours of screaming through a phone and the specific, interior violence of watching a car explode fifteen yards from the woman he loves.
He huffs.
The sound is so characteristically Roman—the frustrated exhale of a man who considers emotional articulation a design flaw in the human operating system—that something in my chest cracks. Not breaks.Cracks. The way a wall cracks when the pressure on one side becomes too great for the structure to hold, the first fissure in a surface that has been bearing weight it was never designed to support.
His thumb strokes my cheek.
One slow, devastating pass of callused skin against the soft tissue beneath my eye.
“So…can I kiss you instead?”
He’s asking.
He’s asking.
Roman Kade—who takes, who competes, who claims space and rank and the last word in every argument—is asking permission to put his mouth on mine.
Because Oakley asked before he kissed my cheek. And Alaric asked before he hugged me. And somewhere between the alley and the hospital bed, these three men decided that asking is the standard and anything less is unacceptable.
They’re rewriting the rules.
One question at a time.
I huff.
The sound mirrors his—the same frustrated, incredulous exhale, the same inability to articulate what’s happening in the space between two people who have spent a decade expressing affection through mutual antagonism. But the corner of my lip lifts. Just slightly. The ghost of a smirk that my face produces when it’s feeling something it doesn’t have the vocabulary for and defaults to the expression that has always lived closest to the truth.
“Of course you can, stupi?—”
