A faint shift crossed his expression.
“No.”
“I thought you might.”
I studied him, the calm in his face, the steadiness.
“And I still—” I hesitated, searching. “I still felt it.”
His gaze met mine.
“Good,” he said.
The word settled deep.
I let out a slow breath, my mind trying—and failing—to organize what I was feeling into something clean, something structured.
It didn’t work.
It didn’t fit.
Because this wasn’t something I could stand outside of and analyze.
I was in it.
18
Ididn’t move right away.
Neither did he.
The room held that quiet, suspended stillness that comes after something shifts and hasn’t settled yet. The fire had burned lower, shadows stretching longer across the walls, the world outside still wrapped in snow and silence. Inside, everything felt closer. Warmer. Sharper.
His hand was still at my hip.
I became acutely conscious of every place our bodies touched—the length of his thigh against mine, the slow rise and fall of his chest, the faint drag of his thumb where it rested against my skin. It wasn’t absentminded. Nothing about him ever was.
It was … deliberate.
Even now.
I turned my head slightly, studying him.
He was already watching me.
Not with the same intensity as before. Not with that focused, predatory awareness that had defined him since the moment I met him.
This was different.
Quieter.
But no less controlled.
“You’re thinking again,” he said.
His voice was low, roughened slightly by everything that had just passed between us.
I let out a small breath. “I don’t think that’s ever going to stop.”
