A pause.
“If you want to,” he said again, but his fingers tightened slightly around mine. Just enough to betray the truth.
He wanted it.
He just wouldn’t beg.
“Why not a hotel?” I asked.
His gaze sharpened. “No.”
The single syllable was absolute.
“Because you don’t share,” I murmured before I could stop myself.
His eyes flickered—dark, intent.
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
Heat curled low in my belly again, sharp and immediate.
I tried to breathe through it like a sane person.
“What about Harper?” I asked, changing direction because if I didn’t, I was going to do something reckless in a plane seat.
Cassian’s thumb kept moving slowly across my knuckles, grounding me in the present.
“I told you—I want to meet her,” he said. “And her husband.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s part of your life,” he replied. “And I’m stepping into it.”
The words should have alarmed me.
Instead, they made something in my chest loosen.
“You’re doing this like it’s … inevitable,” I said again.
His gaze held mine. “You keep saying that.”
“Because it feels true.”
A beat passed.
Then, quieter, “It feels true to me, too.”
My breath caught.
That was the softening.
A single sentence that admitted something without making it sound like weakness.
I stared at him, heat and fear and something dangerously tender tightening together inside me.
“And what does that mean,” I asked softly, “when we land?”
Cassian’s hand covered mine fully now, warm and steady.
