CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
The second alarmdrags me up from the dead.
I surface slowly, like breaking through warm water, the world syrup-thick around me. My limbs feel boneless, my skin hums where he touched me hours ago—hell, minutes ago, who knows anymore—and my throat is dry from groaning his name into a pillow.
For a second, I don’t open my eyes. I just breathe and feel.
Warm body beside me.
A leg thrown over mine.
The faint polished-salt smell of his skin mixed with sweat and sex.
The slow, even breathing of someone who got absolutely railed and then loved within an inch of passing out.
And then I do open my eyes, because how the hell am I not going to look at my husband the morning after we wrecked each other?
Ollie’s on his stomach, face buried in the pillow, hair a messy halo across his forehead. One arm is slung over my waist, the other tucked beneath him like he was trying to hold himself down. There’s a faint red mark on his shoulder from my teeth,and I feel something ugly and primal and stupidly tender claw up my chest at the sight.
He’s beautiful like this—unguarded, open, mine.
My husband.
Fuck, that word hits like a freight train every time.
I watch him for long enough that I know I’m being pathetic, but I can’t stop. My heart does something embarrassing, a full stuttering roll, because nothing about this feels wrong. Not even the hangover creeping in. Not even the sore burn in my thighs. Not even the bruises I know I’m going to find later.
There isn’t even a flicker of regret.
If anything, there’s the opposite. A greedy, selfish kind of joy curling into my bones.
He stirs when I touch his hair, groaning low, burying his face deeper into the pillow.
“No,” he mutters, voice sandpaper thick. “Five more minutes.”
His hand drags up my ribs, lazy, possessive.
“You have a flight,” I whisper, kissing the side of his head. “And practice. And a future to dominate.”
“Don’t care,” he grumbles. “Cancel it.”
“You can’t cancel March Madness, Ollie,” I say, smiling into his hair.
He makes an unhappy sound that might actually be a growl.
I kiss beneath his ear. “Hey. Baby. Wake up.”
He goes still. Then—slowly—he rolls onto me, half asleep and all heat, pressing me into the mattress with his whole gorgeous body. His forehead drops to my chin, and he breathes against my throat.
“Don’t call me baby unless you want me to climb you again,” he mumbles.
My dick twitches in a way that proves I am, in fact, deeply in danger.
“Normally? Yes. Absolutely. Destroy me,” I say. “But we have—” I tap his hip. “—like forty minutes before you need to be dressed and out the door.”
He lifts his head enough to squint at me. His eyes are half lidded, pupils big, expression soft and wrecked and so fucking in love I have to look away for a second.
