"Your heart rate?"
I take stock. My heart is beating fast — but not the survival sprint from the dinner. Not the fight-or-flight of a manin a room full of predators. This is exertion, endorphins, the hummingbird pace of a body that just experienced something it wants to experience again immediately.
"Elevated," I say. "For the right reasons."
He kisses me. Slow this time. Gentle. The opposite of everything that just happened — careful and deliberate and tasting like a promise I didn't know I was looking for.
"Stay," I say. The word comes out before I can stop it. Before I can weigh it and analyze it and decide if it's strategically sound.
Ezra looks at me. "In the Pinewood Inn."
"In the Pinewood Inn."
"The depressing room with the terrible art."
"The art isn't that bad."
"Nico. It's a painting of a barn. The barn has no doors."
"Maybe it's a philosophical barn. Open concept."
He laughs. The real one — not the half-smile, not the smirk. A full laugh, muffled against my shoulder, his body shaking with it. I feel it everywhere.
He settles next to me, pulling me against his chest, his arm heavy across my ribs. The bed is a queen, which I previously thought was adequate for one person. With Ezra in it, it's barely enough, and I've never been more comfortable in my life.
"I'll stay," he says into my hair. "But I'm leaving before sunrise. Knox will know if I don't come home, and I'm not ready for that conversation."
"Knox already knows."
"Knox suspects. There's a difference. Suspecting means he gets to pretend he doesn't know, which is a courtesy I'd like to maintain for at least twenty-four more hours."
"He saidthe outlet thing was smoothto you on the way out. I have very good hearing for a human."
"You weren't supposed to hear that."
"And yet."
Ezra tightens his arm around me. "Go to sleep, Nico."
"I don't fall asleep easily. It takes me—"
"Go to sleep."
I close my eyes. His heartbeat is slow and steady against my back — the resting pulse of a man who is exactly where he wants to be. A lion who found something worth keeping and is holding onto it with the same patience he brings to everything. Spreadsheets and stray cats and a man who was efficient and lonely and didn't know the difference until someone wrote it on a dating profile.
Mine,his lion said. And Ezra stopped fighting it.
I fall asleep in eleven seconds. A new record.
Chapter 19
Ezra
I come through the side door at five-forty-five AM wearing Nico's sweatpants and a hickey on my collarbone that I didn't notice until I caught my reflection in the hotel bathroom mirror and thoughtwell, that's going to be a conversation.
The bar is dark. I move through it on autopilot. Kettle on, mug out, tea bag in. The routine is the same. Everything else is different. My body feels like it belongs to someone who just discovered a new room in a house he's lived in for years. Same structure, new space, the kind of thing that makes you wonder what else you missed.
I smell like him. Hotel soap and something underneath that's specific to Nico. Clean, precise, a scent that manages to be controlled even at a chemical level. It's all over me. My lion is smug about this in a way that's frankly obnoxious.
