He didn’t move.
She lay tucked into him with the specific, unguarded trust of someone who had fallen asleep expecting to be safe and had not been proven wrong. Her hair spread across his shoulder in dark waves. Her hand rested open against his chest, fingers loose, palm warm. In sleep she’d released every careful posture, every calibrated expression, every layer of composure she wore in waking hours the way other people wore armor.
She looked younger. Completely herself in a way she probably didn’t allow during daylight.
He studied her without apology.
Her bruise hadn’t developed yet—it would, where his arm had braced across her shoulder pulling herbehind him on the balcony—but he could see the faint marks his hands had left on her hips. Not damage. Evidence. He ran his thumb across one and something territorial moved through him at the sight.
She’d chosen this. He kept returning to that fact the way a man returns to ground he knows will hold him. She hadn’t offered herself as payment. She hadn’t submitted out of obligation or fear or the long training of a woman who’d learned compliance as a survival skill. She’d reached for him. She’d said yes and please and don’t you dare stop with a ferocity that had taken him apart more thoroughly than anything purely physical could have managed.
He’d had women before. He wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
He hadn’t wanted any of them the way he wanted her. That distinction mattered, and he was too honest with himself to minimizeit.
Her lashes moved. Asmall shift of her body. She was surfacing.
He watched her come back to consciousness, the slight tightening of her fingers against his chest, the gradual deepening of her breath, the moment her eyes opened and the room registered and she remembered where shewas.
She didn’t tense. Didn’t pull away.She turned her face up toward him instead, and her eyes found his in the early golden light. She didn’t say anything, just looked at him with that direct gray-blue gaze that had been undoing his composure since the first evening in the Donatidrawingroom.
“Morning,” she said. Her voice was gravelly with sleep.
He liked it and a rare smile eased the corners of his mouth. “Morning.”
A small silence. Not empty. Charged with the awareness of two people in close proximity who had spent the night learning each other’s bodies and hadn’t yet established the language for the morning after.
She solved it by pressing her mouth to hisjaw.
The contact was soft. Tentative in a way that told him she wasn’t entirely certain of her welcome. That the old reflex to wait for permission still lived in her hands even when the rest of her had moved past it. He turned his head and caught her mouth properly.
He kissed her thoroughly. The way he intended to kiss her every morning going forward, though he kept that particular decision to himself for now.When he finally lifted his head, her eyes weredark.
“Shower,” he said.
Her mouth curved.
“Together?”
“Definitely.”
The water was hot by the time she stepped in after him, steam already filling the glass enclosure, the large rain head sending sheets of water across the stone floor. Magnus watched her cross the threshold through the glass—the unselfconscious way she moved now, unhurried, her dark hair already loose around her shoulders—afamiliartightening gathering low in his body that he’d managed with varying degrees of success.
He didn’t manage itnow.
He reached for her the moment the door closed behind her, pulling her under the water with him. She came without hesitation, her wet hands finding his chest, her face tipping up through the warm cascade. He kissed her again, deeper this time, with none of the morning’s restraint. The water ran over both of them and she pressed into him with a smile against his mouth.
“You’re not a patient man in the morning,” shesaid.
“I’ve been patient for long enough,” he replied against her lips. “I’m done with it.”
She laughed, areal one, brief and startled and unguarded, and the sound of it moved through him with a force entirely disproportionate to its size. He’d wanted to hear that laugh without reservation or fear behind it since the first time he’d caught a glimpse of it in the sitting room, edgy and surprised, breaking apart before she could rein itback.
He intended to hear it often.
He turned her so the water ran down her front and her shoulder blades were against the cool stone of the wall. Her breath caught at the temperature contrast. He pressed his mouth to her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder, taking his time, learning the sounds she made with the same attention he’d given the contract language the morningby thepool.
Methodical. Thorough. With a hint of volatility.
