“Good?”
Her smile is soft.“Yeah.”
I move closer.Not enough to press.Enough to feel the shift in the room.
“You okay?”I ask.
She nods.Then doesn’t say anything else.
I can see it happening in real time—the draw between us, the nerves, the memory of everything she told me over dinner, the fact that fear and wanting can live too close together in a woman who’s had to fight for her own skin.
So I give her room.
Even while I step close enough to touch.My hand comes up slowly, deliberate enough that she can stop me if she wants.She doesn’t.I brush my knuckles along her jaw.Her breath catches.
“Lucy.”
The way she looks at me after that—open, uncertain, already halfway gone—burns.I lower my head and kiss her.
Soft first.
A question, not a demand.
She answers by melting.
That’s the only word for it.Her mouth opens under mine with this quiet little sigh that shoots straight through me, and suddenly I understand every stupid dream I’ve had in the last two weeks because she tastes like a comfort food to my soul glazed with trust and the kind of sweetness that makes a man dangerous to himself.
My hand slides to her waist.Her fingers grip my shirt.And for one brutal second every instinct I have says take more.Deepen it.Pull her in.Learn the shape of every sound she makes.
Instead, I stop.
Not because I don’t want to go on.Because I do.Too much.I break the kiss and stay close enough that our breathing still mixes.
Lucy blinks up at me, dazed and soft and so damn beautiful it hurts.I rest my forehead lightly against hers for one second, then force myself to step back.
Her eyes sharpen slightly.“You’re stopping.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Because if I don’t, I’ll lose the thread of patience I’ve been building since the first night I saw fear on your face.Because getting you into bed isn’t the point.Because you’re worth more than me taking what’s easy.
Instead, I share the simpler truth.“Because I’m doing this right.I want to do right by you, by Quinn.”
Her throat works.
Something shifts in her expression then—something deeper than surprise.Recognition maybe.Or surrender.Not to me.To the fact that I’m serious.To the chance that she can believe there are still decent men out there.
I brush one thumb across her cheek, then let my hand fall.“You should get some sleep.”
She laughs softly, a little unsteady.“You keep saying that.”
“And you keep needing it.”
She smiles this time.A real one.I head for the door before I can change my mind about the patience thing.At the threshold, I glance back.
Lucy is still standing in the kitchen, one hand resting against the counter behind her, lips kissed pink and eyes fixed on me like she’s seeing something she didn’t expect.
