CHAPTER ONE
I woke to the feel of Jack’s mouth on my shoulder.
Not a kiss exactly—more like a question. A slow, deliberate contact that said I’m here, and I’m interested, and there’s no rush. His lips traced the curve where my neck met my collarbone, warm and unhurried, and his hand was already moving beneath the thin sheet, spreading wide across my hip in that proprietary way that still made my pulse trip after all this time.
The ceiling fan turned lazy circles above us, set to high to combat the humidity that clung to everything like a second skin. An unprecedented May heatwave had settled over King George County three days ago and showed no signs of leaving. Even at—I squinted at the clock—five twelve in the morning, the air was thick enough to chew.
But Jack’s skin was warm against my back, and his hand was sliding across my stomach with a reverence that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with what was happening beneath the surface. Ten weeks. Still too early to show, too early for anyone to know except us and my doctor and Lily, who’d overheard at the hospital and had promised to keep our secret.
“You’re awake,” he murmured against my skin.
“You’re making it very hard not to be.”
His low laugh rumbled through his chest and into mine. “That was the idea.”
I rolled to face him. The pre-dawn light filtered through the glass wall—that massive pane that looked out over the trees and down to the Potomac—and turned everything silver and soft. It was my favorite time in this room, when the world outside was still deciding whether to wake up and everything inside felt suspended, private, ours.
Jack propped himself on one elbow and looked down at me with those dark eyes that never failed to undo me. He stretched over me, all height and muscle, his weight familiar and steady. My palm slid over the ridged scar along his ribs, the one he pretended didn’t ache in cold weather. His nose had never quite healed straight, and the scar through his eyebrow tugged when he smiled. He felt like something carved from stone and built to last. His dark hair was cropped close to tame the curl that drove him crazy when it grew out. He needed a haircut.
“No morning sickness?” he asked.
“Second morning in a row.” I smiled up at him. “I think the worst might be over.”
“Yeah?” His hand moved back to my hip, and this time the question in his touch had nothing careful about it. “So you’re feeling…”
“I’m feeling like my husband should stop asking questions and start doing something useful.”
The grin that spread across his face was slow and devastating and entirely too pleased with itself. “Yes, ma’am.”
He kissed me then, really kissed me, and I let myself sink into it the way you sink into a warm bath at the end of a brutal day. His mouth was soft and thorough and tasted like the man I’d somehow ended up building a life with, this impossible, stubborn, beautiful man who’d been my friend before he was my partner and my partner before he was my everything.
His hand slid up beneath my tank top, and I arched into his palm. The calloused pads of his fingers traced patterns on my ribs that were almost unbearably gentle, like I was something precious and breakable, which I was decidedly not. But the tenderness in his touch cracked open a vault I’d spent years constructing, and he’d dismantled it without even trying.
“I love you,” he said against my mouth, and it wasn’t a preamble or a performance. It was just a fact. The same way gravity was a fact, or the Potomac flowing past our cliffs was a fact. Immutable. Beyond argument.
“I love you back,” I whispered, pulling him closer.
His weight settled over me, and the world narrowed to the slide of skin on skin, the sound of our breathing, the magic of two people who knew each other’s bodies like their own, who knew where to touch and when to be patient and when patience was the last thing either of them wanted. His mouth found the spot below my ear that made me forget my own name.
“God, I’ve missed this,” I breathed. The last couple of months had been brutal—weeks of nausea and exhaustion that had turned our bed into a recovery ward rather than anything resembling a love nest. But this morning, with the sickness finally loosening its grip and Jack’s hands moving with a purpose that made my blood hum, I felt like myself again.
“I’ve missed you,” he corrected, his voice rough and low in a way that lit up every nerve I had. His mouth traced a path down my throat, and my fingers dug into the muscles of his back, feeling them shift and flex beneath his skin?—
His phone buzzed on the nightstand.
We both froze. That specific vibration pattern—dispatch, not personal. The one that meant someone, somewhere in King George County, had reached the end of their story in the worst possible way.
Jack dropped his forehead against my collarbone. “No.”
“You have to answer it.”
“What if I pretend I didn’t hear it?”
It buzzed again. Insistent. Unapologetic.
I laughed, even though I wanted to throw the phone through the glass and into the Potomac.
“Jack.”
