I pick her up.
She wraps her legs around my waist and I carry her down the hallway to my bedroom.
Something in the back of my head tries to make this a bigger moment than it already is, and I tell it to shut the fuck up because Leah Mercer is in my arms and nothing else matters.
I lay her on the bed.
She looks up at me—hair fanned across my pillow, chest rising and falling, those eyes dark and wanting—and I have to stop for a second.
Just stop and look at her. Because she's in my bed and she's beautiful and I need to remember this.
Every detail. Every second.
"What?" she whispers.
"Nothing. Just... you. Here." I lean down and press my mouth to the scar above her eyebrow.
Trace the line of it with my lips, from the start of her brow up through her forehead, following the path of it like a road I've been wanting to travel since the first time I noticed it across a hospital room.
She makes a sound—not a moan, something quieter.
Something that lives in the place between relief and want.
Her fingers find the hem of my shirt and pull it up, and I help her—over my head, tossed somewhere I don't care about—and then her hands are on my chest and her palms are warm and slightly rough from years of washing and gloving and working, and the touch of them on my bare skin feels like being found after a decade of being lost.
"Your turn," I say, and my voice doesn't sound like mine anymore. It's lower. Rougher. The voice of a man who's been locked down for ten years and just got the key.
I pull her sweater over her head. She's wearing a bra underneath—simple, dark, nothing fancy—and I don't care because what's underneath that is her, and I'm done waiting.
I unhook it with one hand. She raises an eyebrow.
"Impressive."
"I have skills."
"Clearly."
The bra comes off and I look at her—really look, the way I've been wanting to for weeks.
She's curved in all the right places.
Full breasts, soft stomach, the kind of body that a lesser man might not appreciate, but that I want to worship with my mouth and hands and every minute of the rest of the night.
She starts to cross her arms. Instinct, maybe, or insecurity, and I catch her wrists.
"Don't," I say. "Don't you hide from me, Leah Mercer."
Her arms drop. Her eyes hold mine.
There's a vulnerability there that she doesn't show anyone—not patients, not Garrett, not the ER.
Just me. Right here. Right now.
I start at her throat.
Press my lips to the pulse point, feel her heartbeat hammering under my mouth.
She tips her head back and I trace a line down the column of her neck with my tongue—slow, deliberate, tasting the salt of her skin and the faint trace of perfume she put on before she came here.
