"Stop staring," she says.
"Not a chance."
The ring catches the lamplight when she reaches up to pull me down, and I take her wrist, press my mouth to her palm, feel her breath go shallow. She makes a sound that she'll deny later---low and involuntary---and her free hand grips the back of my neck and pulls.
There's no urgency to it. That's what's different from the inn, from the early months. This is unhurried in a way that only happens when you've stopped being afraid someone will disappear. Her fingers trace the scar on my wrist. My mouth finds the curve of her shoulder, the hollow beneath her ear that makes her exhale my name in pieces.
Then I work my way down.
She knows what's coming and her whole body goes still in that way it does---held breath, fingers threading into my hair, waiting. I press my mouth to the inside of her knee and feel her leg tremble. Take my time moving up her inner thigh, slow enough that she makes a sound halfway between impatience and please, and by the time I reach her she's already flushed and wanting and her hips lift without her permission.
"Tucker---"
"I've got you."
When my mouth finds her she exhales my name like she's been holding it for hours, and her fingers tighten in my hair hard enough to sting. I learn what she needs tonight the way I learn everything about her---by paying attention, by cataloguing the sharp intake of breath versus the low moan, the way her thighs press against my shoulders when I slow down versus the way her whole body arches when I don't. She comes apart with her hand pressed over her own mouth, and I feel it move through her in waves, and I stay with her all the way through it until she tugs me up by the hair and pulls me to her mouth.
She tastes like tears and wine when she kisses me. Her hand slides between us, wraps around me, and I drop my forehead to hers and breathe through it because her grip is sure and deliberate and she's watching my face with the focused attention of a woman conducting research.
"Still tactical?" she asks.
"Losing ground fast."
She guides me to her, and the moment I push inside her the teasing is over. She inhales sharply, hands gripping my back, and I hold still long enough for her to adjust, long enough to look at her face---eyes dark, lips parted, ring glinting at my shoulder where her hand has found purchase. Then she rolls her hips, unmistakable, and I start to move.
It's not the frantic collision of the inn or the urgent relief of the first weeks. This is something slower and more devastating. She meets every movement, her body reading mine the way she reads a manuscript---finding the rhythm, responding to what works, her breath breaking in small sounds that I feel against my neck. Her legs wrap around me and I go deeper, and the sound she makes is the most honest thing I've ever heard.
"Don't stop," she says, voice wrecked. "Don't you dare stop."
I don't stop.
She comes the second time with her face pressed to my shoulder and my name in her mouth, and I follow her over a few strokes later with my face buried in her hair, breathing her in like she's the only air in the room.
We lie tangled and quiet afterward. She catches the ring glinting in the lamplight and starts crying again, mid-laugh, and I kiss the tears off her cheekbone without comment because I've learned that with Kassidy, the crying and the laughing are the same thing---both mean she's all the way present, no armor, no editing.
She tells me I'm terrible at proposals but excellent at everything else.
I pull her closer and don't argue.
Afterward, tangled and spent and grinning like idiots, we plan.
"Small," she says, tracing circles on my chest. "Intimate. Tidehaven."
"Whatever you want. As long as you're there."
"Diana will insist on giving a speech."
"Diana gives excellent speeches."
"Riggs will try to give a speech."
"Riggs will be intercepted."
She laughs. The sound fills the bedroom like music.
My phone dings on the nightstand. Then again. Then continuously, a cascade of notifications that can only mean one thing.
Riggs: DID HE DO IT?? DID HE PROPOSE??
