We stay like that. Tangled, breathing, still connected. The fire crackles. The room is warm now, amber and shadow, the stonewall catching the light. His hand moves slowly up my back, down again, tracing patterns. My fingers are in his hair, the damp curls at the base of his skull, and I feel his pulse against my collarbone, fast and slowing.
"You're something, Maya Reeves," he murmurs against my neck. "You know that?"
I don't answer. I press closer. He pulls me in, arms around me like the towel earlier, encompassing, and I feel his breathing even out and his muscles go slack one by one, the specific sequence of a body releasing the last of its tension.
The sheets are warm beneath us. The fire is settling into a low steady burn, the kind that will hold for hours. His body around mine is heavy and relaxed, and I can feel him drifting, that slow slide toward sleep.
I'm drifting too. My eyes are closed. My hand is over his heart and I can feel it, steady now, slow.
His breathing deepens. His arm tightens around me, a sleep-reflex, pulling me in.
And then, so quiet I almost miss it, mumbled against my hair in a voice already half lost to sleep:
"Don't go breakin' us, sweetheart."
My eyes open.
He doesn't say anything else. His breathing is deep and even, his body heavy with sleep, and I don't think he knows he said it. I don't think it was meant for me to hear. It slipped out from whatever unguarded place Jace keeps behind the teasing.
And I don't move. And I don't sleep. And I don't breathe too deeply, because this moment is so fragile and so enormous that I'm afraid if I shift even slightly it will dissolve.
22
MAYA
Warm.
That's the first thing. Warmth along my back where the sheets have absorbed the heat of two bodies through the night, warmth from the low remains of the fire still ticking in the hearth, warmth in the particular golden quality of the light coming through the window and landing in a stripe across the bed.
I'm alone.
Jace's side is empty but not cold. The pillow still holds the impression of his head, and when I press my face into it I catch pine and woodsmoke and the warm, specific scent of his skin, and my body responds before my brain does, a slow curl of pleasure in my belly that remembers last night.
Male voices from somewhere down the hall. Low, easy, the cadence of people who've had the same morning conversation a thousand times. The smell of coffee reaches me next, strong and dark, followed by something richer. Bacon. Toast. Cake?
I close my eyes and let myself have this. Thirty seconds of feeling safe.
Then Jace's voice comes back to me. From last night, mumbled against my hair, already half-asleep.
Don't go breakin' us, sweetheart.
My eyes open.
I know what I haven't told them. I know exactly what it is and exactly what it would change and I have run the calculation so many times that the math is automatic. If they find out from someone other than me. If Daniel finds out where I am and the information reaches them before I can frame it. If the thing I'm carrying detonates in the middle of whatever fragile, extraordinary structure is building between the four of us.
I didn't do anything wrong. I know that. I know it with a certainty that lives in my bones even when my brain tries to argue otherwise. But knowing I'm not at fault and knowing I'm being fair are two different things, and right now, lying in sheets that smell like Jace, I am not being fair.
The timing is wrong. That's what I tell myself. Everything between us is so new, so unlikely, so easily shattered by the wrong word at the wrong moment. How do you tell three men who are just beginning to let you in, that the version of you they're building something with is incomplete? That there's a piece missing, and the missing piece substantial?
I don't have the answer. What I have is the smell of breakfast pulling me out of bed and the coward's instinct to delay this reckoning one more day.
I push back the covers and find my robe from yesterday folded on the leather chair near the fireplace. Jace did this for me. That small, unexpected act of care sits in my chest alongside the guilt and makes both of them heavier.
I slip out of his room and down the hall to mine. Wash my face, brush my teeth, pull my hair back. The woman in the mirror looks rested. She looks like someone who slept well in a man's arms and woke up to coffee and voices and warmth. Shelooks, for the first time in months, like someone who belongs somewhere.
The kitchen is bright with morning light. Reid is at the stove, moving with the unhurried efficiency of a man who has cooked the same breakfast a thousand times and could do it in his sleep. Flannel rolled to his elbows, beard catching the light, spatula in hand. Jace is leaning against the counter next to him with a mug, saying something I can't hear that makes Reid shake his head.
Reid sees me first. His eyes find mine across the kitchen, and the smile that comes is slow and warm and uncomplicated.
