“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“I’m accepting it.”
Emma smiled then, a full, genuine smile that transformed her exhausted face into something radiant. “Good.”
They stayed like that, wrapped around each other, the world narrowed to this room, this bed, this moment.
He wasn't thinking about the past anymore. Or the future.
Only her—warm against him.
And the quiet certainty that they'd chosen each other.
Chapter 44
Still Breathing
Emma laynext to Zach and watched him breathe.
That was all she was doing. Watching him breathe. Making sure the slow rise and fall of his chest kept happening, because for a few terrible minutes yesterday she hadn’t been certain it would. She’d had her hands pressed against his wound, and she’d been talking to him—stay with me, stay with me—and the words had sounded less like a request than a prayer to something she didn’t entirely believe in.
He was watching her back. He did that. Those gray-blue eyes catalogued everything, filed the world into columns of threat and non-threat, and now viewed her with an expression she’d never quite seen on his face before. Something stripped of its usual armor.
“You should try to sleep,” she said.
“So should you.”
“I’m not the one who got?—”
“Emma.”
Her name in his mouth. The way he said it wasn’t a command or a deflection. It was something quieter than either of those things. Something that felt, in spite of everything, like an answer.
She exhaled.
She shifted to check his bandage and stayed close after. His hand came up to rest at her waist, steadying, except she hadn’t been unsteady. She looked at him. He looked at her. What had been building between them for weeks—finally, simply, solidified.
His hand cradled the back of her head and tugged, pulling her down to meet his lips. He kissed her with a focus and thoroughness that warmed her skin all over, because that was how Zach did everything—completely, with his entire attention, not a fraction held back. When he committed, he went all in.
It showed in the way he touched her.
“You need rest. We don’t have to—” she started.
“I want to. Want you.” His thumb traced her jaw. “You?”
The question surprised her. Not the asking of it—of course he would ask—but the way he asked it. Like the answer mattered. Like whichever way she answered, he’d receive it without pressure or disappointment, file it away and protect it.
“Yes,” Emma tried to find the right words and then decided on the honest ones. “I need to know you’re still here.”
Something moved across his expression. “I’m here.”
“Okay.” She pressed her palm flat against his sternum, feeling his heartbeat. Steady, even, reliable as the man himself. “Okay.”
Every movement was slow. Deliberate.
She stroked her hands over his chest and arms, careful around the bandage, and he let her be careful without making it into anything—didn’t brush her off, didn’t pretend he wasn’t hurt. He let her tend to him, which she was coming to understand was its own kind of trust for someone like Zach. He accepted her touch with a stillness that felt like gratitude. He understood she needed to know he was here, with her, alive.
