The corner of my mouth lifted despite everything.
“No, you don’t.”
She glared at me as much as her face allowed. “I am severely injured, and you’re still smug.”
“I’m consistent.”
“You’re a menace.”
“You love me anyway.”
Her breath caught, and the room changed.
I felt it the second the words left my mouth, felt the way her fingers stilled inside mine and her eyes went glossy with something bigger than fear. I hadn’t meant to say it like that. Not here. Not with bruises around her throat and pain medication making her soft around the edges. But the truth was already out, sitting between us with all the other things Luke hadn’t managed to destroy.
Bliss swallowed carefully.
“I was trying to get there with the marble,” she whispered.
I leaned down and kissed her knuckles again, slower this time.
“I know.”
32
Bliss
The words hit my chest and stayed there.
Not like a punch. Not like a bruise. More like somebody had slipped them carefully beneath my heart and left them glowing there, bright and terrifying, warm enough to burn through every defense I had spent years pretending was my personality.
You love me anyway.
Even with the bruises. Even with the panic. Even with Luke’s fingerprints still carved into my throat like proof of every ugly thing I had survived. Even with the broken ribs and the hospital gown and the fact that I was currently one emotional inconvenience away from crying into a pudding cup I had absolutely earned because, once again, taxes.
Cade watched me from beside the bed with his hand wrapped around mine, thumb moving slowly over my knuckles like he had nowhere else in the world to be. His face was calm in that Cade way that was not actually calm at all. It was control. Discipline. A man holding a loaded weapon inside his chest and choosing, for me, not to pull the trigger.
Which was rude.
Devastating.
Very on brand.
I swallowed carefully because my throat hurt, my ribs hurt, my face hurt, and somehow the worst injury in the room had become this six-foot-something hockey captain looking at me like he already knew the answer to questions I hadn’t been brave enough to ask out loud.
“I was getting there with the marble,” I whispered.
His thumb stilled. Just for half a second. Long enough for me to notice and for the room to change.
The heart monitor kept making its tiny electronic sounds beside me. The air conditioner hummed overhead. Somewhere in the hallway, a nurse laughed softly at something another nurse said, and the world kept being the world even though mine had just tilted straight off its axis.
Cade’s eyes stayed on mine. “I know.”
I tried to nod, immediately decided that was a terrible medical choice, and settled for blinking at him with as much dignity as a battered girl in a hospital bed could manage. “It was going to be a whole thing.”
“A whole thing.”
“Don’t mock my process.”
