I had been watching him for longer than I could account for. The clock on the microwave said 3:17. I was fairly certain it had said 2:43 the last time I’d checked.
He ended the call. Set the phone down. Looked directly across the room at me. Honey-brown eyes. Steady. Certain. The specific look I had been cataloguing for three days and categorically refusing to name, because naming it meantadmitting I’d been counting, and counting meant caring, and caring meant I was in considerably deeper than I’d planned to be when I walked into his office with a baby from a cardboard box.
The page was still unread.
“Don’t,” I said.
He didn’t blink. “Don’t what?”
I pointed at him. “Whatever face that is.”
“I’m not making a face.”
“You’re making a very specific face.” I set the stylus down. “It’s the face that says you’ve reached a conclusion and you’re waiting for me to catch up, and it’s extremely irritating.”
He stood. Not fast. Unhurried. The kind of movement that came from a man who had already decided how this ended and saw no reason to rush the middle.
He crossed the room with the same measured pace he brought to territory negotiations and boardroom takeovers and, apparently, walking across his own kitchen to confront a man who had been staring at him for twenty minutes without editing a single word.
I stayed exactly where I was. Not because I was brave. Because I had also already decided, even if I was only admitting it to myself now, standing at a granite counter with a stylus in my hand and three days of pretending to work weighing on me like a bad conscience.
He stopped on the other side of the island. Close enough that the cedar-and-scotch smell of him cut through the kitchen air. Close enough that I caught the warmer note underneath it, the one that had been wrecking my manuscript for seventy-two straight hours. His hands rested on the counter’s edge. Mine were doing something useless with the stylus.
“I’m not done editing,” I said.
“You weren’t editing.”
“I was thinking about editing.”
“Jai.”
One word. Flat. Certain. My name in his mouth did something to my chest that I was not prepared to examine with any kind of intellectual honesty. It pulled tight and released all at once, like a wire snapping, and the feeling traveled down my spine and settled somewhere below my belt with the particular weight of something I had no intention of ignoring.
I set the stylus down. Looked up. Held his eyes.
“I’m still not letting you bite me,” I said, quietly, with full awareness of what I was saying and what it cost me to say it.
He didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t do anything except look at me with those gold eyes and say, “I know.”
Same as the first time. No argument. No push. Just the certainty that it was still true and still not the whole story, and the patience in it made my throat tight in a way that had nothing to do with want and everything to do with the fact that Braham Wolfe was a man who kept his word even when it cost him, and I was starting to understand exactly how much this one was costing.
“Okay,” I said. Like it was small. It wasn’t small. It was the largest thing I’d said to anyone in years.
I reached out. Got a fistful of his shirt—crisp cotton, probably cost more than my monthly grocery budget—and pulled.
He came. This enormous man, six-foot-three of pure alpha muscle, let himself be pulled around the island without resistance, without hesitation, like being directed by someone half his size was the most natural thing in the world.
My back hit the counter’s edge. His hands found my waist, palms warm through the thin cotton of my shirt, fingers pressing into the dip above my hip bones with a grip that was firm and certain and exactly what I wanted.
The kiss was nothing like controlled. It was three days of replaying and not saying and pretending to edit, compressed into a single point of contact that felt like a door blowing open.
Braham’s mouth was warm, slightly chapped, and he made that sound again—low and rough, like something giving way—and I felt it against my lips, against my chest, everywhere.
My free hand came up to his jaw, palm against the stubble, fingers pressing into the hard line of it, and the way his beard scraped against my skin sent a current straight down to my toes.
The counter’s edge dug into my lower back. I welcomed it. His hands were large enough to span most of my waist, thumbs tracing the ridges of my hip bones through the fabric, and the heat of his palms registered as a physical fact against my skin.
He kissed me like he’d been thinking about it—thorough, deliberate, the kind of kiss that made it very clear he had not been pretending to work for the last three days. He had been counting. Same as me.
