He moved from the foot of the bed with the same unhurried quality he brought to everything, and his palms traced the outside of my legs first, a long, slow stroke from hip to knee and back again, learning the shape of them, letting me feel the weight of his attention through each pass. Then he pressed his lips to the inside of my knee.
The sound I made went into Cole’s mouth before I could do anything about it. Rhett’s mouth was warm and unhurried at the sensitive skin of my inner knee, and his hands were at my hips, patient and careful, and when he moved higher I shifted against him instinctively, my hips finding the direction he was guiding them toward with the same instinct that had turned me toward him earlier in the evening, the animal knowledge of abody that had decided what it wanted and had stopped waiting for permission.
Rhett’s mouth moved higher with deliberate precision.
He worked with the specific attention of a man who had decided he was going to do this correctly or not at all, which meant slowly and completely and with total responsiveness to everything my body communicated, every caught breath, every involuntary sound, the slight hitch when he found a particular angle and the way my fingers found the sheet again when he held it. He adjusted without instruction, reading me the way he read everything he took seriously: carefully and without ego, the whole of his attention given over to the task. My thighs trembled against his shoulders. I could feel the warmth of him against my skin, the slight roughness of his jaw, the specific deliberateness of each movement.
“Rhett.”
His name came out of me in a single, broken note. Not a sentence, not a request. Just his name, cracked at the middle, the way a sound came out when you had stopped managing it.
He did not stop. He listened to the sound and gave me more of what had produced it, patient and certain, and the heat in the room and the heat inside me found each other at the center of that and I came apart.
Cole’s forehead pressed to mine.
He had moved while I was not tracking the room around me, his face now inches from mine, his breath warm on my lips, his hand still cradling my jaw with the same gentle, steady certainty as before. I felt the solid weight of his forehead against mine and the warmth of his breath and the grip of my own hands in his shirt, and I pressed my forehead back into his and felt theworld narrow to that single point of contact while everything else in my body did what it was doing.
Wade’s palm was on my belly.
It had been there the whole time. Flat and warm and still, his hand curved against the weight of Hope with the same even steadiness with which he did everything, his eyes on my face and alert and present and without demand. He had not moved his hand once. I was aware of it the way I was aware of my own pulse, constant and certain and the specific comfort of something that did not need to announce itself to be real.
I came back to the room in pieces.
My breathing slowed. The flush that had moved through my chest began to cool at its edges, the highest heat of it retreating by degrees, leaving behind the warmth of the room and the lamp light and the weight of the quilt beneath me. My hands released Cole’s shirt. I did not know when they had loosened. I looked at the ceiling and let my lungs find their ordinary pace and I did not say anything.
The three of them moved.
It was not a choreographed thing. Nobody had discussed it and nobody directed it and it happened anyway, the way some things happened between people who had been paying close enough attention to each other for long enough to know how to share a space without negotiating every detail. Rhett came up beside me on my left, settling on top of the quilt with the loose, easy weight of a man who had decided where he belonged and did not require confirmation. Cole remained close on my right, the hand that had held my jaw now resting against the pillow beside my head, near but not pressing. Wade stayed where he was behind me, his palm still flat and warm against the curve of my belly.
I stared at the ceiling.
The frost was still working its way across the windows, I could see the light refract differently at the corners than at the center, the crystals catching the lamp’s glow and holding it in their cold geometry. The ceiling was the ceiling I had looked at for months from this same position, the same plaster and the same faint water ring in the corner above the dresser and the same dim expanse of it in lamp light at odd hours. I knew this ceiling. I had had most of my important thoughts at this ceiling. It had not changed.
I let my hand settle over Wade’s.
His hand was large and warm beneath mine, solid against the weight of Hope, and when my fingers came down over his I felt them, his knuckles, the slight ridges of them, the steadiness of his palm that had not moved in all that time. His thumb shifted once beneath my fingers, small and unhurried, barely a movement, and went still again.
I did not say anything.
Neither did he.
The lamp burned its small, warm circle against the winter dark, and the frost held its place on the glass, and the room breathed around the four of us in the particular way of rooms that have been lived in long enough to know when to be quiet.
Hope shifted once beneath our hands.
A slow, private turn, the way she moved when she was settling, not restless, not alarmed, just rearranging herself in the particular deliberate way she had, making known that she was present and accounted for. I felt it under my palm and through Wade’s hand and I pressed mine a fraction flatter against thewarmth of his, and I looked at the ceiling, and I let the night be what it had become.
Outside, the mountains held their cold distance in the dark, patient as everything that had been there before any of this and would be there after, and the frost kept its slow, indifferent work along the lower corners of the glass.
Chapter Fifteen – Lila
The smell reached me before the cold did.
The warm, sweetened drift of something that had settled into the pillow beside me overnight, something Alpha-deep and specific, something that had no business being in my bedroom in the grey pre-dawn and was there anyway. I lay still and looked at the ceiling and did not move my hand, which was flat against my belly the way it always was when I woke, automatic and searching, checking before I was fully conscious of checking. The sheets were damp against the backs of my thighs. The room held the particular closed-in warmth of a space that had contained more heat than it was built for, and beneath the heavy sweetness of my own scent, the floral weight of it, still clinging to the air, to the fabric, to my skin, there were other things. Gunpowder and cedar and black orchid and the warm outdoor smell that I had stopped trying not to know. All of them layered into the room around me like the memory of something I had not yet allowed myself to think about clearly.
I pulled myself upright. The cold caught me at the shoulders the moment I moved out of the warmth of the covers, and I sat at the edge of the bed for a moment with my feet not yet on the floor, one hand still pressed flat against the curve of Hope. The room was dark except for the thin grey seam of pre-dawn coming through the gap in the curtains. The frost was still on the glass, I could see it from here, the crystalline lace of it at the lower corners, holding the night chill in its geometry while the rest of the world began, reluctantly, to consider morning.
Then I made the mistake of looking at the mirror.
