Page 81 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“Here.” He hands me the tea. The word is less of a suggestion of tea and more a reminder of where I am, and I’m grateful for both.

I take it with both hands because my hands want something to hold. It’s the right temperature, not too hot, and it tastes like something with honey. I don’t ask what kind because it doesn’t matter. It matters that it’s warm and I’m here and not there.

Not there.

We sit for a while in the gray light coming through the curtains. He doesn’t talk. I drink the tea and let the shaking finish. He sits on the edge of the bed and does not try to fix anything, which is the thing about Ivan that keeps getting me—he knows when to fix and when to sit, and most people never learn the difference.

“I’m sorry,” he says eventually, quietly. “What happened to you?—”

“That was Jaba. Not you.”

“He targeted you because of me.”

I look at him over the rim of the cup. He’s still looking at his hands, which means he’s been sitting with this since last night and has been building a case against himself in the hours I wasasleep. “I know. But only you can make me feel as safe as I do right now. Sitting here. In this room.”

He looks up. He opens his mouth. He closes it. He opens it again, and something crosses his expression that I’ve never seen on him before.

I watch him try and not quite get there, and I love him for trying, and I have been in love with him for a while now without saying so, and I cut him off before he has to keep trying. “I know what I said before. About not wanting to bring a target into the world. And I meant it, at the time.”

“What… I don’t understand.”

I wrap both hands around the cup. “Here’s what I’ve worked out. People are going to know who my baby’s father is. That’s not up for debate—they’re going to know, and that makes us targets whether you and I are together or not.”

“I can send you somewhere no one knows me.”

“Does that place exist?’

He swallows. “I can try to find a place like that. An island in the South Pacific. Something similar. Whatever you want.”

I look at him. “I could face it alone. Lonely, scared, and doing it by myself. Or I could face it with you and have all the love that comes with that.” I pause. “I’d rather do that. If you’ll have me.”

The room is very quiet.

Ivan looks at me for a long moment with those dark eyes.

He doesn’t climb onto the bed so much as arrive on it—one moment he is sitting on the edge and the next he is there, fully,reaching for my face with both hands. He takes my face the way he took it in the basement, careful and total, and he kisses me.

But it’s not a careful kiss. It starts careful and then it isn’t. I make a guttural sound against his mouth, and the tea goes somewhere I’m not keeping track of because his hands have moved from my face to my waist and I’m pulling him toward me with both fists in his shirt.

He lays me back into the pillows and follows me down, and I get my hands on the buttons of his shirt and deal with it without looking. I know where every button is. I know what’s underneath it. I’ve missed what’s underneath it more than I was prepared to admit to myself.

He pulls my hair back from my neck and finds the spot there that makes my entire nervous system reroute itself toward him. I exhale against his shoulder and feel him smile against my skin.

I’ve missed that smile. The one I feel on my skin.

I get the shirt off his shoulders. I press my palms flat against his chest and feel his heartbeat underneath, fast and real. The scars under my hands, the muscle, the tattoos of him—all of it weeks away from me, and my body has been aware of every one of those weeks and does not approve them. Now I get to do something about that, and I intend to.

“Luna.” My name in his mouth, low.

“Don’t stop. Talk later.”

He doesn’t stop.

He works his way down my throat, and the sensitivity I’ve had since the pregnancy makes everything louder—his mouth, the faint scratch of his jaw stubble, the deliberate pressure of his lipsagainst my collarbone. He takes his time at my breast, and I arch into it and make a sound that has no dignity in it whatsoever. His hand comes up to hold me steady and he does not speed up. He is entirely unmoved by my impatience, which has always been one of the more maddening things about him in bed.

I love it, though.

He moves lower. The drag of his mouth across my ribs, my stomach, the inside of my hip, and I have the pillow over my face by the time he gets where he’s going, biting down on it. He’s thorough in the way he is thorough about everything—methodical, attentive, completely focused, no part of his attention elsewhere—and I’m saying his name like a broken record until it stops being a word.