Page 156 of The Ashes of Summer

The second I step inside, soft perfume and expensive fabric fill the air. Dark lace hangs from the displays under warm lighting while Adelaide starts browsing like she's been training for this her whole life.

Constance holds something up, admiring the missing fabric around the crotch. "This feels illegal."

I ignore her and keep looking.

Then I see it.

Black. Elegant. Dangerous. A bralette with fine silver chains laid across the front, and the matching set with the same chains sweeping low across the back.

Heat curls low in my stomach at the sight of it—and underneath that, sudden and bright and entirely unexpected, comes something that takes me a second to place.

Anticipation.

I stand there holding a scrap of black lace in a shop full of strangers and I feel it properly, the way I used to. Not remembered. Not braced for. Just there, warm and mine and uncomplicated.

Jackson Moore spent three days trying to take this from me. He got a version of me that lay still and counted cracks in a ceiling, while he played with my body and pretended I was someone else.

He didn't get this. He was never going to.

"Oh," Adelaide says softly behind me. "That's very him."

"It really is," Constance agrees.

I run my fingers over the fabric, and I think about the way that man looks at me—like something worth worshipping and ruining in equal measure—and I take my size off the rail before I can talk myself out of it.

"Now that," I murmur, mostly to myself, "is going to be worth it."

Constance cackles loud enough that half the store turns around.

We head for the checkout with the lingerie folded over my arm while the two of them argue behind me about whether banana and cookie dough milkshakes should legally be allowed to exist.

The cashier folds the black lace into tissue paper and slides it into a glossy bag, and as I take it from her my phone buzzes in my handbag.

Jacob.

Just his name on the screen softens something in me.

I answer before the second ring. "Hey, baby." His voice comes through rough and warm. God, I miss him already.

"You surviving without me?" I tease, stepping away from the others.

"Barely." I can hear the smirk in it. "House is too quiet."

My chest does the stupid thing it always does with him now.

"I bought something."

"Yeah?"

"Mhm."

A beat of silence. Then, lower: "Something I'm going to enjoy?"

Heat climbs up my neck. Partly because I know exactly what that voice means. Partly because after everything the two of us have survived, this man can still make me blush like a teenager.

"You'll see when I get home."

A low chuckle rumbles down the line. "Christ, baby. You can't say things like that while I'm trying to behave."