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She narrows her eyes at me in the mirror. "Are you sure? I can change."

I glance up. My gorgeous wife taking up every thought I have in my mind.

She’s wearing a cream sweater tucked into a black leather pencil skirt that reaches to her calves and tall boots, simple enough for game day, expensive enough that Everly would approve, and the ring on her left hand catches the light every time she lifts her arm. Her hair is curled and in a high pony tail with soft strands shaping her face. Her mouth is pink from whatever gloss she uses that I now associate with being kissed half to death in doorways.

"You look good," I say.

Her brows lift. "Only good?"

I take one step toward her. Then another as she watches me, Until I’m standing behind her at the mirror with one hand settling automatically at her waist.

"You look," I say carefully, because careful is the only way I ever seem able to say things that matter, "like I’m going to spend half the night watching other people notice my wife and regretting every social obligation that requires me to share oxygen with them. And if we don’t leave soon, it won’t matter what you’re wearing because I’m ten seconds away from stripping everything off you and telling Penelope that we hit traffic and won’t be making it so that I can spend the entire night inside my wife."

Her lips part. There’s the faintest flush in her cheeks.

"Is that better?"

"That," she says softly, "was not very subtle."

"I wasn’t aiming for subtlety."

She turns then, her hands sliding up my chest and then her arms locking around my neck.

"I don’t know… I might like your idea better for the night," she says, catching her lower lip with her teeth and my cock twitches.

"You're going to turn into a big problem for me, aren’t you," I say.

"Why do you say that?" she asks, but she already knows exactly why.

"Because if you keep this up, I may never leave this house."

She grins like she won something, and we both know she did. She already preemptively just won every argument I could ever come up with to leave the house. All she has to do is bat her eyes and lick her lips, and I’m done for.

"Okay fine," she says, releasing her arms around my shoulders. "We should probably make an appearance before someone sends the police for a well-person visit."

"Good idea. God forbid they come around and hear some of the sounds you make when I have you pinned under me. Those sounds could get me locked up."

She chuckles and then reaches down for her bag, the small black leather one she brought back from France, and slips it over her shoulder. When she straightens, her fingers brush mine once, the contact brief and thoughtless and entirely too easy.

It’s become a pattern now. These little touches neither of us plans. Her hand at my back in the kitchen. My palm at her waist while moving around her. Her knee against mine at breakfast.

My phone buzzes against the dresser.

Christian.

I glance at the screen and ignore it for the moment.

"We should go," I say.

She nods. "Right."

The stadium hum with game-night tension as we walk through the back entrance with security clearing us up to the elevator that takes us to the private suites. Staff nod as we pass. A sponsorship rep I vaguely recognize starts toward me, then thinks better of it when he sees Aria beside me and clocks that my tolerance for pregame small talk is low.

Good instincts.

Aria stays half a step at my side, neither clinging nor hanging back, and I feel the way people register her before they look away. She’s stunning, I already know that, and now she’s Mrs. Kauffman.

I should hate how much I like that. How dedicated to the cause to keep it there, attached to her first name.