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Denise

Call me asap. A reporter figured it out. This is about to get very ugly.

I look down, she’s wrapped around me, finally mine, and it drops into my gut like cold water.

Our lie is about to come for the one true thing I've got.

Margot.

Chapter 18: Margot

"If you keep looking at me like that, we’re never getting out of this bed."

I say it into his pillow, which smells like him, and I don’t want to move, because I want one more second exactly here with him.

I’m wrapped around the man I spent years pretending I didn't want. And now the lie is over.

Jax has been propped on one elbow watching me sleep for God knows how long.

When I look at him, the expression on his face is soft, unguarded and mine. Nothing between us at all, and it does something to my heart. I feel so much more than hope.

"Good. I like being here with you." He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and his hand lingers on my jaw.

In the morning light he is all warm skin and old white scars.

He’s so beautiful sprawled across the pillows without a single scrap of the performance he wears everywhere else that it makes my throat tight. "I don’t want to waste anymore time."

I poke him in the chest, right over his heart, which is thudding slow and steady under my finger. "How long have you actually been quietly obsessed with me?"

"Deeply. Quietly. Menacingly obsessed." He catches my hand and presses a kiss to the pad of the finger that poked him. "There were spreadsheets."

"That’s my move.”

"I know. I stole it right out of your handler binder." His mouth curves against my knuckles. "You keep a system for managing my public image and a private subsystem for managing me, and the second one has a concerning amount of red in it."

"We’ve been pounding through my sex spreadsheet."

He grins into my hand. "Don’t worry I have lots more ‘pounding’ to add to your list."

I laugh, and he catches the sound with his mouth, unhurried, like we have all the time in the world.

His hand slides down my spine and settles at the small of my back and just holds me there, and I let myself sink into it.

And here I am, boneless and undone in Jax’s bed, and I could get used to this.

He pads out to the kitchen in nothing but low gray sweats slung off his hips, and I steal his discarded shirt off the floor and follow, because a view like that should not go unsupervised.

He makes me coffee and breakfast. Then he leans back against the counter and watches me take the first bite like it's a save he needs to make.

And it's so domestic that my eyes start to tear up a little.

I’m terrified by how badly I want a thousand more mornings that start exactly like this.

"So." I wrap both hands around the warm mug and hop up to sit on his counter, because if I'm having this conversation I'm having it with some altitude and looking straight into his eyes.

"What do we actually do now? Because last night we lit every rule we had on fire, and I don't regret one second of it, I want that on the record, but I’m still the woman the team pays to manage your image, but I’m extremely, thoroughly sleeping with you, and that’s a problem with a capital everything."

"We’ll figure it out." He steps between my knees and sets his hands on the counter on either side of my hips, caging me in. "Together. We go to Denise, we sit her down, we give her the truth. And then we do it our way." He kisses my forehead. "I’m done hiding you, Margot. I've been hiding my feelings for you my entire life. I'm not doing it one more day."