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“I was smiling at you.”

“Why?”

“Because you looked so content in your own skin.”

Despite the cyclone my emotions have been through in the last six months, I am content in my own skin tonight. And it’s a feeling that amplifies every second I have Poet this close to me. I still don’t fully understand the fire he lit in me two years ago, but I have faith it’ll figure itself out.

If we give it room.

If we let it breathe.

I don’t need to breathe to do that.

I don’t want to. I want—I need—to smother myself in Poet Whitlock. And so I kiss him again, and without the door to brace him against, we tip onto the couch.

It isn’t the first time I’ve toppled him over and covered him with my body. But inside, with a safe place to fall, it feels different. He feels different, and maybe it’s the hard planes of a masculine body lifting me beyond reason so quickly. Or perhaps it is him. The way he gives just enough, as he did against the door, and breathes into my kiss with subtle, deliberate heat that draws me further in.

I slide my hand up his side, over his flank and ribs, rucking his shirt. He presses up into my touch and the movement goes straight through me. Our mouths fuse together, my body pinning him down. I feel his cock scrape mine and a rougher edge awakens in me. I crowd him deeper into the couch. Kiss him harder. Mould us together in ways I have never been with a man.

But the newness of it is quiet.

Absent.

Sensation is louder. Instinct. Urge and desire coming so naturally the shock of it all is delayed. Until it lands and something inside me locks down tight.

Above Poet, I freeze, hitting a wall I don’t see coming. He stills beneath me. Blue eyes fixed on my face, palm to my chest, reading every shift in me without a single question in his gaze.

How can he know what I’m feeling?

Or where it came from?

How can I be so certain he does?

It baffles me, truly. But the need to explain myself is a weak thing. Because he does not ask. He brings his other hand to my face and strokes my cheek with his thumb, and only then does the truth come tumbling out of me.

“I don’t want to take too much from you.”

“Then don’t,” he whispers. “Let me give it to you instead.”

He squeezes my jaw with sweet pressure, giving me a moment to react. A moment I can but stare at him and wonder what he means as my heart thumps and my blood pulses so hard in my veins I know I will need to check my fancy new watch before this is over.

Then I am on my back before I know what’s happening, flat against the couch cushions, grateful for reasons I never imagined when I came home from the hospital six months ago to find Rubi Matherson had replaced my old settee for one wide enough for two grown men.

“Don’t care what anyone says, sofas should be bed-shaped or you’re doing it wrong.”

I was too tired to argue with him at the time. Now I can only enjoy the space as Poet looms over me and braces his hands either side of my head. “You are very strong. No one has picked me up and moved me like that since I was a child.”

Poet leans down, his mouth just out of reach. “You’ve never been with a man at all?”

“Only you.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Curious,” I admit. “But I don’t know how to do what you asked. I feel like something is coiled too tight inside me and I don’t know how to let it go.”

Poet shifts his weight to one side, staring hard at my mouth while I speak. Then gifting me his deep blue stare when I’m done. “What are you afraid of?”

“Afraid?”