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“Nothing happens next that you don’t choose.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
She looked at the tide pools. She looked at the ward lines offshore. She looked at the man beside her, who had chosen honesty over leverage every time he’d had the option.
She didn’t have a word for it yet.
She was starting to think she didn’t need one.
She reached for his hand in the dark. Not a declaration. Not a decision she’d planned, scheduled, or built up to. She put her hand in his, out there on the cold pebble shelf, with the rain softening and the tide moving, and the whole enormous thing they’d been sitting with settling into the air around them.
His fingers closed around hers.
She turned her head. He was right there — close in the dark, the ocean behind them, the tide pools still lit at the southern end of the beach. She kissed him. Brief and warm, without a single thought about whether it was the right moment, because she’d stopped making that calculation and this was what happened when she did. The tide pools brightened, as if they’d noticed too.
SIXTEEN
DRAYCE
She came with him without discussing it.
The rain had eased to a thin mist that wasn’t quite done yet, and the cliff path was dark. She walked beside him, and when they reached the house, she came inside, and that was the whole of the decision. This was how things worked between them now. The significant things settled into place before they needed to be said.
His wolf had been quiet since the beach. Not the vigilant kind of quiet. The kind that came after a decision had been made and needed no further commentary. It had been right for three months and was now behaving as if it intended to be gracious about that fact.
He built the fire himself.
He’d been building fires in that hearth for over a decade, one of those tasks his hands knew without his attention — useful, because his attention was wholly occupied by the woman settling onto the leather couch, knees pulled up, shoes beside her on the floor. She had ocean water in her hair and the focused stillness she got when she hadn’t decided what to do about something yet.
He was the thing she was paying attention to. He was aware of this.
He stacked the logs slowly and precisely, understanding that this hour didn’t benefit from rushing. The fire caught on the second match, and when he sat back on his heels, it was already steady and quiet.
He heard her exhale behind him.
He looked back at her. She was watching the fire with an expression he couldn’t fully read — not quite surprise, more like cataloging a change she hadn’t tracked in real time.
“The fire.” She nodded toward the hearth. “Yours. Mine. I can’t tell when I stopped being afraid of it.”
“Since training.” He turned from the fire. “You stopped flinching at the controlled burns around week three.”
She blinked, caught off guard by how exact the answer was. “You counted weeks.”
“I count things.”
“That’s either very sweet or mildly alarming.”
“Probably both.”
She huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. The fire warmed her back, and she sat six feet away on his couch. The house felt like it had been waiting a long time for exactly these people, something he wouldn’t say out loud, but his wolf had no such reservations.
He turned fully toward her, and she tracked the movement as she always did, watching him with everything she had while trying, and failing, to look like she wasn’t—something he had stopped finding inconvenient and had started finding one of his favorite things.
“I need to tell you one more thing before this goes any further.”
She held his gaze. No deflection, no bracing. She’d gotten better at receiving information straight.
