Page 55 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Doing what?"

"Making it feel like you've been waiting your whole life to get here."

"Maybe I have." He says it simply, no performance in it, and the honesty of it does more to me than the kiss did. I pull his shirt over his head so I can do the same to him, tracing the scars I already know by heart and finding I love them more each time instead of less, proof of a man who survived himself long enough to end up here with me, and when my palm flattens over his heart I feel it slamming against his ribs like he's been running.

"Tell me if this is too slow," he murmurs against my collarbone, working his way lower with maddening patience, and I laugh, breathless, threading my fingers through his hair to keep from grabbing at something more urgent.

"There's no such thing as too slow tonight."

"Good. Because I intend to take my time learning every single thing that makes you sound like that." He proves it, unhurried, his mouth finding places I didn't know could ache for attention. I stop thinking in words at some point, lost to the drag of his mouth and the weight of him, my hips lifting toward him before I've decided to move at all.

"Rafe." His name comes out of me more plea than sentence, and he lifts his head just enough to look at me, something wrecked and pleased in equal measure behind his eyes.

"I know." He kisses his way back up my body, taking his time, until his mouth finds mine again, and the low sound he makes against my lips when I arch up into him is the single most undone I have ever heard him. "I know exactly what you need. I'm getting there."

"You're going to kill me getting there."

"I can live with that outcome." He settles his weight over me, both of us bare in the firelight with nothing left between us but breath and the last thin thread of anticipation, and pauses long enough to look at me, really look, like he's checking one more time that I'm still choosing this.

"I'm right here," I tell him, answering the question he hasn't asked out loud. "I'm not going anywhere. Please, Rafe."

"Neither am I." He says it like a vow, low and certain, and then he finally, finally fills the space between us, slow enough that I feel every single inch of it, both of us going still for a long, shaking second just to hold onto how much it means before either of us can move again. "You feel like coming home."

Words fail me completely beyond his name, broken and reverent, and he takes that as permission to move, savoring every inch of it at first, his forehead against mine and his breath ragged against my mouth. His hands find mine and pin them gently to the rug on either side of my head, lacing our fingers together like he needs the anchor as much as I do, and I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, chasing the same building heat he's chasing, both of us climbing toward it together instead of one waiting on the other.

"Look at me," he says, rough, and I do, holding his gaze through every second of it even when my whole body wants to close my eyes against the intensity of it. "Stay right here with me."

"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere, I promise."

We find a rhythm that builds and builds, nothing slow left in it now, until something wilder takes over completely, my name breaking out of him in pieces he doesn't seem able to help. When I finally shatter underneath him it isn't a small thing. It's total, every part of me pulling taut and then dissolving at once. He follows me over that same edge only seconds later, groaning my name against my throat like it's the only word he has left in him. We stay locked together through the last of it, both of us shaking, both of us holding on through it like letting go might mean losing something neither of us can get back.

Afterward we stay tangled on the rug, blanket pulled down from the couch and thrown over both of us, the fire burned low to embers that paint everything the warm color of a sunset. His fingers trace lazy lines along my spine, and I trace the scar at his ribs the way I have every time since the first, and neither of us seems in any hurry to move or speak or do anything but exist in the quiet together.

"I keep thinking about how close I came to never doing this," he says eventually, voice rough with something more than exhaustion. "Not just tonight. Any of it. If I'd stayed in Denver another year, or taken the job Gunny tried to talk me out of, or a hundred other small decisions that could've gone differently."

"Don't do that to yourself. You're here. That's what matters."

"I know. I still think about it." He tightens his arm around me, like proving the point to himself as much as to me. "I don't know how to explain what these last few months have done to me. I spent six years building a life that only had to hold my own weight, and now there's you and the twins, and I can't imagine going back."

"That's either the most romantic or the most structural thing anyone's ever said to me."

"Probably both. I contain multitudes, remember."

I laugh, soft, and press closer against him, close enough to feel his heartbeat slow gradually under my palm, steady and real and entirely mine for tonight if nothing else. The fire pops once, settling, and for a long moment neither of us says anything else, content just to lie there in the glow of it, his hand tracing lazy patterns against my hip, my head tucked under his chin like it was built for exactly that spot.

"Jenna." He says my name quiet, testing it, like he's working up to something bigger sitting just behind it.

"Yeah?"

"I..."

He stops. I feel the word catch somewhere in his chest before it fully forms, feel the exact moment he decides not to finish it, and instead of saying whatever it was he leans down and presses a slow kiss to my temple, warm and lingering, saying everything the sentence didn't get to.

It isn't the first swallowed sentence this family's carried around lately. I think of Eli in the driveway after sledding, red to the ears over a word he never let himself finish, and here's Rafe doing the exact same thing on a rug in front of the fire, and I can't help wondering if it's the same word circling both of them, or if I'm just hopeful enough tonight to want it to be.

I don't ask him to finish it. I don't push, don't fill the silence the way some old, anxious part of me still wants to. I heard it anyway, even unfinished. Some things don't need the whole sentence to be understood.

I let the hope sit there instead, quiet and unspoken beside me in the firelight, and close my eyes against his shoulder, entirely certain that whatever he almost said, we'll get there eventually, in our own time, the same unhurried way we got here.