Page 95 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Dot promised sprinkles," I say. "All three kinds. Told me herself like it was classified information."

"She's spoiling them rotten."

"That's the job now. Grandmother by proxy, no paperwork required." I watch the car disappear around the bend, and some old knot behind my ribs finally works itself loose, one I'd stopped noticing until it let go, the particular ease of a man with an empty house and an entire night in front of him and nowhere he's required to be until noon. "Come back to the loft."

"Just like that."

"Just like that." I take her hand, and she lets me, easy, like it costs her nothing at all anymore.

The drive back is quiet in a way that would have wound me up tight a few months ago and now just feels like room to breathe. Her hand rests on my knee, my thumb tracing slow circles over her knuckles at every stop sign, neither of us reaching for the radio or a topic to fill the silence with something it doesn't need. The loft looks the same as it always does when I pull in, lights off, porch bulb throwing its usual weak yellow glow across the steps, except tonight it doesn't feel like a place I go to be alone. It feels like a place we're walking into together, on purpose, for the first time since everything between us broke wide open and then, slower and harder, mended.

"Fourth step still creaks," Jenna says, catching herself on the railing when it groans under her foot.

"Been meaning to fix that for two years."

"You say that every single time."

"I mean it every single time." I catch her around the waist before she can finish the climb, and she laughs, surprised, her hands landing flat against my chest to steady herself, and for a second we just stand there on the stairs with the whole night waiting above us and neither of us moving to close the distance yet, both of us apparently willing to stretch this part out as long as it'll go.

"This is the same step that nearly took me out the first time I ever climbed up here," she says. "You didn't warn me. I about broke my ankle in front of you on our second real conversation."

"I was too busy staring to remember I owned stairs."

"You barely said ten words to me that whole visit."

"I'd rehearsed about forty of them in the truck on the drive over and lost every single one the second you smiled at me on the porch." I tug her the rest of the way up, slow, giving her every chance to laugh at me for it, which she does, easy and unguarded, nothing careful left in the sound of it. "Some things about me haven't changed much."

"You talk plenty now."

"Only because you stopped making me nervous enough to forget how."

"You're stalling," she says.

"I'm savoring. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"Ask me again in five minutes."

Inside, I don't bother with the lights, just the lamp by the window that throws everything gold and soft instead of bright, and Jenna toes off her shoes by the door the way she's done a hundred times now, easy and unthinking, a woman who knows exactly where she is and isn't measuring the exits anymore. I remember the first night she stood in this same doorway, both of us too careful, too polite, apologizing over nothing, tripping over words we'd rehearsed and then couldn't say right when it mattered. None of that's left in the room tonight. What's left is just us, unguarded, no script either one of us is working from anymore.

"You're staring," she says.

"I'm allowed. Nobody's timing me."

"That's a new development."

"Everything about tonight's a new development." I close the distance she left on the stairs, slow enough that she has every second to change her mind and doesn't, and when I kiss her it isn't the careful, testing kind from months ago, checking for permission with every inch. It's certain. It's a man who's stopped guessing at all and just wants the pleasure of hearing her confirm it out loud.

"Rafe."

"Yeah."

"Stop talking."

"Copy that."

She laughs against my mouth, and I feel it more than hear it, and whatever nerves either of us walked in carrying dissolve somewhere between the door and the couch we don't quite make it to, trading her jacket for my hands and my shirt for hers, unhurried, neither of us racing toward anything, both of us finally sure enough of what's waiting on the other side that we can afford to take our time getting there.