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A fire lights in his eyes, sudden and bright. He slides the ring onto my finger and presses a kiss to the back of my hand, and heat spreads all the way up my arm.

“Stand up,” I say, my hand finding the warm edge of his jaw. “I’m not used to looking down at you.”

He rises and lifts me easily onto the edge of the table by my waist.

“Your injury,” I start.

“It is healed,” he says, and cradles the back of my neck and my waist, kissing me until I forget the argument, stopping the instant I press a hand to his chest.

He gathers me up and carries me back along the lit path and into the house, and every step of it holds a future he is finally daring to believe in.

In the bedroom his kiss turns hungrier, deeper, feral, and he presses a kiss to the side of my neck and murmurs that this is our home now.

I take in the dark, decadent, masculine room, saturated all the way through with his overpowering cedar scent, and heat floods low in me, and my pussy clenches just imagining what happens on that bed. I have been in his bed before, that first stunned night in his penthouse that started all of it, but this is the house he chose for all of us, and everything is different now.

There is a ring on my finger and a binder in the yard and a child asleep down the hall who is safe under this roof. This is not some muddled, dopamine-induced attraction or a mistake I’m about to make. It is a life I’m choosing with both eyes open.

“Are you happy?” he asks, his forehead resting against mine.

“Yes,” I say, and it is the truest word I have said all day.

He works the buttons of my shirt open one at a time, fingers dancing down them, unhurried, baring me, and the slight roundness of my belly, to his eyes as though he has all the time in the world now, as though there is no version of tomorrow where I’m not here.

“So fucking beautiful,” he says, cupping my breasts in both hands as though he has waited his whole life to hold exactly this. He pushes my bra up, kissing his way down my tender breasts, and closes his mouth over one peak, and my back arches up off the bed toward him before I decide to move.

He lowers me back onto the plush bed. “I need to taste you,” he says, and drags my panties off and settles himself between my thighs, my legs over his shoulders.

His first stroke of his tongue through my slick folds rips a cry out of me. He licks and sucks, groaning, at the spot that makes my hips buck up off the mattress, my soft skin rippling with pleasure.

He adds his fingers, curling them, and I shatter around him in a hard, fast climax, my thighs shaking around his head until all I feel is wet heat.

He presses a kiss to my inner thigh, and there is a low, male satisfaction in the sound he makes against my skin. “It is delicious, the taste of you. Come here,” he says, and pulls me up the length of his body, past the hard press of his member.

I hesitate over him, torn between scrambling away and submitting.

“Trust me,” he says. He wants my full weight on him, nothing held back, and it is so easy to give up control.

I settle over his face, and I stop thinking entirely, all liquid pleasure as he works me relentlessly, and I brace both hands against the headboard, and it takes every scrap of my energy to stay upright.

“Don’t stop,” I beg, chasing my orgasm, and I feel him smile against me.

A second, shattering orgasm, harder than the first, whites out my vision completely, and his hands hold me steady through every wave of it.

He lays me back down and strips off the rest of his clothes, revealing all of himself, the broad chest and the scarred abdomen and the hard length of his already-engorged prick.

He settles between my thighs and braces himself on his forearms above me, careful even now, even undone. “You taught me what love is,” he says, and pushes in slowly despite the tension shaking through his whole body. “I didn’t know before you. I thought I did, and I didn’t know a thing.”

The stretch of him steals my breath. Fully seated, he drops his forehead to mine and says my name low, like a prayer, and then he begins to move in deep, steady strokes.

“I want you to come inside me,” I whisper, and I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him deeper, and his careful control finally slips its leash.

His pace turns harder and faster with every thrust, and I love the way he fucks me and owns me, and the sounds he makes against my throat are unguarded in a way I have never once heard from him, from the most controlled man I know.

“You are perfect,” he says against my mouth. “You are mine. Come all over my cock.”

“Yours. Yours, yours,” I agree, and I feel the word go through him like a current, feel his whole body answer it.

He reaches between us to where we are joined and presses, and I come, crying out, as it pushes me straight over the edge again. He follows me with a harsh groan, grinding deep as his cum spills into me.