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She reaches for me first. “This is a terrible grand gesture,” she says softly as I kiss my way down her body.

“No,” I say against her skin. “This is the follow-through.”

Then I put my mouth on her breast and she stops talking.

She feels too good under me, warm and alive and finally, finally not being kept at a distance by another man’s contract or my own bad judgment. I suck her nipple into my mouth and she arches off the bed with a sound so sharp and needy it goes straight through me. I give the other breast the same attention, slow at first, then harder when I feel how much she wants it, how desperate she already is.

Her fingers tangle in my hair. “Dalton.”

“Yes.”

“Less talking.”

I smile against her skin and slide lower.

When my mouth gets between her thighs, she curses softly and spreads for me without a trace of shyness, and the trust in that nearly undoes me as much as her body does. I don’t take my time. I can’t. I’ve already lost too many days to restraint and too many nights to pretending I could still leave.

I lick into her hard and deep, and she grabs a fistful of sheet and my shoulder at the same time, caught between pulling me closer and holding herself together. By the time I get two fingers inside her, she’s shaking.

“That’s it,” I say, and feel her clench around my hand. “Come for me.”

She does.

I drag it out because I’m not generous and because I need to feel her come apart under me at least once before I let myself have what I’ve been driving toward since I turned the car around. When I finally climb back over her, she’s flushed from throat to chest and looking at me like she’d like to devour me and sue me at the same time.

“Tell me you’re not leaving,” she says.

I get inside her in one hard thrust and answer with my face buried against her neck. “I’m not leaving.”

That’s all she needs.

She wraps her legs around me again and I fuck her hard enough to make the bed protest, every stroke knocking a different broken sound out of her. There is nothing measured about it now. No caution, no lingering strategy. Just all the love and fear and relief I’ve been carrying around in my body finally given somewhere to go.

She meets me thrust for thrust, nails in my shoulders, mouth at my throat, all of her open and furious and wanting. I kiss her when I can, hold her when I can’t, and keep going until she comes again around me so tightly I nearly lose the rhythm.

Then I make sure I don’t. Because I have waited too long for this and because I want her to feel exactly what it means that I came back.

She’s the one who breaks first this time, pulling me down by the back of the neck, mouth against my ear, voice wrecked. “Harder.”

I obey.

Of course I obey.

By the time I come, it’s with her still wrapped around me, still holding me there like she doesn’t trust the world not to take me back the second she loosens her grip.

Maybe she’s right. Maybe I don’t trust it either.

Afterward, I lift her up and carry her to the middle of the bed properly, because somewhere under the sex and the relief and the hunger I still know how to take care of her body. She laughs weakly when I pull the blanket over us.

“What?”

“You turned around on the way to the airport and then came here and fucked me into the mattress.”

“Yes.”

“That is an absurdly male declaration of love.”

I kiss her shoulder. “I also gave a speech.”