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“It’s a compliment.” I stroke the back of her neck. “But you never let survival become your whole identity. Even when you felt like you had to hide. You found work you like. You still want things, Jules. Music boxes. Old maps nobody on earth needs anymore. Bows. Enough fairy lights to violate several electrical codes.”

She pouts. “The beams looked sad.”

“You’d been in my house twelve minutes when you said that.”

“They were very sad.”

“And you stole an entire box of macarons from my refrigerator.”

She straightens in outrage. “They were individually wrapped in gold, and the box had a big purple bow. It practically screamed my name.”

A laugh rolls out of me. “Fuck, I love that mouth. And not just because I have firsthand knowledge of its talents.”

She flips me off. Holding my towel around my waist, I cross to the dresser before she can retaliate. When I glance back, she’s propped on one elbow among the rumpled sheets, wrapped in terrycloth, her hungry attention trained directly on my towel.

I point at the far wall. “Turn around.”

Her nose wrinkles. “Now you’re suddenly modest? I don’t get to see the whole package?”

“Turn around, you little perv.”

She sticks out her tongue but rotates on her knees, muttering about hypocrisy while I pull on boxer briefs and sleep pants. “Safe.”

She whips back around. “Coward.”

I return to the bed, and she rises onto her knees to meet me, the sheet slipping to her waist before she hauls it back up. I cup her chin, and the firelight catches in her eyes.

This terrifies me. After everything taken from her, she still has the nerve to want more. She can cut a larger man into ribbons, then melt the second Marzipan rubs her ankle. She can survive without beautiful things but refuses to pretend beauty is frivolous.

I want to feed her hunger, her passion. I want to be standing there every time those eyes find beauty. I want her bows in my bathroom and her crumbs on my couch if it means she keeps looking at the world like it still holds things worth wanting.

I’m not falling carefully or sensibly. I’m dangerously close to falling madly, irreversibly in love with Jubilee York, and I suspect the ground disappeared long before I noticed.

She’s spent weeks testing me. Tomorrow, it’s my turn. “I’m taking you somewhere tomorrow.”

Her eyes narrow. “Where?”

“Surprise.”

She sticks her nose in the air. “I hate surprises.”

I aim a scolding finger at her. “No hacking, no searching, no reverse-image bullshit, and no cheat sheets.”

She guffaws and slumps against the pillows, arms crossed. “That’s discriminatory against my natural talents.”

“Tragic.”

“What am I even being tested on?”

I tuck a loose strand behind her ear. “Your only hint is that you’re going to meet someone more important to me than this house, the chickens, the cats, the business, and every one of those five million people following me.”

Her eyes go enormous. I savor that for approximately three seconds before she fires off, “Who? Family?”

“Nice try.”

“A celebrity?” I stare at her. “What? Maybe Julia Child came back from the dead.”

“I’d have serious concerns about the apocalypse.”