Cole went home while I settled the horses, then I followed and let myself into the cottage.
He was waiting for me in the kitchen. He wasn’t naked. I frowned my disapproval, and he laughed. “Easy. You want me to bend you over the kitchen counter?”
Eventually, maybe. Right now, I just wanted to be with him. I’d felt his gaze on me all morning, and every time we’d locked eyes across the sand, something had shifted between us, bringing us right to this moment. I couldn’t name what it was or why it had happened now, but he’d said the right moment would find us.
And it had.
“You know I’d planned all this out,” Cole said. “When we first met and I couldn’t stop kissing you. I was going to take you upstairs, tease you for hours, then fuck you really gently.”
A shudder passed through me. “And now?”
“I’m still going to be gentle, but I know better than to think I can hold out for hours.”
The conversation felt surreal. Like I was watching it on TV. Since last summer, we’d muddled along in the outside world, fitting our lives together, piece by piece, and inside, in Cole’s bed, I’d fucked him so much I’d forgotten there’d once been a time I hadn’t known how.
That I’d walked into our friendship wanting something else.
Something I still wanted. So. Fucking. Much.
I took a breath.
He was on me before I’d let it go, but I caught his face before he could kiss me. “You know I love you?”
Cole smiled in his slow way. “Of course I do. You know I love you too, don’t you?”
I did. He was still pretty bad at being nice to himself, but I never worried that he didn’t feel the same way about me as I did about him. Cole wasn’t good at bullshit. He was good at honesty, even when he did it without words. “I know you love me. It’s just...”
“What?” Cole cupped my jaw, as he so often did, and searched my face as if he could spare me the trouble of explaining myself. “What is it?”
“Sometimes you look at me like you don’t believe I’m really there.”
His gaze flickered. “Get out of my head.”
“I’m not in your head. I’m in mine, and I know you do enough worrying for the both of us, but that doesn’t stop me doing it too. You don’t think I’m going anywhere, do you?”
Cole sighed and pressed his forehead to mine. “No. I mean, not really. I’m just not used to being this happy. I keep waiting for something to go wrong, or even just for me to fuck it up spectacularly all by my damn self, but every day I wake up and you’re stillright here, and I don’t always know what to do with that.”
“Are you worried about Ella?”
“Nope. At least, I wasn’t till she started walking and now I need six pairs of eyes.”
“Five. You’ve got me.”
“I know.”
“Sure about that?”
Cole’s gaze darkened, but in the way that made my blood heat. The good way. “Do I need to show you?”
“Maybe. But Cole?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t be careful with me.”
* * *
I was living on another planet if I thought he wasn’t going to be careful with me. At least to start with. He’d already shut the blinds and lit his candles. Upstairs in the bedroom, a new scent misted from his favourite diffuser.