The last trace of uncertainty in her eyes—the last question mark—dissolved, and what was left was just her. Open. Unguarded. Giving him permission to just be himself.
He kissed her. This kiss was slow, intentional.
He kissed the corner of her mouth first—giving back the gesture she’d given him on the highway, the one that had nearly broken his resolve—and then her lower lip, and then fully, deeply.
She made a sound against his mouth. Low, quiet, barely a breath. He felt it vibrate through him like a tuning fork.
Her hands found the hem of his shirt and pulled upward. He helped, sitting back to let her ease it over his head. She was careful with his arm—working the sleeve over the bandage slowly, her fingers light around the gauze—and the tenderness of it, the way she handled his wound like something that mattered to her more than it mattered to him, made his throat tighten.
The shirt dropped. He’d never been self-conscious about his body—the military had stripped that out of him. But the way she looked at him now wasn’t the way someone looked at a body.
It was the way she looked at a face she was about to draw—absorbing everything, the whole and the damaged, finding the story in the details.
Her fingers traced the scar on his left hand, moved up his forearm, and found the older ones on his shoulder from shrapnel. Then to the fresh bandage on his right bicep. She touched the edge of it, feather-light.
“Battle scars,” she said.
“Some of them.”
“All of them Blake’s fault?”
“Not all.”
She leaned forward and pressed her lips to the bandage. Just that. A kiss against white gauze and medical tape, so careful he barely felt the pressure. But it detonated something in his chest—a detonation without sound, the kind that rearranges everything internal while the surface stays intact.
He pulled her up to him. Kissed her harder, one hand in her hair, and the taste of her mouth and the warmth of her skin against his. The small, urgent sound she made fueled his mouth, his fingers.
His hands shook as he helped her remove her shirt. That surprised him. He’d held a rifle steady in sixty-knot crosswinds. He’d performed field surgery on a teammate with a flashlight between his teeth. His hands were the most reliable part of him—trained, conditioned, precise.
This wasn’t a rifle or a field kit. This was Alyssa, and the last time he’d touched her like this, they’d been engaged. The future had been simple, and he hadn’t known yet that a single lie could incinerate everything.
She took his hands and pressed them against her ribcage, her skin warm under his palms, her heartbeat knocking against his fingers.
“I’m right here,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He breathed. Let his hands steady against the rhythm of her heartbeat. Let the truth of her settle into his bones—alive, present, choosing him. Right here, in this room, she was choosing him after everything.
“I know,” he said. And kissed the hollow of her throat.
After that, time stopped behaving like time.
He’d forgotten this—the way the world narrowed to a single point of focus whenever he was with her. The way everything outside the room faded to static, and the only signal that mattered was her.
He’d forgotten how she fit against him. The geometry of it—her head tucked under his chin, her hips under his, the way her legs wrapped around him like she was anchoring herself.
Two years had changed the details but not the architecture. She still fit. He moved slowly. Not because she was fragile—she wasn’t, she’d proved that a dozen times in the last twenty-four hours—but because he wanted to pay attention.
He’d spent their time apart numbing himself, and now that what he wanted and needed was here, vivid and real, he didn’t want to miss a second of it.
The pulse in her neck fluttered when he kissed her just below her ear. She squirmed when he licked the dip of her collarbone, where she was ticklish and always had been.
He smiled against her skin, moving down her body. Reaquainting himself with it. The plane of her stomach where her muscles tensed under his lips. Her hips arching up on a gasp when he trailed kisses down her thighs.
He measured each response the way he did wind direction and distance, but this was the opposite of tactical. This was devotional. This was a man on his knees in the only church he’d ever believed in.
She pulled him back up to her. Kissed him while her hands explored the planes of his back, traced the ridge of his spine, and found the knot of tension between his shoulder blades. She kneaded her thumbs into it, and he groaned.
“There,” she said against his mouth. “That’s what you sound like when you stop controlling everything.”