Page 52 of Heat Unscripted

Behind us the kitchen went on being a kitchen. The morning light kept shifting through the window. Tuck and Cillian kept breathing. The legal packet sat on the counter, its ugly contents waiting, its threat still unanswered.

None of it mattered. Not yet. Not in this.

What mattered was this. Bram St.James, who had never in his life let himself want without managing the wanting, was holding me in a kitchen that smelled like all four of us. His composure was gone. His frame was gone. His hands were pressed flat to my back with the fierceness of a man who’d finally stopped being afraid of his own grip.

And my voice, the one he’d fallen asleep to before he had my face, the one that built a career on fiction and concealment and the careful work of being someone else, was saying his name against his temple. Low and unmuted and completely, finally real.

“Bram.”

He shuddered.

“Bram. Stay.”

His arms tightened. His face pressed deeper into my neck. The sound that came out of him wasn’t language. It was the Alpha version of the whines I’d been making. Involuntary. Stripped of every filter he had.

It sounded like yes.

TWENTY-ONE

Isobel

The library found us by accident.

Or Bram found it. After the kitchen, after the holding, after Tuck pressed a kiss to my temple and muttered something about food, after Cillian squeezed my shoulder once and drifted off toward his tablet. Cillian didn’t need to be told that what came next wasn’t for an audience. He just went. And Bram pulled back far enough to look at me, his gray-green eyes still wet, his hands still shaking where they held my waist.

“I need…” He stopped. Swallowed. “Can we…”

He couldn’t finish the sentence. But his gaze slid sideways, toward the hallway, toward the small room at the back of my house I’d turned into a reading space years ago. Bookshelves floor to ceiling. A deep leather sofa. A lamp that threw warm amber light. The quietest room in a house built for quiet.

I took his hand and led him there.

The door clicked shut behind us, and everything on the other side of it went away. Tuck’s footsteps in the kitchen. The hum of Cillian’s gear. The legal packet on the counter. The people who had heard my secret. All of it gone behind wood and plaster and a wall of books.

Bram stood in the middle of the room like he’d never seen it. His gaze moved across the shelves, reading the spines, clocking the order I’d put them in, the worn patches on the leather where I’d spent a thousand evenings curled up with scripts. His hand stayed in mine. He was still shaking.

“I’ve been here before,” he said. His voice came out rough. Stripped of its usual gloss, still grainy with everything he’d confessed in the kitchen. “The script review. Third act transitions.”

“You sat in that chair.” I waved my free hand at the armchair by the window. “I made tea.”

“You made tea.” Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile. The memory of sitting in this room with four feet of professional distance between us, calling everything he felt practical. “I sat in here with you, and I went home and couldn’t sleep.”

“I know.”

His eyes came to mine. “You knew?”

“I knew you weren’t sleeping.” My voice did the thing it had only just learned to do, the low warm register I’d spent years refusing to let out in front of anyone. “Cillian mentioned it. The dark circles during pre-production.”

“Cillian.” A breath that might have been a laugh in some other life. “Of course Cillian noticed.”

The quiet that came after wasn’t empty. It was two people standing in a room that smelled of old paper and chamomile and the sharp thread of peppercorn that Bram’s scent was working into every surface. His biology was claiming the space without asking him. Marking it. Making it ours instead of just mine.

He was looking at me.

Not the assessment I’d gotten used to over the years of working together, the once-over that took in posture and energy and readiness like numbers to be tuned. This was somethingelse. This was a man who’d been listening to me in the dark for years, seeing my face for the first time without the professional frame that had kept everything safe.

His free hand lifted. Slowly. The way someone reaches for something they expect to vanish.

His fingers found the frame of my glasses.