Page 46 of Brother in Law with Benefits

The bedroom door is barely closed before Sophie’s hands are at my collar, working the buttons with that focused precision she brings to everything she decides to get right.

There’s no clock on this anymore. No two months. No Brazil. That fact sits heavy and quiet between us, changing the shape of the whole night.

She gets my shirt open and pushes it off my shoulders. I let her. Nineteen years of being the one who moves first, and here I am standing still while she undresses me like she has all the time in the world. It feels more exposed than anything else we’ve done.

“You’re staring,” she says, not looking up from my belt. Her fingers are steady. Her voice isn’t.

“I know.”

“It’s unnerving. Like being assessed.”

“You’ll live.”

She glances up through her lashes, that quick dry humor still flickering even with her breath already uneven. “I feel like I should be taking notes. Grant Guilligan, staring like he’s trying to memorize something.”

“I am.” My voice comes out lower than I meant. “Keep going.”

She laughs—surprised, a little breathless—and gets the belt open. Her hands pause against my stomach for half a second, like she’s testing how much of this is actually hers now that there’s no end date hanging over us.

I answer by not moving.

She pushes me back onto the bed. I go easy. She climbs over me, deliberate, hair falling around her face. The green sweater disappears somewhere between one breath and the next; I’m too busy watching the way her eyes darken when she feels me hard beneath her to track the fabric. She registers the look I’m giving her and her mouth tilts, small and satisfied.

She should. After five years of a marriage that taught her the opposite, she should get used to being looked at like this.

Her hands map the old scar along my ribs, slower than usual. Her mouth follows, open and warm, tracing the line like she’s learning it for the first time even though she’s done it a dozen times before. Something’s different tonight and we both feel it. Neither of us names it.

“You’re quiet,” she says against my jaw.

“I’m concentrating.”

“On what?”

“On not flipping you over and fucking you yet.”

She goes still, then laughs low against my throat. The vibration of it frays whatever’s left of my restraint. “Yet,” she repeats. “Interesting word choice.”

“I have a sequence in mind.”

“Of course you do.” She nips the underside of my jaw, then sits up just enough to look at me properly, eyes bright and already alittle wrecked. “That’s the least romantic thing you’ve ever said to me and I am, somehow, extremely into it.”

I let her get about as far as I can stand to let her get before I decide I’ve had enough of watching.

I roll her under me in one motion, and she makes a sound of surprise that turns into something else fast, her hands sliding up into my hair, her whole body arching up to meet mine like the movement's been waiting on her too.

"Oh," she says, breathless, looking up at me with that wry light in her eyes that never fully goes out, not even now.

"Let me take care of you," I say.

It's not a request.

She doesn't argue. That, more than anything, tells me where we are tonight — Sophie Guilligan, who argues with everyone about everything, including herself, going soft and quiet and letting me do what I've wanted to do since the day I walked back into her life and found her running an entire household better than anyone had a right to expect from a twenty-three-year-old who married into a family she barely knew.

I finish undressing her slow, on purpose. Every piece of clothing I move gets a beat of attention before I move to the next — her collarbone, the curve of her waist, the soft skin just below her ribs that makes her breath catch every time, without fail, like her body's still surprised by it after five months. She squirms under the pace, impatient, and I hold her hips still with one hand and keep going anyway.

"You're doing this on purpose," she says, voice already fraying at the edges.

I take my time. I've always taken my time with her — it's one of the only real advantages age actually gives a man, the patience to get somewhere slow and mean every single step of it — but tonight there's no reason to hurry, and I use every minute of that. My mouth finds her, and her hands fist in the sheets, andthe sounds she makes stop being words somewhere around the third time I do the thing that makes her hips buck up off the mattress entirely.