Page 87 of Claim

“Lennon was only popping out for milk. How long would that take?”

A laugh left me before I could stop it, and I pressed my mouth into his hair, kissing the crown of his head.

“He’s got a six-pinter in the fridge. Reckon he’s circling the block til he thinks it’s safe.”

Chapter fifteen

Tristan

I lay there, having slipped from Razor’s front to his side, our trousers still caught around our ankles, legs tangled, unsure how I was going to peel myself away.

But a more pressing realisation was the room I was in.

Two narrow beds. Pale walls. A stack of folded blankets in the corner. A soft toy half-hidden on a shelf.

A baby room.

I huffed out a quiet breath and thought of Theo Langford’s drunken audacity at Marcus and Eloise’s baby shower when he’d boldly and brazenly asked for a fuck in the nursery. I’d been genuinely horrified then. Appalled by the setting. The disrespect. The idea of bringing anything adult and messy into a space meant for something new and unbroken.

Turns out, I was willing to let that slide when it was Razor.

I was willing to let a lot of things slide for Razor.

Especially when he traced soft lines up and down my spine with tender fingertips, an idle touch unperformed. The sort of touch someone does automatically. Because they want to. Because it’s…instinctual.

I closed my eyes.

And it all came down on me.

What I’d done. Where I was. What I’d risked by walking into this house and not walking back out again.

I hadn’t meant for any of this to happen.

I’d come here because my day had ended and his hadn’t. Because I needed to see him with my own eyes. To make sure he’d been released. Check he had what he needed. And to remind him about the consultation, the paperwork, and the conditions. Anchor him back into the process. To make this make sense.

Professional. Contained. Sensible.

I’d told myself that was all it was.

But how could I ever have believed it would end any other way?

I shifted closer, pressing my face into his shoulder, breathing him in. Not sex. Not hunger.

Him.

The man I had rearranged my life around. The man the law said I should not touch. Yet my body had already chosen, long before I’d understood the cost.

His hand tightened at my back, as if he’d felt the shift in me.

“Does this mean I need to find a new brief?” He tilted his head, looking down at me, and I looked up at him through the last drifting haze of what we’d done.

He looked different. Not changed, exactly. But… clearer.

Maybe because I wasn’t projecting onto him anymore. Wasn’t responding to the danger he used to wear, or the version of him I’d once shaped to satisfy my hunger for rebellion. I wasn’t attuned to the idea of him now, but to the reality.

And fuck if I wasn’t in love with that reality.

I knew what he’d lost. What he’d endured. How close he’d come to breaking inside those walls. I could see the fear he kept buried so deep it had shaped him from the inside. The gratitude he didn’t know how to hold without flinching. The uncertainty threaded through everything now that the brutal architecture of his life had been torn away and nothing solid had replaced it. There was no myth left in him. Only a man who’d survived.