Page 24 of Charmed by the Obsessive Boss

I rock. His mouth falls open. He says my name and then please, and then a string of things I can't hear over the roar in my ears.

His hand slides between us and finds me, and I'm coming again before I've caught my breath, with my head thrown back and his name in my mouth, and he follows with a sound torn straight out of his chest, his arms locked around me, his face pressed into my neck, shuddering.

For a long time neither of us moves.

Afterward the lamp is still on. I'm sprawled over his chest with my cheek on his heart and his hand moving slowly up and down my back. I can hear his pulse slowing.

The room smells like skin and cinnamon, and from somewhere outside I can still hear the faintest crack of the bonfire, three streets away.

"I'm going to say something," he says quietly, "and I'd like you to hear it all the way through."

"Okay."

"I didn't fix your faucet because I thought you needed fixing." His fingers stop at the small of my back. "I don't want to rescue you, Rosey. You don't need it. You've held up an entire town on your own two shoulders and never once asked to be thanked." He draws a breath. "I want to be useful. There's a difference."

"What's the difference?"

"A rescuer needs you to be in trouble."

The words go through me like warm water. I lie very still with my hand over his heart, and it's a perfectly ordinary heart, thumping steadily against my palm, and something in my chest turns over and doesn't turn back.

I count it up because I'm a woman who counts. Thirty-seven hours, give or take. Thirty-seven hours since a man in a ridiculous coat told a roomful of my friends their jobs were a column on a page.

It isn't enough time to know anyone. It's all the time there is.

I'm falling for him.

It arrives with no fanfare. It's quiet and enormous and absolutely certain, a thing I recognize the way you recognize your own handwriting. I think of a receipt in a junk drawer and a circled tally mark, and I think of a man on his knees under my sink, and I wait to be afraid. I am, I'm terrified, but underneath the fear the floor holds.

"Roman," I say.

"Mm."

"Nothing." I press my mouth to his chest. "Say it again."

"Which part?"

"The part about trouble."

He says it again. I fall into it like a bath.

Later, I don't know how much later, there's a hand on the back of my knee and a mouth on my shoulder, and I hear myself laugh into the pillow when he finds the spot just under my ribs that makes me squeal. "Ninety-four," he says solemnly, and starts over.

I tell him there are four hundred of them and he says that sounds like a challenge, and I say that's a terrible word to use, and he laughs and rolls me beneath him and kisses me until I forget my own name.

It's easier the second time, lazier, full of whispers and tangled sheets, my teeth in his shoulder, his hand at the nape of my neck, his forehead against mine. We're laughing when we come apart.

Then we're quiet. The lamp's gone off at some point, I don't remember when.

The dark is warm and close. He's behind me with one arm over my waist, and his hand has come to rest, spread flat and heavy, over the soft curve of my stomach and the old silver lines I've spent nine years trying to hide. I wait for him to move it.

He doesn't.

I fall asleep like that, with his breath on the back of my neck, happy beyond anything I have words for, and so frightened I can feel it in my teeth.

Chapter 6 — Roman

I wake before she does, and for the first time in my adult life I don't reach for my phone.