Page 126 of Gracefully Yours

Even after he’d given me multiple orgasms tonight, my mind hadn’t been able to settle down. I couldn’t seem to shut off all of my worries, even if I knew most of them were just my anxiety bubbling through. Sometimes it was hard to ignore them, to listen to the rational part of my brain who knew how crazy things sounded.

Daniel, my best friend, my husband, wrapped his arms around me from behind and nuzzled into my neck. “Come back to bed, darling. I can’t sleep without you next to me.”

I sighed, leaning my head backwards on his shoulder before just staring up at his jaw. He was so handsome and loving, and somehow, he was mine. We’d been friends for years, nothing more, and yet I didn’t regret a moment of that. Because I had him, and I was definitely, one hundred percent, in love with him.

So I tried to banish the thoughts in my head that said something could go wrong. How could it, when he was looking at me like that?

He spun my chair around, pulling me into his arms and onto my feet—or more accurately, his feet, since he was holding me so close that I was standing on his toes.

“Hi,” I whispered as he dropped his forehead to mine.

“Hi.”

Wrapping my arms around his neck, I let him sway us back and forth. And then we were slow dancing, at three am, in the quiet silence of our home, and I wondered if a moment had ever felt so wholly and wonderfully mine as this one did between us.

Resting my head on his shoulder, we kept going like that, dancing to non-existent music, until I yawned, remembering how tired I was.

He brushed the hair away from my eyes. “What do you think? Time for bed?”

“Mhm,” I agreed, sighing sleepily against him as he scooped me up, one hand on the small of my back, and the other under my arms, like he was protectively cradling me.

I’d never felt more at home than I did in his arms.

Maybe this was what it meant to be married. That your spouse was the place where your heart lived. It didn’t matter where you went, as long as you were together, because they were your home.

And maybe those sleepy thoughts were still pinging around my brain, even as he slid me under the covers and moved in next to me, holding me against him even in sleep. Daniel’s breathing evened out, and I couldn’t help but brush the small black curl that had fallen onto his forehead back before tracing his jawbone, admiring his face as he slept.

Maybe that was why I said what I said. Or maybe it was simply that the words were true, and yet I hadn’t said them yet.

“I love you,” I murmured as I fell asleep, cradled against his body. He was already asleep anyway, so I knew he wouldn’t have heard it. Nevertheless, even as sleep pulled me under, I knew it was true. It had been true for a long time.

I was so in love with my best friend.

CHAPTER30

Daniel

Ilove you. There had been no mistaking it when she’d whispered it last night. At first, I thought I’d hallucinated the words. Thought that there was no way I’d heard her properly. But I had. She’d said the words, incoherent and half asleep.

She loved me.The thought rocked my core. She didn’t mean as just friends, did she? This wasn’t a casual remark made among passing. And I’d been in love with her for a long, long time.

Now it was my turn to tell her. Make my own confession.

Because I was so in love with my wife. I always had been.

And yet… She was quiet. Withdrawn. Something about the way she had been staring at the oven last night with glassy eyes didn’t sit right in my gut. Something waswrong.

I’d watched her for three months, putting on her best brave face every time her period had come that I knew it was killing her inside. But all I could do was wrap my arms around her while she cried. I couldn’t fix it with a snap of my fingers the same way I could make something with my hands. Build a house. Strum the cords of my guitar. Play a quiet melody on the piano. Those were all making something from nothing, and yet…

“What?” Charlotte looked up at me from her coffee cup, having clearly caught me staring at her.

I shook my head. “It’s nothing.”

Was I just being paranoid? Maybe itwasnothing. Maybe I was reading too into her moods, even though I knew Charlotte as well as I knew myself.

I knew what her favorite candy was. How she liked to eat marshmallows as a casual snack. The way I’d catch her crying at Hallmark movies I knew she’d already watched before. How her eyes would fill with lust when she was reading something dirty in one of her romance novels. Her closet was stuffed full with every shade of pink imaginable, pastels that never seemed to end but were so perfectly her. How glitter seemed to go wherever she did. Her little look of concentration when she was threading a needle, or putting a hem into her newest creation.

The way she would light up when someone complimented the dress she’d made, and her response was always, “Thank you! It has pockets!”

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