Page 54 of Fall Into Me

“You have agirlfriend?”

“Mmm,” he hummed, walked up to me, and let his hands wander from my ribs down my back, letting them rest just above the curve of my ass. “I do.”

“Well, she sounds great.” I placed a hand on each of his cheeks and gave them a little smoosh.

“She is.” He nodded, his words coming out wonky.

“A real giver.”

Fane’s smile couldn’t be contained by the light hold I had on his cheeks. I’d come to realize that there were fewer things in life that gave me this feeling of intense, overwhelming gratitude as being someone who got to see the way he smiled. Second only to getting to hear him laugh.

He didn’t give them out freely, and usually the ones he did give out were restrained. Kind but subdued.

Not with me. I had his all-in smiles. When Fane smiled at me, he did it with his soul, and my God, he was beautiful.

“She certainly gave this morning.” He gave me a quick wink and a kiss to the corner of my mouth before he straightened up and stepped back.

My face was immediately flaming red because now I was thinking about this morning. Him, naked and warm and solid. The way his stomach muscles contracted with every rapid breath, his hands white-knuckled as they gripped the iron frame of his bed, the sounds that poured out of his mouth as I eased him into mine.

Great. Now, I was actively having a hot flash, which just made him grin even wider because, damn him, heknewwhere my mind had gone. If the look on his face said anything, he was pretty happy with himself about it.

“So.” I cleared my throat and rolled my eyes at him. “If you’ve already robbed this apartment, I don’t know what else I could help you with.”

“The next part is where you come in.” He trailed behind me, keeping just enough distance between us.

“And what’s that?”

“Getting all our stuff in here.”

That stopped me in my tracks.

“But this isn’t your apartment.”

Fane looked at me with equal parts excitement and vulnerability. “No, it’s not.”

“Okay.” I nodded, not at all following him, but from the tone of his voice, my stomach had begun doing flips.

“However,” he went on, and I just stood there, heart lodged in my esophagus, waiting for whatever he was about to say. He cleared his throat, keeping his eyes on mine. “It isourapartment.”

There was the right amount of blood in every part of my body until he said those words, and then suddenly there wasn’t. It was rushing around in a panic, trying to figure out where to go.

Fane’s face went from unsure to worried in a split second, and then he was there, arms wrapped around me. Always keeping me steady.

“Baby,” he murmured, ducking down to get me to look at him. “Baby, look at me.”

I shook my head, too busy trying to look around him.

“I—” I had no words. I had nothing to say. Whatwasthere to say when you were in the midst of living out something you had actively wished for your entire life?

“You don’t like it,” he said like it was a fact. A reprimand he was giving himself.

“Fane.” I shook my head again and tried to step away from him so that I could see him without craning my neck.

“I’m going to kick Ash’s ass. I asked him if this was too soon. He said it was toolate. What does that even mean?” Fane dropped his arms from where they were wound around me and turned away from me, running a hand through his long, shoulder-length hair. He usually kept it up, but today he’d left it down, and it was doing incredibly sinister things to me.

“Fane!”I wasn’t the sort of person who raised their voice, but every now and then when he got in his own head, it was like he couldn’t hear me and it was all I could do to snap him out of it.

The look he gave me was heartbreaking. It was every ounce of the vulnerability I saw from before but without any of the shy hopefulness that had accompanied it.

---