Page 43 of Mason

Because once we’ve cleared our plates, I set my mug down and meet his gaze.

“Can you take me home?”

Mason watches me for a second, his eyes unreadable. Then he nods. “Yeah. Of course.”

There’s something unspoken between us.

Something thick, heavy, lingering in the air.

We both feel it, but neither of us says a word.

I don’t know what it is.

But I know it’s there.

And I think he does, too.

Mason hasn’t told me to stay. Hasn’t tried to convince me that I don’t need to go back.

But I see it in the way his jaw ticks, in the way his fingers drum absently against the table.

A quiet reluctance. A hesitation.

Maybe he doesn’t want me to go.

And if I’m honest with myself, I’m not entirely ready to leave either.

But I have to.

I need to go home. I need to face my reality.

Clay is meeting with Mason’s lawyer today, and if everything goes well, he could be coming home.

There won’t be a welcome home party—not after everything—but I can at least make sure things are ready for him. That he has a place to land. That I’m there when he walks through the door.

Because no matter how much my life has changed in the last twenty-four hours… Clay is still my family.

And family is the one thing I refuse to lose.

But something else has shifted, too.

Something deeper, something I didn’t see coming.

What happened between Mason and me this morning wasn’t part of any plan.

It wasn’t supposed to happen.

Yet here I am, wrapped in the aftermath of it, unable to shake the feeling that nothing will ever be the same.

I won’t say I regret it—because I don’t.

How could I?

Having mind-blowing, body-wrecking sex with a man who looks and moves like Mason Ironside after the longest dry spell in the history of time?

That’s the kind of thing that rewires a woman’s brain. Changes her chemistry.

It wasn’t just good—it was devastating.

---