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.