Page 149 of Your Place or Mine

The way he’d said—

I love you.

Three words I hadn’t expected.

Three words that hit like lightning and melted me down to my marrow.

And then, he’d touched me like I was something he was scared to break and starved to have at the same time. Gentle and wild, reverent and demanding. We hadn’t just had sex—we’dcollided. Every grief, every ache, every wall we’d built had crumbled somewhere between the kisses and the heat and those three words whispered into the hollow of my throat.

And now here I was. In his bed. In the aftermath.

And the only thing I could feel was a calm kind of certainty curling in my belly.

His breath shifted again, and I felt him stir. A slight squeeze of his arm around my waist. The scrape of morning stubble against my neck.

“Hmm.” His voice was sleep-rough and low enough to make goosebumps ripple down my spine. “You still here?”

I smiled. “Unless I’m hallucinating your mattress and flannel.”

He chuckled, voice still thick with sleep. “I thought maybe you’d vanish on me.”

I turned in his arms so I could see his face. He blinked, eyes clearer now, green and vibrant and so much softer than I remembered them being the first time we met.

“Why would I do that?”

He shrugged, one shoulder rising beneath the sheet. “Because I always figured I wasn’t the kind of guy a woman sticks around for.”

I reached up and brushed his hair off his forehead. “That might’ve been true once. But you keep surprising me.”

A beat passed. His eyes searched mine.

“And last night…?” he asked quietly.

I leaned in and kissed the corner of his mouth. “Last night changed things. For me, at least.”

His hand found mine beneath the covers. He didn’t say anything right away. He didn’t need to.

It was in the way he kissed my forehead. The way he pulled me closer, like he wasn’t letting go anytime soon.

My phone buzzed again, vibrating against the headboard.

Callum groaned. “Let me guess…Melanie?”

I laughed. “She wants her car.”

He buried his face in my shoulder and muttered, “She’s got the worst timing in the history of timing.”

I held him tighter. “She’s just… her.”

He kissed my shoulder. “Yeah, well. She better be ready to share you.”

I tilted my head to look at him, heart full.

“You planning to keep me?”

He met my gaze. “I’m planning totry.”

And just like that, the morning stretched long and soft around us. A new beginning wrapped in flannel and the scent of pine, with a man I never saw coming and maybe couldn’t live without.

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