Emma's POV
"Stay." His voice is barely above a whisper, abraded with sleep, rougher than I've ever heard it. "Let me hold you while you sleep."
The words land somewhere low in my chest and don't bounce back.
I should move. Every reasonable part of me knows I should move—should climb out of this bed, cross the room, get back behind the curtain where there is darkness and distance and the comfortable fiction that nothing is happening between us. I know what the right thing is.
But his arm is around me. His chest is against my back. And the cedar-and-rain scent of him has settled into every breath I take like it belongs there, like my lungs have decided this is simply what air is now, and moving means losing it, and something in me—something that has been cold and guarded and locked down
