Ava wakes to the taste of him on her tongue and the soft drag of cotton against bare skin.
For a second, she doesn’t know where she is.
The ceiling above her is unfamiliar—higher, darker, a recessed line of light tracing the perimeter. The sheets smell like clean linen and his soap and something that is already starting to smell like *them.*
Memory hits in fragments.
Damian’s hands on her hips.
His mouth at her throat.
His voice at her ear was rough and reverent and entirely too honest.
Her body aches in satisfying ways. Her throat feels scraped from laughing and gasping and saying his name too many times in too few hours.
She turns her head.
He isn’t there.
The space beside her is warm, dented, a faint imprint of his body in the mattress.
For a wild, stupid second, panic flares
