After dessert, Angel excused herself to the lounge to tidy some papers. Conley turned to me then, the kind of private glance that made my skin prickle.
“Later,” he said. “After she leaves.”
I nodded. It was not a promise so much as an instruction. The house hummed with a harmony that felt fragile. I wanted to push it into permanence.
We moved to the bedroom later that night. The way he closed the door behind us carried the hush of something sanctified. He walked toward me slowly, fingertips hovering at the line of my jaw. In his eyes there was a hunger that had a softer undertow than the raw animal magnetism of the earliest weeks. It was a hunger laced with something like concern.
“Tell me,” he whispered, voice low, “when it gets to you. The days. The images. I can’t protect what I can
