GIDEON
I had faced down wars.
Had stood in rooms where the wrong word would have ended empires. Had made decisions that cost lives and made them anyway because that was the weight of the seat I held. Had been, for thirty years, the thing other things were afraid of.
None of it had prepared me for this.
Something so mundane as watching a woman sleep, but to me it was everything.
Curled on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek, her hair spread across the pillow I had apparently decided was now hers.
The morning light was doing something unconscionable to her shoulders. The sheet had slipped. I had been lying here for – I checked – twenty minutes, which was seventeen minutes longer than I had ever spent simply looking at another person.
I couldn’t stop.
The bond was doing somet
