Elara's POV
I thought about that kiss for the entire drive back to pick up Mia.
I didn't want to think about it. It was a Thursday morning, I'd just left a fertility clinic, and I had a child to pick up. But I couldn't stop. Eleven months of divorce, a mate bond formally severed, and my body still remembered everything I'd ordered it to forget.
He had kissed me the way he always had. Like I was something he intended to keep. Like hesitation was a language he had never learned. Like nothing had changed.
And I had stood there.
Not because I had forgiven him. Not because the past five years hadn't happened.
I had stood there because I was twenty-six years old and I had spent five years responding to exactly that kind of kiss. Muscle memory. That was all it was.
I drove through four tra
