(Millie POV)
He kissed my stomach. I had not yet given him permission to touch my stomach. I had not yet given him the small, generous permission a woman gives a man whose baby she is carrying when she wants him to touch her stomach. He had taken the permission himself, the way he had taken all of me, not with force, not with cruelty, but with the slow, sure, patient certainty of a man who had been earning the right to touch my stomach for seven months and had decided, on Sunday morning, that he had earned it. The kiss was not a kiss. The kiss was a claim. The kiss was the same as you can't leave me now. I did not know yet what to do about the kiss. I sat up in bed on Monday morning and the room smelled like laundry and cedar and the lavender pillow spray Adrianna had been putting on the
