thrust inside of her, and she lost her breath.
Because it was him. Finally.
He was something she hadn’t let herself want. This was something she hadn’t let herself want. And it wasn’t until she had stripped away all those other people in her life that had had so many expectations of her that she was free. Free to feel what she did. Free to want what she did.
And she wanted him.
And as he established a steady rhythm that drove them both to the heights, as he thrust into her body, over and over again, he forged in them a bond that she didn’t think could ever be broken.
She felt utterly devastated by it. By him.
And she was glad of it.
Him. And only him.
She broke open, right there with him, pleasure a torrent that poured over, and he growled out his own release too, trembling, this big, sexy man. Trembling because of her.
And the words that she had held back on her lips echoed inside of her, reverberated inside her soul, joining up with that mystical sense of fate, and it all made sense.
It was more than fate. It had felt like it in that first moment. But over a decade of friendship and conversations, of building something genuine and real, had transformed this.
She loved him.
She was certain.
It felt nothing like loving Dylan. Nothing at all. It was its own thing, unique and wild.
And she was terrified with it. But maybe... Maybe the thing about loving Laz was that she had to accept that her future would look different than the one she had imagined with Dylan. Because she had been married to an idea of domesticity. Of having what his parents had. Of having that magical, normal sort of thing that she had never gotten to see in her childhood.
But maybe loving Laz meant being his friend. Sharing his bed. And letting him have his own life. Would that be so bad? She could be herself with him. More herself than she had been all this time. And maybe that was good enough?
Maybe it would be good enough.
Maybe she could accept that. Because she couldn’t imagine going back to not having this. To not having him.
So maybe accepting what was on the table wasn’t a bad thing.
Maybe the problem was that what she wanted was never going to fit her.
And she could take more in terms of what she felt, but less...
Checks and balances. It was reasonable. And as she lay there in his arms, safe and sheltered, buzzing with pleasure after what had just occurred, she decided that it was okay.
More than okay.
Friends with benefits with Laz was better than the promise of marriage and forever had ever been with Dylan.
And for the first time she could remember, without pacing herself to exhaustion, driving across half a state or tossing and turning for hours, Jordan fell effortlessly, deeply asleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN LAZ WOKE UP the next morning, he could smell bacon. And he still felt sated and satisfied after a night spent in Jordan’s arms. That sex... The woman had blown his head off.
And now she was cooking for him.
He shook his head.
Yeah, it was what she had been hired to do, but this felt different.
It just did.
He had to wonder why.
Guilt crept over him. Guilt at the speech he’d given her. At what he told her about how he intended to keep his life separate.
It was true, though.
It was all he had to give. All he had.
But he got up, and had breakfast with her, and instead of going out to his wood shop, he ended up taking her back to bed.
And when she got down on her knees and took him into her mouth, her blue eyes a wild spark as she looked up at him while she pleasured him, he figured it was all right that for now, this was all he wanted to do.
He called his bar manager and told her that he wouldn’t be in tonight.
Instead, he made dinner for himself and Jordan, and she baked a cake. Then they made love on the floor of his house in such a way that he almost felt like he needed to apologize to the portrait of his grandmother that hung at the end of the hallway.
And it went on like that. For days.
Because he felt like he’d found something in her that he never anticipated. She made him want to disrupt his schedule. She made him not care so much about being at the bar every night.
He