Page 48 of Promised to the Cowboy

He lifts his eyes to mine. “I looked for you.”

For a heartbeat, I can’t breathe.

Gabriel doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t tell me where he looked or how long he hoped. He doesn’t have to. The admission itself feels intimate, another piece of himself placed carefully into my hands.

This is a man who keeps everything locked behind quiet smiles and steady hands.

And he’s just told me I mattered enough to go looking.

The wall I’ve been trying to shore up finally gives way.

All week, everyone has been telling me I belong.

Gabriel has been telling me I’m family.

But this...

This is a man choosingme.

I cross the space between us, lift my hands, and rest them lightly against his chest. Over the heart he’s spent years believing was somehow less than whole.

“It isn’t just the baby for me either,” I whisper.

His breath catches.

“I know what I want now.”

“What?”

I smile through the tears threatening my eyes. “You.”

“Evie,” he says, his voice low. A warning and a question both.

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Do you?”

“For once,” I say, “yeah.”

And I kiss him.

For a second, he doesn’t move, like he can’t believe the thing he’s wanted is happening on its own. Then his hands come up and frame my face carefully, the way you’d cup water you didn’t want to lose, and he kisses me back like he’s been starving and too proud to say so.

He kisses me slowly. That’s the thing that undoes me first. There’s no rush in it. There’s the whole night in it. His thumbs trace my cheekbones, and his mouth moves over mine, deliberate and unhurried, learning me again. I remember this—God, I remember this, the carefulness, the attention he gave me in Bigfork. He saw me that night because he notices everything about me, and that knowledge humbles me.

“Take me to bed,” I murmur against his mouth.

He walks me backward, not releasing my mouth, and lowers me to the mattress like I’m breakable.

“Slow,” he says against my lips. “We’ve got all night. Nobody’s leaving before dawn this time.”

He’s carried the fact that I climbed out of his bed in the dark for four months, and he’s not throwing it at me; he’s setting it down gently and telling me it’s over.

My body throbs. I love his touch. A pulse thrums between my thighs, where I’m already swollen and wet for him.

He undresses me slowly, sliding my jeans and panties down my legs. My shirt is next as he flicks the buttons open one at a time, his warm knuckles feathering over my sternum as he removes my bra.

He’s seen me naked before, but my body has undergone subtle and not-so-subtle changes with my pregnancy.