Page 95 of Mane Rival in Store

His hair stood up fully.

“She designed it.” Lark turned the cape so the lining caught the light. The embroidery glinted—Villains do it better—and her expression was pure, radiant mischief. “Custom. Silk-lined. Reinforced collar for, and I quote, ‘wind resistance or whatever.’”

“She is never allowed to design for me again.”

“She didn’t design it for you.” Lark draped the cape over her own shoulders. The purple silk fell to mid-calf, the collar fanning behind her neck, the fabric catching Villainette’s neon through the arch and Sterling & Mane’s gallery light at once. She looked like a queen in a comic book—powerful, beautiful, ridiculous, and completely serious about the ridiculousness. “She designed it for me.”

He stared.

She turned slowly. The cape swished. The gold embroidery flashed.

“Well?” Both eyebrows up. The full Lark Coleman challenge—the expression that dared him to be honest, that refused to let him retreat behind formality or diplomacy, that had been dismantling his defenses since the day she’d walked into the store next door and called his inventory “commercial garbage” and upgraded his insult into a compliment.

“You look…” He searched for the word. His vocabulary—three languages, a lifetime of boardroom eloquence—failed him with the same consistency it had failed him since the first day. “…magnificent.”

“Magnificent.” She grinned. “Not ‘aggressive’? Not ‘commercial’? Not ‘an assault on curation’?”

“I may have… revised my assessment.”

“You revised your entire personality, Your Majesty. The assessment was the easy part.”

He pulled her in by the cape’s lapel. Gentle. Deliberate. The silk slid through his fingers and she came toward him, laughing, her hands landing on his chest. He kissed her—slow, thorough, with the focused attention he’d once reserved for editions under glass—and her laughter dissolved into the kiss and his lion settled into a deep, purring contentment that only surfaced when she was close and warm and entirely, impossibly his.

“The stockroom,” she murmured against his mouth.

“We’re in a public retail space.”

“We’re in a CLOSED public retail space. The preview ended an hour ago. The doors are locked. Breezy went home. Dekel went home. The stores are empty.” She pulled back enough to meet his eyes. Hers were green in this light—the hazel shifting warm. “And I’m wearing the cape.”

The stockroom of Sterling & Mane was a climate-controlled vault of organized shelving, unprocessed inventory, and the faint chemical scent of preservation materials. It was also—after hours, with the overhead fluorescent replaced by the spillover glow from the gallery lights—surprisingly intimate. Small. Enclosed. Surrounded by boxes of merchandise that represented both of their lives’ work, stacked in organized rows that she’d helped reorganize last week in a session that had turned into a debate about classification systems that had turned into a kiss against the shelving that had turned into Dekel texting from the front: I’m going home. Lock up. Don’t damage the merchandise.

Tonight, the shelving held a mix: Villainette candles beside Sterling authentication kits. Villain lipstick shipments beside rare-edition storage boxes. The physical merger of two inventories, two businesses, two people who had started as rivals and ended as mates and were now standing in a stockroom with a cape.

She kept the cape on.

He didn’t ask her to. He wanted to. The impulse surfaced—a need he hadn’t known existed until the cosplay event, a hunger that had nothing to do with the fabric and everything to do with what the fabric represented: joy. Ridiculousness. The radical act of a serious man embracing the absurd because the woman he loved had taught him that dignity and delight could share the same room.

But she was already wearing it. And the look on her face—the warmth, the mischief, the confidence of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and what it did to him—meant the ask was unnecessary.

“You’re staring at the cape.”

“I’m staring at you.”

“I’m wearing the cape. The cape is relevant.”

“The cape is secondary.”

“The cape is SILK, Rune. Custom. Your sister designed it. Show some respect.” She backed against the shelving. The purple silk pooled around her shoulders, framing her in the soft light. Her fingers found the top button of her blouse. Popped it. “Or show some disrespect. I’m flexible.”

He laughed. The sound surprised him—not because it was involuntary (it was) but because of where it landed. Not in his chest or his throat but somewhere deeper, in the place where the boy who had collected comics at age nine still lived. Lark didn’t make him laugh despite his seriousness. She made him laugh because of it—because the contrast between who he had been and who she revealed him to be was the funniest thing in the room, and she understood the joke, and she loved both versions, and that was the most erotic thing he’d ever experienced.

He crossed the stockroom. Three steps. His hands found her waist beneath the cape. Her back pressed against the shelving—a box of Villainette candles shifted behind her, steadied, held. His mouth found hers and the kiss was not the slow, thorough exploration of the arch. It was hungry. Confident. He’d learned—through her patience and her humor and her refusal to be intimidated—that desire didn’t require gravity. It could be fun.

She pulled his shirt from his trousers. Her hands found the skin of his abdomen and traveled upward, mapping the terrain she’d learned three times now—the rooftop, the den after the fight, and now here, in a stockroom, with candles and comics and a cape. Each time was different. The rooftop had been intensity. The den had been desperation. This was play. Her fingers were light and teasing and she was grinning against his mouth and he was grinning back, and the grins made the kiss imprecise, which made it better.

His hands slid the cape aside. Found the buttons of her blouse. Worked them with the focused dexterity of a man whose fine motor skills had been honed by decades of handling fragile objects, which she found—and had told him, explicitly, on the rooftop—absurdly attractive. She made a sound when his mouth found her neck. Not a moan—a hum. Appreciative. The sound of a woman enjoying herself without performing the enjoyment. It drove him to distraction.

She pushed him back. Two steps. His spine hit the opposite shelf. A box of rare-edition storage sleeves slid sideways. He caught it without looking—the reflexive save of a man who protected inventory the way other people protected children—and she took the opportunity to pull his shirt over his head. The box went back on the shelf. The shirt did not.