Three days passed quietly.
The good kind of quietly.
The kind that settles between two people who have said enough true things to each other that the silence no longer needs filling.
Aurora moved through the mansion with a lightness she had not felt since arriving and Damian moved through it differently too, less like a man patrolling the borders of something and more like a man who had decided to simply exist inside it for a while.
They had breakfast together every morning.
Not formally.
Not at the long dining table with the full spread the kitchen staff prepared.
In the kitchen itself, at the small island, with toast and coffee and the morning news playing low on the counter screen.
Damian read things on his phone and Aurora read her book and occasionally one of them said something and the other responded and it was easy in a way that felt earned.
She noticed the small things he did without appearing to notice he was doing them.
He refilled her coffee before she asked.
He turned the counter screen down when she was reading without being told it was distracting her.
When she came downstairs on the second morning with her hair still damp from the shower he looked up and then looked back at his phone and said nothing but ten minutes later a warm throw appeared over the back of her stool that had not been there before.
She did not mention it.
She pulled it around her shoulders and drank her coffee.
On the third evening Elena came for dinner uninvited as was her custom and sat between them at the dining table with the satisfied energy of someone exactly where they wanted to be.
She talked about her painting and her interesting gallery man whose name had still not been volunteered and the general state of the world as she understood it, which was detailed and entertaining and occasionally wildly incorrect.
Damian sat across from Aurora and listened to his sister with the quiet patience he reserved for people he genuinely loved and every so often his eyes moved to Aurora without particular reason and she felt each time like a small warm thing landing on her skin.
After Elena left and the kitchen was cleared and the house settled into its evening quiet, they ended up in the sitting room as they usually did now.
It had become a habit without either of them declaring it one.
After dinner, the sitting room, the low lamps, the wine or tea depending on the mood, the particular ease of two people who had stopped pretending.
Tonight it was wine.
Aurora sat at her end of the sofa with her legs folded under her and her glass resting on her knee.
Damian sat at his end and they were close enough that she could see the slight silver threading through his dark hair in the lamplight and the way his hands looked holding the glass, large and still and certain.
She had been thinking about his hands for three days.
She was thinking about them now.
“You are quiet,” he said without looking up from the fire.
“I am always quiet in the evenings.”
“You are a different kind of quiet tonight.”
She looked at him.
He was still watching the fire, but the line of his jaw told her he was aware of her completely.
“What kind is it,” she asked.
He turned to look at her then.
Directly.
Those gray eyes moving over her face with the unhurried attention he gave to things he was thinking seriously about.
“The kind that means something is on your mind,” he said.
“Things are often on my mind.”
“Aurora.”
She looked at him.
“Come here,” he said quietly.
It was not a command.
It was softer than that. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
An invitation with a door held open, the choice entirely hers.
She unfolded her legs and moved along the sofa toward him and he shifted to make room and she settled beside him with her shoulder against his and his arm moving naturally around her and it was so simple and so right that it made her throat tight.
She could feel the warmth of him all along her side.
The solid certainty of him.
She rested her head against his shoulder and looked at the fire and breathed.
For a while neither of them spoke.
The fire moved.
The wine sat untouched on the table in front of them.
The house was entirely quiet.
“I keep thinking about Florence,” she said eventually.
“The art school.”
“Yes.” She watched the fire.
“I wonder sometimes who I would be if I had gone. What I would have made. What I would have become.”
“Someone different,” he said.
“Maybe better.”
“Or just different.” His hand moved slowly against her shoulder.
Just a small motion.
Back and forth.
Like something he was doing without thinking.
“The person you are now is not someone who needs improving Aurora.”
She turned her face slightly into his shoulder.
“You did not know me three months ago,” she said.
“I have known you for eleven years.”
“You knew a version of me.”
“The version that mattered,” he said.
“The one that was always going to become this.”
She lifted her head and looked at him.
He was already looking at her.
Close now, properly close, the way they had been in the storm kitchen and in the car outside the club and every other moment that had built quietly toward this one.
His hand moved from her shoulder to her face.
Slowly.
Like a man who had made a decision and was moving toward it carefully so nothing got broken on the way.
His thumb traced her cheekbone.
She felt her breath change.
“Damian,” she said softly.
“I know,” he said.
Just as softly.
He leaned toward her.
She felt the warmth of him closing the last small distance between them and her eyes were already falling shut and his forehead touched hers and she felt his breath against her lips and she was one second away from his mouth on hers when his phone rang.
Neither of them moved for a moment.
It rang again.
Damian exhaled.
His forehead stayed against hers for one more second.
Then he pulled back and looked at the screen on the table beside them.
Aurora looked too.
Her father’s name.
Ethan Hayes.
The name sat on the screen and rang and the warm firelit sitting room went very still around it.
Damian looked at it.
Then at Aurora.
She saw everything move across his face in the space of three seconds.
The guilt and the conflict and the weight of seventeen years of loyalty pressing down on the moment like a hand on a shoulder.
She sat back slightly.
“Answer it,” she said quietly.
He held her gaze for a moment.
Then he picked up the phone.
“Ethan.” His voice was completely even.
Not a single thread of what had just almost happened in it anywhere.
Aurora stood up carefully and picked up her wine glass and walked to the window and looked out at the dark garden and listened to Damian talk to her father in the warm voice he reserved for the people he loved most.
Her chest hurt in the complicated way that things hurt when they are real.
She pressed her free hand flat against the cold glass.
Outside the garden was dark and still and the sky above it was full of stars that did not know anything about the people looking up at them.
She breathed.
One step at a time.
Even when the steps hurt.
NO.
NO.
NO.
They were *this* close!
After all the slow-burn tension, the late-night conversations, the stolen glances, and the emotional walls finally coming down… the phone had to ring at the worst possible moment.
And not just any phone call.
Ethan Hayes The one person neither of them can ignore.
Now tell me, dear readers… do you think Ethan suspects something already, or is fate simply having fun at Damian and Aurora’s expense?
Leave your thoughts in the comments!
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See you in the next chapter… where things may become a lot more complicated.