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I cover her hands with mine. “Hey.”

She doesn’t look up. “I know I’m not—” She stops. Tries again. “I’m not exactly the women you probably⁠—”

“Look at me.”

She does.

I take her wrists, gently, and move her arms down to her sides. I don’t rush it. I want her to see me looking at her. All of her. The soft, full curves I’ve spent four weeks trying not to notice. The freckles scattered across her shoulders, more of them than I ever imagined. The little crease at her waist. The pale skin of her stomach, rising and falling fast.

“You,” I say, and my voice comes out wrecked, “are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.”

Her lips part.

“I’m not saying that because you’re standing in my bedroom. I’m saying it because it’s true. It was true the first day. It was true with flour on your face and that goddamn apron. It’s true right now.”

Her eyes go bright. “Okay,” she whispers.

“Okay?”

“Okay.” A shaky smile. “You can keep going.”

So I do.

I lower her onto my bed, carefully, like she might break, even though I know by now she won’t. She’s tougher than anyone I’ve ever met. She’s just soft on the outside. She sinks back into my pillows, her hair fanning out across them, and something low and possessive and primitive rises up inside me at the sight.

My bed.

My wife.

I follow her down, bracing my weight on my forearms, and she wraps her arms around my neck and pulls me the rest of the way. Skin against skin. Her softness against every hard inch of me. I groan into her neck. She shivers.

I take my time.

I kiss my way down the side of her throat, across her collarbone, over the freckles on her shoulder. I find the places that make her breath catch. The spot beneath her ear. The curve where her neck meets her shoulder. The underside of her breast, where she gasps my name and arches up off the bed and grips my hair so hard it stings.

I like that. I like it a lot.

I like everything about her. The small, startled noises she makes. The way she doesn’t seem to know what to do with her hands and then decides she wants them everywhere. The way she laughs, breathless and embarrassed, when I find a ticklish spot on her ribs, and then stops laughing entirely when I kiss lower.

I’ve negotiated deals with men who had everything to lose. I’ve walked into rooms where no one wanted me and walked out with exactly what I came for.

None of it felt like this.

Like every sound she makes is something I’ve earned.

By the time I make my way back up her body, she’s trembling. Flushed from her face to her chest. Her eyes are glassy and dazed, and she’s looking at me like I just did something miraculous.

I’m going to want her to look at me like that again.

And again.

“Maverick,” she breathes.

“I’m here.”

“Please.”

I rest my forehead against hers. “Are you sure?”