At least . . . she’d believed that until tonight. Except what she’d seen certainly hadn’t felt like a dream.

God only knew how long they stayed like that, curled around each other, their collective warmth amplifying for a different reason than it had out in the bedroom: now, it was skin-on-skin comfort.

When Isaac finally sat up from her, she braced herself for him to thank her awkwardly and tell her to go. But instead, he traded places with her, his arms wrapping around her body, one behind her knees, the other at her back. Then he rose from the floor as if she weighed nothing and carried her out past the messy bed into the hall. He took the stairs without slowing or seeming to exert himself; his breathing barely changed even while he held her.

Up in her room, he laid her out in between her sheets and then just stood over her.

She could feel the hunger in him, but this time it wasn’t sexual. It was for something that seemed even more important than all that desperate heat.

Grier moved over to make space, and after a moment, he slipped inside with her. Now, she was the one being cradled, that muscled chest of his somehow making all her problems magically seem smaller. And yes, the idea that she was falling into some kind of Cinderella state made her cringe, but she was too relaxed to put up a fight.

Closing her eyes, she tucked her arm around his waist.

As exhaustion slammed into her and knocked her out cold, her last thought was that it was okay to sleep. There would be time to say good-bye in the morning.

Isaac lay beside Grier, and waited for her to sink down solidly into REM territory. To pass the time, he reviewed vocabulary terms, because his mind was cannibalizing itself and he needed to redirect his neurons.

In the male lexicon of labels, the term nancy usually referred to guys who were a little light in their loafers: the kind who made women kill spiders for them, worried about how much starch was in their dry cleaning, and might possibly have a spice rack that was alphabetized.

Real men did not have spice racks. Or even know how to find them in a kitchen—much less what to do with what was in ’em. . . . At least, that was what his father had taught him and his brothers. And actually, in retrospect, that opinion sort of explained why their mother had gone off, married someone else, and started a new family before she’d died. Clearly, she’d known that a reboot of the system was going to get her nowhere and the only solution was to get fresh components—

What had he been thinking about? Oh, right. Nancys.