He’s doing it with me. This felt like something…bigger even than everything he’d said. Bigger than the sex.

“Third floor.” The boy that videotaped the girl having sex and then blackmailed her for all sorts of petty bullshit or he’d put it all over social media, was a distant Morelli.

Now he lived in what was practically the servants’ quarters.

She led the way towards the third-floor staircase, feeling him at her back. He lifted his hand, put it on her ass, as they walked up. She smacked his hand away.

“What are you doing?” she hissed at him.

“I don’t know,” he said. She turned and looked at him and nearly stumbled.

He was smiling. Something she’d only ever seen him do two or three times in their years together. And it changed him completely. All that distance was gone, all that control replaced by joy. It was breathtaking every time.

How handsome you are, she thought.

And then she turned around and kept walking.

He reached up and touched her ass again and she smacked his hand away. Fought the urge to smile.

The third floor was full of bedrooms. They stood at the end of the hallway of doors.

“I’ll take the ones on the right. You take the ones on the left.”

“Why are you helping me?” she asked, opening the first door on the left. A guest room, unused.

“Because we’ve done everything my way,’ he said and opened a door on the right. “I told you. We’re doing it your way now.”

She shut the second door and stared at him. “And you think you know what that means?”

“I’m going to follow your lead,” he said.

“What if I don’t know what my way means?” she asked. “Most of my life I was told I was a mess.”

“By people who don’t know you.”

The implication being that he knew her. He trusted her. Her way could be the right way.

She turned away again, unsure. Awkward.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “About earlier. When people talk about love, it…it makes me freeze up.”

She watched him out of the corner of her eye.

“Did I ever tell you about my dad?” he asked and she stopped at the second door.

“No.”

“He was a marine. Served in Vietnam. My grandfather served in Korea. Being a marine was a thing in my family…well, it was the only thing.”

“That’s why you enlisted.”