There was a thrilling, sickening feeling in her chest, as though her core was trying to hurl itself towards him, held back only by bone and muscle.

Why shouldn’t she knock on the door? Why couldn’t she have this, when she wanted it—him—so badly?

Oh, she wasn’t thinking straight. On the one hand, there were any number of good reasons she shouldn’t—but, on the other hand, there were good reasons she should. His actions earlier in the afternoon, for one: the way he’d stood up for her, tried to protect her. The things he’d said on the way home, the way he’d deftly shifted from sincerity to absurdity to make her laugh. He’d been … on her side.

That wasn’t something she could take for granted.

There was his righteous anger, too, the way he’d railed that morning against an unkind and unjust world, because by doing so he thought he could make it a little bit better. She loved his kindness and his fury, and the way they weren’t two separate emotions at all.

She loved …

She knocked on the door.

Several heartbeats passed before he answered, his jacket off and his white shirt unbuttoned at the throat. His hands were ink stained and his expression slightly absent.

“You’re working,” Alva said. She hadn’t considered that he might be busy, and the doubt pried open a large enough crack for a trickle of embarrassment.

“Mmm,” he agreed, and pulled her into the room. “The question is, would water be a more elegant cooling solution?”

He sat her down on the edge of his bed, which was covered entirely by clothing and the mysterious bits and bobs that always floated in his orbit.

“I’ll come back,” she said, standing, but he waved an impatient hand at her, clearly instructing her to sit back down and stop making noise, so she shrugged and did.

After two days of being inhabited by Sam, the room had begun to look like one of Maggie’s explosions, which wasn’t really any worse than its original design, given that the hotel had apparently been decorated by a tapestry-addicted toddler with a Midas delusion. Alva played her mental editing game, subtracting this and that, adding architectural detailing around the windows to highlight the beautiful Manhattan view.

Once she had rearranged the room to, if not her satisfaction, at least the best she could do with the materials she’d been given, her gaze drifted back to Sam. His hair curled over the back of his collar, the lack of coat highlighting the broadness of his shoulders and the strength of his back. She thought about running her hands over the muscles there, playing with the fringe of hair where it skimmed his neck, moving lower to investigate the narrowness of his waist and the strength of his thighs.…