Se connecter~Amelia~I smelled coffee before I even made it downstairs, which was the first good thing about the morning.The second thing was considerably more distracting.Kaden was standing at the counter when I walked in, shirtless, sweatpants sitting low, hair still a mess from sleep, holding a mug like he hadn't just committed a crime against my ability to think clearly. I stopped in the doorway for exactly one second too long.He didn't even turn around. "You're staring like you haven’t seen me before.""No, I’m not." I crossed to the table and sat down. He turned around then, and the look on his face said he'd already figured out exactly what the situation was. He set a mug in front of me, leaned down until his face was level with mine, and said very quietly: "Your heart rate went up the second you walked in."I picked up the mug and looked somewhere else. "That's because I walked down stairs. Cardio.""Sure it is." He pulled out the chair across from me, sat down, and flipped open the n
~Amelia~Caleb called a meeting.He put a single sheet of paper on the table. Three bullet points. I'd learned that if Caleb needed a full page to explain something, the thing was very bad. One page meant it was just bad."Blake has found a partner," he stated.
~Amelia~Uncle Alan did the hug first.That was the thing about him, he always led with the hug, arms out before he even finished crossing the distance, like the physical contact was the priority and everything else came after. I'd loved that about him since I was small. He hugged like someone who understood that people needed it and wasn't embarrassed about that being true."You look tired," h
~Amelia~I kept it straightforward, what the alliance could look like going forward, why it was worth keeping even without the personal arrangement he'd come here expecting. By the end he said to send him a proposal and he'd read it."You did your homework," he complimented."I try to. My position here is new. I don't have the luxury of
~Amelia~I was in the garden when Caleb found me.I'd been out there for about twenty minutes with a cup of tea that had gone cold, sitting on the stone bench near the east wall where the morning sun hit longest and nobody usually came by. My hands weren't doing the tingling thing. I was just sitting there being a person who wasn't worried about anything for five consecutive minutes.Then Caleb
~Amelia~The first day after the letter, I told myself I was imagining it.Kaden was fine. He was present, he was functional, he did everything he was supposed to do. He answered messages, he sat through a briefing with Caleb, he made sure I ate dinner. Normal Kaden stuff. But there was this half-second lag to everything like a video where the audio is just slightly out of sync with the picture. Nothing you'd catch if you weren't paying attention. Nothing most people would even notice.
KADEN’S P.O.VI wanted to go to Amelia but I felt like enough time had not passed yet. She hadn’t reached out and I thought she would do so at her own pace and when she felt ready. I made sure to send her flowers every morning but I never got a response back as to whether or not she got them. As I st
AMELIA’S P.O.VI felt like an absolute bitch for what I had said to Kaden. I should never have thrown my past with Blake in his face like that. I was just so upset. I didn’t know how to handle everything that had been thrown in front of me. It wasn’t as if I wanted Blake, hell, I wanted to break our
KADEN’S P.O.VI should have known that Amelia didn’t take to instructions well, I just didn’t expect for her to run headfirst into a frenzy that she knew nothing about. The border patrol had caught the man trying to sneak in. He looked like a rogue, he was dirty and his hair was matted but there was
BLAKE’S P.O.VWaiting patiently had always been something I did extremely well. I was naturally a patient person and I believed in the long game but I was starting to get increasingly frustrated by how long of a game this was becoming. With every passing second, it became harder not to storm that gro







