I slid my arms around him.

Thus Ham commenced making love to me before I was barely awake. Something he did on occasion. Something I liked very, very much.

And when he did it, he made it all about me. Taking his time through kisses and touches to remove my nightgown and panties. Then it was all about his hands, lips, and tongue trailing over my neck, chest, my breasts, ribs, and belly. His mouth closing over my nipples and gently suckling. His fingertips gliding through the wetness between my legs, tender, reverent, loving. His lips coming back to my mouth to kiss me deep, wet, sweet, beautiful, and long.

It was a slow burn he built, taking his time, like we had years for Ham to taste me, touch me, give me everything.

With experience, I’d learned to ride the burn, not push it, not demand more. Moving my hands over him, tasting him when I had the chance but, when we did this, it was about Ham giving to me.

And that was what I got that morning.

Until Ham changed it and, doing so, he altered my world.

Because, when he finally slid inside, no condom, just him and me, he moved, slow, deep, beautiful but he did it holding my eyes, his weight braced onto a forearm in the bed under me but his hand connected with me, fingers wrapped around the back of my neck while he drifted the fingers of his other hand through my hair.

“Softest hair I ever felt,” he murmured.

My arms, already wrapped around him, tightened and I lifted my legs to curve them around his hips as I whispered, “Ham.”

He brushed his lips against mine, pulled back, kept sliding in and out, the rhythm sure, leisured, amazing, as he held my eyes.

“Drove away from you nine years ago, knew it was wrong then, didn’t know that it was the biggest mistake I’d make in my life,” he whispered back.

My arms and legs convulsed around him, I lifted my hips, deepening his invasion, and his rhythm escalated.

“Darlin’,” I breathed, not knowing where this was going but liking how it made me feel.

“You’re an unbelievable woman, Zara,” he told me softly.

I liked how that made me feel even more and tears filled my eyes.

But I ordered, “Shut up and make love to me,” and when I did, my voice was trembling.

Ham ignored me.

“Best woman I ever met,” he went on.

My hands slid up his back, rounding him, shoving between us and up through the crisp hair on his chest. I cupped his jaw and slid my thumbs over the stubble on his cheeks.

“Be quiet, baby,” I begged.

His thrusts got faster and he dropped his head, his lips a whisper away from mine.

“Took hit after hit, started life takin’ ’em, literally, you never even went down to a knee,” he murmured against my mouth.

“Be quiet.”

“So fuckin’ strong.”

“Quiet, honey.”

“So goddamned pretty.”

“Ham,” I whispered.

“Mine,” he growled, that noise sounding against my lips sweeping through me, his hips moving much faster, driving harder, going even deeper. “All mine,” he finished and, before I could say a word, he slanted his head and took my mouth.

Then he took us both there.

Timing it perfectly, I gasped into his mouth before I moaned, my limbs clenching around him, the climax rolling through me, gentle but beautiful and lasting. Seconds later, Ham planted himself to the root and groaned down my throat.

When he came down, he started gliding in and out as his lips trailed down to my neck and moved there. He did this awhile before he slid in, filling me, connecting us, and stayed put.

Then he said against my neck, “Want you off The Pill, honey. We start now.”

“Okay,” I agreed quietly, liking that.

Ham and me, we’d already started. But a family, we were going to start now.

Yes, I liked that.

And he’d obviously liked Zander, and meeting him reminded Ham, like me, of the bounty we had before us. No reason to delay. We started now.

He lifted up and looked down at me. One of his hands was still curled around the back of my neck, the other one he used to drift his fingers lightly across the skin on my face as his eyes watched.

Then they caught mine.

“Loved Rachel,” he stated and his words were so unexpected, considering the mood he’d created, I blinked.

Where did that come from? And why was he talking about Rachel now?

“Ham, I think—”

“Bear with me, darlin’,” he whispered.

I shut my mouth.

Ham continued. “We met after high school. She was beautiful, think I fell in love with her the minute I laid eyes on her. Stopped at nothin’ to get in there then bind her to me.”

He paused and I said nothing, doing my best to bear with him.

When I didn’t say a word, he kept going.

“Had a good life with my folks. Mom bein’ so sick, she took a risk havin’ me. She couldn’t take more risks after that, though. But, the love they had to give, love they gave me, I knew the only thing that would have made growin’ up better was havin’ brothers and sisters. Never, when I was a kid, when I was growin’ into a man, did I dream of doin’ big things. Goin’ to the moon. Makin’ lots of money. Bein’ some kind of hotshot. I just wanted to build on what my parents gave to me and showed me. A man in love with his wife. Dad takin’ care of her, me, our home. A woman in love with her husband. Them makin’ a child outta that love and workin’ together to teach him to be a good man. Havin’ that I knew that was the only thing I needed.”

“Okay,” I said softly, liking this part of what he was saying even as my heart broke, knowing Rachel took away that simple dream.

“So young, in love, I shared all that with Rachel. Laid it out for her. Stupid,” he stated and I tensed my limbs around him.

“She was the one who was stupid, Ham.”

He gave me a small smile, dipped his head, and touched his mouth to mine before he lifted it and kept talking.

“She told me she wanted the same things. She agreed with me on everything, our life path, how we’d get there, how many kids we were gonna have.”

I nodded.

Ham went on. “I believed her. So gone for her, I sucked that shit up. Woke up in the morning, told her I loved her. Left for work, told her I loved her. Rolled into bed at night, worked bars then, too, babe,” he shared something I knew. “Woke her when I got home and told her I loved her. Every time, she said the same thing back. She’d even call me durin’ the day for no reason, she said, except to say she loved me.”

This wasn’t fun to hear but I held him close, held his eyes, slid one of my hands up his back so I could sift my fingers through his messy hair, and stayed silent.

But I did it thinking the woman I’d met a few days ago still loved my man. Back then, she was young, stupid, selfish, and I didn’t understand her kind of love, why she did the things she did. I just understood in that moment with the sadness I read in her face, the gesture she’d made for Ham driving all the way out to Gnaw Bone, that she’d spent twenty years paying a big price for doing them.

And the price she paid was losing Ham and, after doing that, knowing exactly how much she’d lost. But it was worse. She had to live with the fact that it was what she did that meant she hadn’t lost him. She’d actually thrown all that was Graham Reece away.

Ham broke into my thoughts to ask, “After what she did to me, I didn’t get it. How could you love someone and do that to them?”

“I don’t know,” I answered on a whisper.

“No,” he replied. “You wouldn’t.”

The way he said that, like he really believed it, meant the world to me.

Ham continued. “The two after her, cookie, same thing. I wasn’t stupid, though I was still young. But I’d learned. With them, I didn’t lay it bare, open myself, but we eventually got to the discussion and they told me they wanted the same things as I did out of life. They also told me they loved me. Swore it. Said it over and over. Then they showed how they felt, who they were, and it was not that.”

“No,” I agreed.

“And after the third, I really learned. After the third, I knew those words were empty. You can say anything but it’s what you do that says it all.”

My hand in his hair clenched as where he was going with all this finally dawned on me.

“Never said those words again, cookie,” he told me. “Women said them to me, didn’t believe it. Those words had lost their meaning.”

Yes, I now knew where this was going.

“Darlin’,” I murmured.

“Then you said it.”

I closed my eyes as beauty scored through me.

Because when he said those four words, his voice was jagged.

“Baby, come back to me,” Ham urged.

I opened my eyes and his fingers still drifting over my face stopped as he cupped my cheek.

“Suddenly, those words again had meaning,” he said.

“They totally do,” I replied, my voice throaty.

“Only ’cause you show they do,” he returned. “With all her bullshit, the way she burned me, time and again gutting me, Rachel taught me, and fuck but I learned, love is a show, it’s not a tell.”

I nodded, swallowing, fighting the emotion that was building inside me.

“All the time, people say one thing, but they do another. You feel somethin’ for them, you wanna believe what they say but you gotta learn to read what they do. I think, the other night, you got what I meant when I asked you to pay attention. But now, I’m sayin’ all this because I want you to know why that man is me. Why I couldn’t give you what you needed, say the words you needed to hear.”

“I understand, baby,” I told him.

“I love you, Zara.”

My breath caught loudly in my throat even as my body bucked under his with the force of emotion that had built so high, it exploded inside me.

Unthinking, overwhelmed, holding on to him tightly, I lifted my head, shoved it in his neck, and mumbled brokenly, “Ham.”

His lips against my ear, his hand at the back of my neck squeezing, he whispered, “You get those words because you give them. You say them and you mean them. No bullshit. No lies. Not tellin’ me what I wanna hear to get my dick, my money, my protection, whatever the fuck it was that they wanted outta me. Nine years ago, you let me go so I could be the man I was. You took me only as I could give because you knew that was the way it needed to be for me. You gave me that because you love me. And I took it, fuckin’ up huge. But now, baby, you get it all back. Now’s your time where you get everything you need.”

I loved all that, adored it.

But part of it made me uneasy.

So I dropped my head to the pillow, Ham lifted his, and when I caught his eyes, I asked, “You fucked up huge?”

“Left you,” he answered.

“Ham—”

He shook his head and his hand came back to my face so he could press his thumb to my lips.

“No. No, cookie. None of this shit woulda happened to you if I didn’t have my head so far up my ass back then.”

“Ham—” I tried again but his thumb smushing my lips made it come out “Humm,” and he talked right over me.

“I fucked up. We lost near on a decade. You endured some serious shit. You lost nine years of Zander—”

I moved my hand to his wrist, pulling it slightly away, and told him, “You probably wouldn’t have known about Zander either. Dad went to great lengths to keep that from me.”

His brows rose. “You think I stood by your side where I should have been, I wouldn’t have kept my eye on that asshole?”

No, I didn’t think that. New, awesomer Ham, if he’d been able to be that Ham back then, would have definitely kept his eye on Dad if only to make certain Dad didn’t screw with me.

“It’s done now,” I decided to say to let him know all was cool.

“Babe, you lost your home. You lost your shop. You lost nine years of your nephew. You been sittin’ on millions of dollars you didn’t know you had for nearly three years. You got married to a guy you cared about but you picked him for safety, figured out you fucked up, cut those ties, and moved on but did it torturing yourself because you picked wrong even though he did too. None of that shit would have happened if I’d been where I knew when I fuckin’ drove away nine years ago I should have stuck. At your side.”

My belly warmed at his words and my hand still wrapped around his wrist gave him a squeeze as I replied, “Okay, Ham, maybe all that’s true and I love it that you think that but don’t you think that even if you were here, other shit might have happened? You can’t protect me from everything. You can’t stop life from happening.”