Prologue — The Unopened Text
The hall lamp threw a thin bar across the guest-room carpet and stopped at the sage sweater, crumpled where she had let it fall. Claire lay back on the borrowed pillows with the waistband of her underwear folded beneath the curve of her belly, one knee tipped out, the other still caught on the sheet. The weight of her breasts had shifted toward her arms. A darker line ran the center of her stomach. She heard him breathe before she felt the mattress dip.
Daniel knelt on the floor beside the bed, flannel sleeves shoved up, jeans open and forgotten at his hips. His palm settled low, broad enough to cover the place that had been itching under the sweater all evening. The baby turned under his hand. He made a rough sound in his throat and did not take the hand away.
“Look at you,” he said. Quiet. Tired. The voice he used for things that were already his to handle. “All of this. Soft. Full. I can see where the leggings cut you.”
Heat climbed her chest. She had meant to keep an arm across herself. He moved it, not rough, and bent to the underside of one breast, mouth open, beard scraping the tender skin there before his tongue found the nipple. She arched before she decided to. The sound she made was small and wet at the back of her throat. He stayed with it, sucking slow, then let the nipple go shiny and moved to the other, praising the weight of it against his cheek, the way it filled his mouth, the fact that none of her was a smaller version of herself.
“Don’t hide it.” His thumb stroked the lower curve while he spoke into her skin. “This is what I think about. You, like this.”
She wanted the inventory. The last of the sentence snagged, and she still did not close her knee. His mouth traveled down the slope of her belly, kissing where the skin was tightest, pausing when the baby shifted against his lips. He hooked the underwear aside. Cool air, then the heat of his breath. He licked her once, broad and unhurried, and groaned as if the taste had answered something he had been carrying since the sink.
Claire’s hand found the back of his head. The curl of his hair was damp at the nape. He licked her again, slower, tongue flat against her clit, then lower, pushing into the give of her until she heard herself. Slick. Obscene in the quiet room. Her thigh jumped against his ear. He held it open with the heel of his hand and kept talking between strokes, muffled, shameless.
“Good. Stay open. You’re dripping on my mouth and you’re already carrying. God, the weight of you.”
The praise went through her harder than his tongue. She rocked, careful of the belly, chasing the flat of it, the scrape of his beard on the soft inside of her thigh, the wet sound every time he sealed his mouth over her and sucked. Two fingers eased in beside his tongue, thick, crooked, working until her heel dragged the sheet. She came with her face turned into the pillow, a long cramped pulse, fluids slicking his knuckles, her stomach tightening under the hand he had never moved.
He rose before the aftershivers finished. Cock heavy, flushed, the head already wet. He did not ask. He climbed onto the bed at her side, drew her top leg over his thigh, and pushed in from behind the curve, slow enough that she felt every inch spread her. The angle seated him deep. She gasped at the fullness, at the way her body took him as if it had been waiting under the sweater. His chest met her back. His palm covered what it could of the belly. He stayed buried and breathed against her hair.
“There. Feel that. Good girl. Soft all around me.”
He drew back and slid home again, long, the wet sound of it loud in the little room. Each stroke rocked the frame against the wall. She reached for his hip and held on. He praised the clutch of her, the heat, the way the pregnancy made her grip, the shine on her thigh where she had leaked around him. When she asked, ashamed and clear, for him to say it again, he did, over and over, into the dark curl at her ear, while his fingers found her clit and rubbed in the same rhythm as his cock.
She tightened. A fresh spill of wetness. He swore, hips stuttering, and drove in to the base.
“I’m going to come in you,” he said, not a question. “Right here. Where you’re already full.”
The words tipped her. She came shaking, forehead to the pillow, taking him through it, and he followed with a broken sound, grinding deep, pulse after pulse flooding her until she felt it leak warm around his shaft and onto the sheet. He did not pull out. His hand stroked the belly. His mouth stayed at her hair. Down in the folds of the sweater, her phone lit once and went dark, the message unopened, his cock still twitching inside her. She kept her hand on his wrist. Neither of them moved to read it.
