Chapter 487
Chapter 486:
The words fell into the space between them, into the green-lit darkness, into the warmth of the fire and the cold of the Arctic night.
Jocelyn didn’t answer immediately. She turned in his arms, shifting until she was kneeling to face him, her hands rising to cup his face. She looked at him — really looked at him — and saw what he had been trying to conceal beneath the confidence, beneath the certainty.
He watched her, a coiled tension in his gut. It wasn’t fear of rejection — he had built their entire world to make that impossible. It was the precipice of a decade-long obsession, the final and most vulnerable step he had ever taken. The anticipation was so profound it bordered on pain.
The realization broke something open in her chest — some final barrier she hadn’t known she was still maintaining.
𝘍𝗶𝗇𝘥 ո𝘰𝗏𝘦𝗅 р𝗗F𝘀 𝗈ո 𝗴а𝘭ոо𝘃е𝘭ѕ.cо𝗺
She leaned forward and kissed him, soft and slow and deliberate, pouring everything into the press of her lips against his. The future she wanted. The family she had never believed she could have. The life she was only now beginning to allow herself to imagine.
When she pulled back, his eyes were closed. His breathing had gone shallow.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, Gaston. Let’s make a baby. Let’s make a family. Let’s make everything p>
His eyes flew open. For one single, suspended moment, he stared at her as if he couldn’t process what he had heard.
Then he moved.
He rose to his feet, lifting her with him, and spun her in a wide circle that made her laugh and clutch at his shoulders. He was laughing too — a sound she had heard perhaps three times in all the years she had known him, bright and unguarded and absolutely joyful.
“You’re sure?” he demanded, setting her down but not releasing her, his hands framing her face. “You’re absolutely sure p>
“I have never been more sure of anything,” she said. And meant it completely.
Gaston’s expression shifted. The joy remained, but something else joined it — something darker, more immediate, more consuming. He looked at her as though she were already carrying his child, as though she were already the mother of his future, as though she were everything he had ever wanted and had finally, finally been given permission to claim.
He kissed her. It was nothing like the quiet promise of moments before. This was claiming and celebration both — the beginning of something they had each been moving toward without knowing they were moving at all.
They found their way to the bed, shedding wool and thermal and cotton in a trail across the floor until they were skin to skin beneath the furs, the green light of the aurora moving across their bodies, the fire crackling steadily, the Arctic cold held at bay by nothing but glass and warmth and everything they generated between them.
Afterward, they lay tangled together, watching the lights fade and return, fade and return — a celestial rhythm that matched the slowing beat of their hearts.