“Can’t move,” I mumbled into Champ’s armpit. “Pretty sure I broke all my bones in the stairwell fall yesterday and didn’t know it at the time because of adrenaline. I read that’s a thing.”
“Mpfh.”
“You need to wake up and make me coffee. It’s the least you can do after your ex-boyfriend tossed me down a cement staircase to land on a hard stone floor.”
“He tossed you because you pretended to faint,” he grumbled, assaulting me with facts despite the early hour. “I know that because I’m going to be replaying that moment in my head for the next seventy years of our lives. Also, the stairs and floor are carpeted.”
“You sure?”
“Very. I remember it from the first time you tackled me to that carpeted floor a few weeks ago when we were looking for the vault.” His voice went deeper and roughened with arousal. “Remember?”
I blinked at him. I had no idea I’d made a habit of tackling him to basement floors.
I supposed there were worse things, really.
“Baby,” I said. “If you were thinking about the flooring that night, I had to be doing something wrong.”
Champ made a noise of sleepy amusement. “I also have a rug burn on the back of my hand from yesterday.”
I lifted my head up to squint at him. As usual, he looked divine in my bed. “You sure that’s not from the sex we had last night?”
“We had sex in the woods behind the catering truck,” he said. “No carpet in sight.”
“You sure it’s not poison ivy rather than rug burn?”
Champ sighed. “Shit.”
I laughed. “Just kidding. It dies off in winter. But we might need to remember that come summertime.”
He shifted until he’d pulled me halfway onto his chest. “Who says I’ll still be fucking you come summertime?” he teased.
I pushed against him until I was sitting up. Then I made a big production of letting the sheet drop before stretching my arms over my head. “I’d say the stack of seventeen T-shirts I have hidden in my apartment say so.”
He sighed sadly and tugged the sheet down further. “My boyfriend is a thief.”
I batted my eyelashes. “And yet, I’m still a better bet than the last guy you dated.”
“Not. Funny.” He tackled me onto the bed again and began tickling me mercilessly until the sheet was gone completely and I was breathless for reasons that had nothing to do with tickling.
With the exception of a brief walk for Hercules’s sake, we didn’t make it out of bed again for hours, but for once, my joy in spending the morning in bed had nothing to do with sleeping.
It turned out, dreams of some fairy-tale Prince Charming couldn’t hold a candle to reality when your reality included Percival Champion.
When it was finally time to either get up or starve to death, Champ casually mentioned wanting to swing by his house to pick up some fresh clothes on the way to eat.
I stared at him, my chest squeezing with genuine surprise and excitement. “You want to take me to your house? Man, this is serious.”
We moved into the shower, where Champ’s expression turned sober. “I’m sorry it took me so long to see what was right in front of me this whole time. I really do appreciate you, love you, and want to spend my life with you. So…” He took a breath. “So I want you to see the house and tell me what you think. If you want to live there, we can do that. If you want to stay in the apartment over the shop, we can do that. Or, if you want, I can sell the house, and we can pick something else out together. I just… I just want you to be happy. And I want us to be together.”
“I don’t want to live there if it’s going to remind you of Vince,” I admitted. “Didn’t you say you bought it for the two of you?”
Champ shook his head. “Vince never liked that house. I bought it more to serve my dream of settling down. I thought, if I got the house and the white picket fence all prepared for him, surely Vince would get on board. I see now that I railroaded him into it. Hell, he never even looked at houses with me here. I don’t know why I bought a house without his input, but when I saw this house, I…” He let out a breath. “There was something about it. It felt like home to me. It doesn’t have to be, though,” he added quickly. “Wherever you are is gonna be home.”
I was secretly glad something had pulled him to the Thicket strongly enough to stay. Even if that reason was a dream with someone else, the reality of the situation included me, not Vince.
“I can’t wait to see it,” I said.