POV: DIMITRI
He hadn't expected that word.
He'd expected fear....she'd have been reasonable to feel it. He'd expected conflict, the particular confusion she experienced when her body and her better judgment disagreed. He'd expected maybe the reluctant, complicated arousal she always tried to hide and never quite managed.
He had not expected proud.
He sat beside her in the back of the car with her hand in his and turned the word over in his chest like something he didn't know the name of yet. It sat next to the other things she'd given him that he hadn't known how to hold.....I love you, I'm all in, I'm not going anywhere....the collection of things Eve Thorne had said to him that were slowly, irreversibly, dismantling the architecture of a man who had spent twenty years deciding he didn't need anything from anyone.
