Aurora came back slowly.
Not the sharp return of someone startled awake—something gentler than that, the gradual reassembly of a person who had been deeply under and was surfacing through layers of warmth and quiet. She was aware of the warmth first. Then the surface beneath her cheek. Then the specific quality of the silence around her—not her apartment's silence, not the particular sound of her own building at night.
She opened her eyes.
The office was dark except for the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows— Manhattan at night doing what Manhattan at night did, the specific luminescence of a city that never fully went dark, casting the room in the ambient glow of a million lit windows and the slow movement of traffic forty floors below. And in that light, standing at the window with his back to her and his hands in his pockets, was Liam.
He was looking at the city. Lost in whatever he'd been thinking about while she slept.
She sat up quietly.
