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“Where’s the fun in that?”

“I’m still going to be finding them at Christmas,” I grumbled as I took a sip of my tea.

“Nah, you’ll find them before then.”

I rolled my eyes fondly, looking at the ridiculous man lounging against my kitchen counter with his badly tattooed knuckles, sparkling eyes, and a penchant for doing little things to make me smile, like covering my flat with Easter chicks or putting an item on the menu for me at Toasty—a three-cheese, garlic, and rosemary roll—or bringing me a cup of tea in the early evening before he went to bed.

“Good thing I love you, you daft bastard,” I said.

Riley snorted, then jumped as coffee came out of his nose. “Ah shit! Bloody hell that stings!”

“Shit, are you okay?” I asked, grabbing some kitchen roll and pulling his mug out of his hands before he dropped it on the floor. “Here.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Some prick just said he loved me while I was drinking coffee and it caught me by surprise.”

It was only then that the realisation of what I’d said actually hit me and I swallowed, my heart pounding so hard it felt like it was going to break my ribs. “Did he?”

“Yeah, he did.” He wiped his nose and shoved the ball of kitchen roll into his hoodie pocket before taking both mugs from my hand and putting them on the kitchen side. “Luckily, he’s really damn cute.”

“I-Is he?”

“Yeah,” Riley said, putting his hand on my waist. “And luckily, I love him too.”

“You do?”

He chuckled softly. “You sound surprised. Don’t you want me to say it?”

“I do,” I said as I leant in and nudged his nose with mine, resting our foreheads together. “More than anything. I just… never expected to be loved like this, that’s all.”

“Neither did I.”

“Good thing we have each other then.”

“Yeah.” He kissed me slowly and deeply, and I felt my heartbeat start to steady, my nerves bleeding away under his touch. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

More kisses and then his hand sliding into mine to drag me towards my room, which was more ours these days, the door closing behind us as he pulled me onto the bed.

We made love slowly, pressing heated words of adoration into each other’s skin until we fell apart.

And afterwards we lay in bed, talking about the little things that made up our lives—books and bread and cups of tea. Croissants and coffee and early mornings when it felt like we were the only two people in the world. Danishes and date nights and feeding the ducks frozen peas.

Maybe one day there would holidays and a house, Christmases filled with sparkle and cheesy gifts, and rainy afternoons on the sofa watching films and K-dramas until one of us feel asleep.

But whatever happened, there would be me and Riley.

And that was all I needed.

Epilogue

Riley

Two Years Later

“You know what we should do?” Jace said, looking up from his corner of the sofa where he was tapping away on his laptop. He kept saying he was working, but we both knew it wasn’t true. I knew what his face looked like when he was concentrating on a translation, and he hadn’t been wearing that expression for at least the last hour.

“What?” I asked from my seat on the other end of the sofa, where I was scribbling away in a notebook with some potential ideas for Toasty and half-watching the replay of a football game I’d recorded the other night. I knew the result already, so it was more background noise than something I was actually paying attention to.