Page 23 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies

I tell myself it is just a delivery. Just food. Just a door I will not walk through with my heart in my hands again.

I lift the first carrier and the heat of it kisses my coat.

The wood porch stones my soles with cold.

The door opens before I can knock, and Cruz stands there with Isla on his hip, both of them beaming at me like I invented sugar.

Isla is bigger than the last photo, gap-toothed and fierce, hair a riot of espresso ringlets under a knit hat with a pom at the top that suggests a snowball took up permanent residence.

She wraps a hand around Cruz’s collar and leans toward me, although she has only ever seen me in video calls before.

The warmth is welcome and incredibly sweet, not to mentionsogood for my soul.

“You came,” she announces, as if it were prearranged by a small queen.

“I brought stollen,” I say solemnly, because I know my place.

She leans farther. “Do you have the kind with the tiny orange bits that taste like the sun?”

“I do.” I cannot help the smile that climbs over my face and stays.

Cruz’s eyes do the soft thing they do when he is pleased with the world. “Bring her in before she freezes,” he says. “I mean you, not the stollen, although I respect both.”

I step into heat and cinnamon and woodsmoke.

It smells like a home I did not know I was allowed to want.

Deacon is in the hall with a clipboard and a pencil, reading the labels on the carriers as if he is inventorying me along with the food.

He’s wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and looks exactly like a problem solving itself.

“You did not need to come yourself,” he says without hello, then he meets my eyes and adds, “I am glad you did.”

“I accepted the job through the app,” I tell him. “I didn’t know it was you.”

“We did,” he replies, which is strictly true if you take the long way around.

Cruz laughs and the sound fills the doorway like warmth. “Someone may have used the third party to save you from the decision where you pretend we are strangers,” he says. “Consider us your holiday act of fate.”

Roman appears then with a movement I can feel before I mark it.

He steps out of the shadow into the threshold of the kitchen, and the light takes him in with suspicion and then approval.

He looks the same and he looks different because it has been a year and I have filled in the blanks with texts and photos and theway a man can become larger in your mind when you are careful not to tell anyone he lives there.

He sees the carriers and then me, which feels like being counted and then being named.

He does not smile.

His eyes slide down to my mouth, then return to my eyes like a rule he keeps even when no one is watching.

“You are late,” he says. His voice is dry. His mouth does not betray him.

“For what,” I ask, because I like to pretend I do not understand him. It gives me a second to breathe.

“For the coffee we are about to argue about,” he says, and the corner of his mouth lifts a fraction before it corrects itself.

The kitchen is as I left it in my mind.