Page 61 of Angel's Smoke

Despair had that effect on people.

Anna got to her feet and threw on whatever clothes she happened to grab first—a pair of maternity jeans and a long-sleeve tunic—and made her way out into the kitchen. Before she got there, though, her hip brushed against Iron’s coat, which he’d tossed over the edge of the couch in the living room. A sturdy case of some sort hit the floor, and she leaned down to pick it up.

“Going back out again?” She said this more to herself since Iron rarely left his coat anywhere other than the coat rack unless he didn’t plan on being inside very long.

“Yeah. I was about to touch base with Titan but remembered you have a client call at nine and wanted breakfast ready for you.”

As if either of them could possibly go back to normal after what they’d learned the night before.

It was on the tip of her tongue to say as much, and how she’d already planned to reschedule all her calls today and spend it with him, when her brain stalled out over what she’d picked up off the floor.

It was a rigid pyramidal gray glasses case with the designery-est of designer brand names stamped across the magnetic flap.

“What’s this?” Anna held up the case.

The wooden spoon hit the spoon rest next to the stove, and Iron filled the doorway between the kitchen and living room. A chagrined look of unease twisted his features. Then a huge sigh collapsed his shoulders. “Open it.”

Curious, she skimmed her thumb along the magnetic seam. Air rushed out of her lungs. Nestled within its plum-colored bassinet of a microfiber lens cloth was a shiny new pair of prescription glasses. She knew without even lifting them to her eyes that they were meant for her. The pale purple brushed metallic frames arched over lenses that were the perfect shapely mix of oval and cat eye. Wide but not distractingly so. The carved temple arms featured cut-aways of small, very subtle flames arching around the sides before bleeding out into the most comfortable-looking temple tips she’d ever seen.

“They’re titanium,” Iron added as if he hadn’t just added another several hundred dollars to the wonder sitting in her palms.

“What? Wait, you can’t mean what I think you’re meaning.”

Iron lifted a brawny shoulder as if the half a grand worth of eyewear she cradled to her chest like a baby bird was just no big deal. “I know a guy. Helps that he’s my brother and knows a thing or two about titanium metal manipulation. Rose had fun playing with the color wheel on that pair, too, after I told her what I was thinking. And before you ask, yes, it’s therightprescription.”

Gently, he lifted the glasses from their case and settled them on her face. All at once, her world came into focus again, starting with Iron, all glorious and charming, smiling sweetly before her, and ending with the last time she’d seen her old pair of glasses before she’d lost them. Iron had been with her then, too, as he’d usually been.

“You had something to do with my old pair going missing, didn’t you?”

“Guilty.” But there was a calm, comforting edge to the admission, as though he didn’t mind getting caught because he was looking forward to the punishment. Then he cupped the sides of her face. “I hated seeing you settle for whatever you thought you deserved to see of the world. And I also learned real fast that I was a pretty miserable bastard to be around when I was away from you.”

Anna snorted. “How could you tell?”

He lifted her chin higher and silenced her with a searing kiss that stole her breath as well as her brazen teases. “It wasn’t hard to see the writing on the wall. Brass poured his beer in my lap when he asked whether everyone liked the cranberry scones Molly sent him home with, and I neglected to respond.”

“Her food’s amazing, though.”

“Oh, I know. I just had other things on my mind, and by the time I realized how loud my silence was, I had a crotch full of IPA and the insistence from several dubiously well-intentioned family members that I needed to fix my shit or they’d fix it for me.”

He didn’t have to say what had been on his mind. The heat in his stare confirmed everything she was already thinking. She tried to look away, but her heart was utterly captivated. The beautiful warmth pumping out of him was just so damn bright even for her soul.

“The next time I saw you and saw the pitiful condition of your favorite glasses, I swiped them, determined to give them an overhaul for you. It was a small kindness I could offer. I kept telling myself that if I could make sure you had groceries, that your oil heat tank was accessible, that your damn car had enough in her to get you down the mountain and back, that you’d be okay without me.”

Anna let her tears slip, not caring a whit whether or not she smudged her new glasses. And like freaking clockwork, Iron was there to catch every single tear that slid down her cheeks.

He was always there, and she was fairly certain she’d no longer know how to exist in a world where he didn’t.

Iron smoothed his rough thumbs over her cheeks. “At one point, I wasn’t even sure I was capable of returning your glasses to you. I debated with that selfish part of myself and thought if I could at least carry a piece of you with me, even if that piece was a pair of seen-better-days glasses with a scratch on the left lens, then that was better than not seeing you at all. I couldn’t bear not having some of you to protect and hold in any way. After all, you had already been taken from my dreams, and though we’d yet to figure out how to use the relic’s magic, I’d always known I wasn’t meant to keep you forever. Just like I couldn’t keep your glasses either.”

The dam burst free on every emotion that had been lodged deep inside Anna. She cried rivers onto Iron’s shirt. Anger, love, betrayal, fear, acceptance, compassion, it all poured out in great ugly gasps. Iron held her to him as he guided them to the nearby couch. There, he let her unleash everything she’d been feeling, and never once did he shush her or tell her it was going to be okay.

Because it wasn’t. None of it was okay. Not the fact that he and his family had an impossible choice to make, or that she’d just begun to truly know the man she imagined her child meeting for the first time.

Not the fact that she loved him.

That thought had slapped her soberly across the face but made itself known as nothing but fact when she hadn’t retreated from the sting it left behind. Instead, she relished it, searching out more of what it would mean to love a man such as him.

And all of that newly unearthed wonder had been stamped with an expiration date.

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