I kind of think he looks even more comfortable than he did seconds ago, his attention unwavering as he crosses his utensils over his empty plate, leans back in his chair and cups his hands behind his head, laughing at my mother’s stories about young Rachel’s antics.

He looks . . . at home, here with my mother and me.

It does something to me. I suddenly feel very vulnerable.

I wonder about his mother as he talks with mine. As he talks with mine and occasionally ends her anecdotes with, “Did she really?” in amusement.

And my mom won’t shut up about me!

I feel extremely, intimately bared to Malcolm right now.

Malcolm already knows so much about me. What I like and fear and want. That I hope to do good things, but I sometimes do bad. He knows how I taste.

And now, having the man of my dreams know me through my mother’s stories, I feel completely exposed. As if I have no more secrets from him, while he, somehow, is a box of them that I might never fully open.

Gina’s right: maybe I do have a few walls up to protect myself. But I feel them all about to topple.

“Now, Rachel had very few friends when she was younger,” she says as she brings over my favorite dessert from the kitchen, a chocolate peppermint pie. “She was reserved and of course it was a concern of mine, as you can imagine. The only people Rachel allowed to know that she didn’t have a father were those we met through End the Violence. People like her, who’ve known loss. She just didn’t feel comfortable sharing that loss with anyone else, whom she thought wouldn’t understand.”

I try to laugh it off, but my laugh wavers. It’s only after Saint reaches for my hand under the table and squeezes it that I exhale.

Because he’s not judging me.

I’m into you, I remember him saying. I steal a look at his profile. He senses it and turns, and when our gazes meet, I feel like he kisses me with his eyes.

This evening in my home feels so monumental all of a sudden. Like he too is giving me something he’s given no one else.

Now my mother is saying I read during the weekends throughout my teens.

“She wasn’t a party girl?”

He asked my mother this, but he’s teasing me. I can tell by the look—and smile—he sends my way.

A smile that no woman on earth could withstand with dry panties.

“Oh, no, though she enjoys having fun,” Mother assures. “Rachel was back from prom at twelve. Her date couldn’t interest her long enough to make her stay, a nice young man one of her friends suggested. She wasn’t really interested in anyone. I used to think she’d need a man so compelling, her stories couldn’t live up to him; he’d make her reality so much more compelling than anything else.”

I feel privately caressed when his gaze intensifies.

“So there was no one,” he says, sounding perfectly greedy.

I hold my breath.

“No one,” mother confirms.

But you, I tell him with my eyes when he smiles at me.

It’s better than sex, the way he’s staring at me now, the clenching of his jaw as if some unnamable emotion has touched him.

“Sin, we really need to find someone able to tell me embarrassing stories about you, so I can get even,” I tease him with a husky, shy voice.

Under the table, he gives my hand another squeeze, his voice dropping an octave just for me. “Give it a Goog. We’ll be more than even.”

“She’d come up with stories about families,” Mom tells him. “Usually very sweet ones. I worried she was a bit too hopeful for the real world, but I’m sure it was the way she coped after we lost Michael.”

After a nod of understanding directed at my mother, Saint’s eyes seek me out again. Caress me again. But the caress doesn’t feel sexual. It feels like so much more. Male eyes, as deep as eternity, seem to simply say, I understand.

“I’m sorry to hear that, for both of you,” he finally murmurs to my mother, and I notice that it takes him an effort to pull his gaze away from me.

The cold flecks that are so common in Malcolm Saint’s eyes . . .

There’s not a single cold fleck in them now.

He’s living, breathing and human and sitting like a calm storm at our dinner table, still so strong and alive and normal despite him being abnormally beautiful, abnormally powerful.

I see my mother blush a little when his full attention is on her. “I know you’ve lost your mother as well. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” he says quietly.

“This is your home too, Malcolm. Anytime.”