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  “Cinnamon sugar,” he said.

  I started to cry.

  “Hey, hey!” He protested, moving around to sit next to me and take my hand. “No crying. It’s your favorite, you told me so yourself.”

  “That’s why I’m crying! Because you remembered!”

  Niall laughed and kissed me then wiped away my tears with his thumbs. He cupped my face with both his hands. “Of course I did.”

  I didn’t tell him that there was no of course about it. I kissed him, instead. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” Niall said, “even if you’re a weirdo about cinnamon sugar.”

  “And other things?”

  He smiled again. “Yeah. And other things.”

  We drank tea and ate our perfect cinnamon-sugared toast and yawned our way upstairs to brush our teeth and flop into his bed. I fell asleep almost instantly. When I woke, the sun was bright, and the bed was empty.

  I followed the scent of coffee. He’d made pancakes. I paused in the doorway wearing the T-shirt I’d borrowed from him the night before, self-conscious about my hair and smudged eyeliner and the fact I’d told him that I loved him, even though he’d said it first this time. I took a seat in front of the platter of pancakes, and he sat across from me.

  “I’ve been making a list for you,” Niall said formally.

  Both my eyebrows went up. I was no stranger to making lists, but I hadn’t often been the recipient of one. “Okay.”

  He cleared his throat and pushed the legal pad toward me. On it were two columns written in his tightly angled handwriting. “Yes” and “No.”

  There was yes to blindfolding and hand tying. No in capital letters with an extra no added to it in the front and back to “butt stuff.” I had to clap a hand over my mouth to stop myself from bursting into laughter. Beneath “Yes” he’d added “clothes” with a small asterisk, which marked a footnote at the bottom of the page and the words “for you.”

  That was it; I had to guffaw. “Niall. Oh, my God.”

  “I figured I needed to be up front with you,” he said, still sort of stiffly. He’d poured us both coffee, but he hadn’t eaten very much. “Read the rest of the list.”

  “Yes to toys that are not meant for the back door. Yes to calling me Mistress—” I paused, still reading. “I don’t care to be called Mistress, but thank you. Yes to being made to clean the bathroom?”

  He shrugged. “I hate a nasty bathroom anyway.”

  “Well, I’m on board with you taking it over, but not like a sex thing,” I said carefully. “Unless that’s your...thing?”

  “I don’t have a thing. I just thought if it was your thing...”

  “It’s not my thing,” I said, and looked at his list again. “No to anything in public like wearing a collar or being ordered around like a dog. No to anything that hurts too much, like clothespins on the balls— For fuck’s sake!”

  “I don’t think I’d like it,” he told me.

  That was it, I had to touch him. I pushed out of my chair and settled onto his lap with the list still in my hand. “I don’t want to put clothespins on your balls, Niall.”

  I kissed him for that look of blatant relief. And for lots of other reasons. Mostly because of love, pure and unadulterated and overwhelming.

  His arms went around me. He had to tip his face up for my kiss because of the way I’d straddled him. “This...this is okay, though. You on top.”

  “I like to be on top, baby.” I nuzzled his throat for a second before looking into his eyes. “Thank you very much for this list. You have no idea what this means to me. And I also think you’ve been watching way too much porn. I mean, I don’t have a problem with porn or watching it, in general, but I think maybe you’ve been looking at some stuff that’s a little too scary.”

  “I did a category search,” he admitted. “I couldn’t get through a lot of it. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. God,” I said. “The fact you even tried at all makes me want to kiss you all over. It’s really special, Niall. But what did I tell you about porn before?”

  “That what you like and do isn’t the way it is in porn?”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised you remembered that, but the fact you did makes me love you so much right now I can’t even stand it.” I held back a sniffle.

  He squeezed me hard again. “Don’t you cry!”

  “I won’t. Okay, maybe a little.” I buried my face against the side of his neck and breathed away the tears. His hands soothed up and down my back. I snuggled closer. I thought about what Alex had told me, about the reasons why we fall in love. “Niall, listen...it’s not about the things we do or don’t do. It’s about how you make me feel.”

  He shifted my weight a little, but kept holding me close. “How do I make you feel?”

  “Taken care of.” I didn’t even have to think about the answer; the words came out at once. “Understood.”

  “I like to take care of you, Elise.”

  I leaned back to look into his eyes. “You make me feel known, Niall. Inside and out. Hey, hey, don’t you cry now.”

  “If you get to,” he said sternly, eyes glittering, “I get to.”

  But neither of us dissolved into tears. We both smiled. I brushed his hair out of his eyes and let my fingertips trace his eyebrows. I marveled at how beautiful his face had become to me. I leaned close; I breathed him in.

  “I love you,” I whispered again so I could taste the words. Sweet like honey. Rich like wine.

  We kissed for a while until both of us were breathing fast, and he was hard. It took a small change of position, a little rearranging, and I was straddling him. The chair creaked as I rocked on him. I tightened my thighs against his hips when he tried to move.

  Niall kissed the curve of my collarbone above my scooped neckline, then gathered me close with his head pillowed on my chest for a few seconds before he looked up at me. “I don’t know if I can be what you want.”

  “You’re exactly what I want. Better than that, Niall, you’re what I need.” I shook my head. “I told you, it’s not about the toys or the games. Why don’t you believe me?”

  “Because I don’t think if you like something that much you should have to give it up,” he said seriously. “And I think that if I don’t give it to you, you’ll want to find it from someone else.”

  It was a fair concern. “I don’t get off on making someone do something they don’t want to do. So, sure, would I like to push your boundaries and explore some territory you’ve never tried? Well, wouldn’t you want to do that with me, if there was something you liked and I hadn’t done?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything I’d like that you haven’t done,” Niall said.

  “And that bothers you.”

  He shifted me again, one hand gripping my knee. “Yeah. Of course it does.”

  “I can’t change it.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “For me, what it all comes down to is really pretty simple. I like to be taken care of. Even better when I don’t have to explain or repeat myself. The rest is only icing, Niall.” I ran my finger over his lips until he opened his mouth, and then I kissed him.

  “The icing is the best part,” he said into my kiss.

  I smiled. “Eat too much, and it will make you sick.”

  “But you’ve had that kind of relationship. Guys who did those things. That guy who broke your heart. He did that stuff, right? And the other one, the one you were with when we met.” Niall frowned. “Hard to convince me that after having that, you’ll settle for plain, old-fashioned sex.”

  “You made me a list,” I reminded him. “You’re willing to try some new things. What more could I possibly want?”

  “Everything,” Niall said.

  I took his face in my hands until he looked into my eyes. “Listen to me, because I’m not going to repeat myself again. Four years ago I was crazy mad in love with a guy I loved too much. Three months ago, I was with a man I didn’t love e