40. Aurélie
Callum pulled me back into the bed, and the sound that ripped out of me was equal parts sob and laugh, like grief and relief were colliding in my chest. The tension I’d been carrying in my shoulders, in my spine, in the very marrow of me, finally broke.
I folded against him as though my body had been waiting for this permission—to rest, to collapse, to belong .
My ribs still ached from yesterday, from crying until my lungs burned, from holding on so tight I thought I might splinter.
Every bruise and scrape felt like proof of how easily the world could break me.
But in his arms, the same aches turned into something else entirely.
Not a wound, not a punishment, but a reminder that I was still alive, still here.
That maybe pain could mean survival, and survival meant there was still something worth wanting.
Not just existing to succeed, but to live .
“Mon amour,” I whispered, the words barely making it past the tears leaking hot down my temples.
My eyes closed, surrendering to the feel of him.
We were both alive, here in each other’s arms, in the quiet of this room where only the sound of the rain and us could penetrate our haze. “You don’t know what that means to me.”
“Yes, I do,” he murmured. His lips brushed my lashes, then my temple, then the tender, ugly bruise darkening my cheekbone.
Each kiss softened the sharp edges of my pain until they blurred into something gentler, something almost holy.
He always had a way of making me surrender to him.
“Because yesterday, I thought I lost you. And now you’re here, and you’re mine, and I’ll never let you believe you’re anything less than whole. ”
Whole.
The word landed in my chest like a revelation.
Yesterday, my body had felt like a cage—broken, traitorous, proof of everything I’d been told I couldn’t be.
Incapable of controlling the car any longer, giving out on me as the strength bled from me the way life had before.
But now? Pressed to him, breathing with him, the pain inside felt less like emptiness and more like space.
Space we might fill together, however we chose.
I sagged into him, trembling, but lighter than I’d been in years. Lighter because the weight of carrying it alone wasn’t mine anymore. It was ours .
And then he asked the question. The one that had gutted me for so long I thought it might kill me to hear it aloud.
“Do you want kids, Aurélie?”
My body went still. My heart stumbled. Every nerve screamed at me to run, to shut down, to hide the truth in silence where it couldn’t wound me again.
For years I had done just that—buried the want so deep it became a fossil, something I couldn’t admit even to myself.
Safer to pretend I never wanted it. Safer to live without hope than to risk it being crushed again.
But then his pale blue eyes held mine. Steady. Gentle. Carving out a space safe enough for honesty. Telling me whatever answer I gave him was okay . That the choice was mine .
And for the first time, I let myself imagine it. Not the picture-perfect story the world shoved in my face, not the dream they said I’d never deserve. Just… me and him. However it looked. Whatever it meant. A future of our deciding.
My lips wobbled, my throat closed, and the tears came harder. But I nodded.
His reaction nearly undid me, eyes closing briefly in relief. He touched my face as though he’d been drowning and I was the shore, thumb catching the tears spilling faster than I could stop them.
“Okay,” he breathed. “That’s all I need to know. If you want them, then we’ll figure it out. Other options, other paths. Whatever it takes. But I need to understand everything, so I can be here for you. So I can be what you need. Because I’m not going anywhere, Aurélie.”
My lungs collapsed around a sob, but this one wasn’t despair. This one was pure release. The years of shame, the nights I’d convinced myself I was unworthy, the terror that love would always leave me once it saw the truth—all of it washed away in his vow.
Clean . I was clean now, rid of the dirty lies I’d believed all this time.
I pressed a kiss right over his heart, the steady thrum under my lips proof that he meant it.
That he was staying. “What about you?” I asked, my voice barely more than a sigh.
Because if he didn’t want this—any version of it—I had to know before I let myself believe too much.
But part of me already knew his answer, well before he even took the breath to utter the words aloud.
“I want them too,” he said. His fingers slid through my tangled hair with such tenderness it nearly hurt. “But the craziest thing? I never thought about it before you. Not once in my life. And now the future is all I think about. Only ever with you.”
The sound that left me was fragile and fractured—a laugh breaking open through a sob. For so long the future had been a locked room in my mind, barred and shadowed. And now he’d flung the door wide open, lit it with something bright and impossible.
“And by the way,” he whispered, kissing me softly.
I arched into his touch, caving to him, and his hand splayed over my womb, the span of it reaching from hip to hip, “your body isn’t broken.
It’s perfect. Exactly how it was always meant to be.
Made for me. To carry me when I couldn’t, to fit against me like two halves of the same heartbeat, to remind me every day that home isn’t a place or a podium. It’s you.”
The words poured into me like water into desert soil. What had been dry, cracked, barren inside me bloomed with something terrifying and new: hope .
He pressed his forehead to mine, his breath fanning across my lips. “And if you’re okay with it, when you’re ready… I’d like to hear all the information. Everything you know. Or we can go get answers, so we can plan. Together.”
Plan. Together.
Not my burden alone. Not my secret, my shame. Ours.
And for the first time since I was told what my body couldn’t do, I didn’t feel broken. I felt whole.
I rolled onto my stomach, resting my chin on my hand.
Callum just gawked at me like I was the only thing in his universe.
The weight in my chest had lifted just enough to let something mischievous slip through.
This moment was precious and fragile, but I needed to lighten it, because that was how I survived.
“Plan, hmm? Then we’d better call your mum. She’s probably already chosen the church.”
Malina really was planning the wedding, and if I had been any other woman, it would have scared me off.
But Callum and I belonged together. We’d had to fight this connection, then hide it, then rise from the ashes.
And I knew, without a doubt, that if we could survive what we already had, the rest of the world never stood a chance.
At his frown, I grinned. My first real smile in days, and God, it felt strange and wonderful on my face. “Remember? She told you to marry that French girl someday. Don’t let her down.”
Oh mon Dieu, the look on him. The sound of his laugh was gravelly and sudden, so fucking sexy and delicious.
Different from the broken hysteria we’d shared the night before.
This was raw, cathartic, alive. Hope wrapped in sound.
I thought my heart might split open watching him fall apart in front of me from something I gave him. Love, not pain. Joy, not despair.
“Christ, woman,” he groaned, dragging me across the bed until I was flush against him, his accent gone rough and thick in that way I loved so much. The way it did when he was losing his grip. “You’re going to kill me one day.”
The warmth bubbling in me spilled over. I giggled, soft and unrestrained, and his mouth devoured it like he’d been waiting his whole life for that exact sound. My giggle broke apart into a gasp, and he just kissed me like his life depended on it.
“Do you have any idea what that sound does to me?” he breathed, his words a confession against my lips. “You could burn me alive with it, and I’d thank you.”
Heat licked down my spine, settling low in my belly. I smiled wickedly, feeling it in every inch of me. But my brain decided to do that thing where it couldn’t decide which language to pick. “Mmm. Pain and poetry. C’est… comment dit… hot as fuck ?”
He laughed again, breaking our kiss, his forehead dropping against mine.
His chest shook, and I felt giddy with it, like I’d stolen the sun back for him.
It was so… carefree, and boyish, and that fucking grin of his where that goddamn dimple appeared…
fuck, it had me sighing like a boy-crazed teenager.
“Jesus, Aurélie,” he managed through his laughter. “That is not how that phrase works.”
“Pfft, I beg to differ. It works on you,” I shot back, smirk curling my lips, smug as sin.
My eyes dragged over him, the way his hair was halfway between waves and curls, messy from sleep and the longest I’d seen it, but God, was it perfect on him.
And the way he’d trimmed his facial hair— ugh , I suddenly wanted that all over me, marking me, branding me, claiming me.
Callum Fraser was all man, walking sex and everything I could ever want.
The sheet was bunched around his hips, and in the low light, his abs were a work of art, a single vein disappearing beneath the fabric.
Before he could recover, I tilted my head and whispered the truth anyway. “Non. Your weak spot, remember? Tu es mon point faible.” You are my weak spot.
Morel had implied it was a bad thing, but it was far from. Callum was my weakness, but in the sense that he was the only person I’d die for. The only one I’d kill for, the only one I’d walk to the edges of the earth just to drag him back to me.