The first time he met Juliet, she zapped him with some taser stun-gun gadget that stuck in his neck and made him feel like he'd been struck by lightning, and not in the good way.

Not exactly what you'd call love at first sight.

Not that he actually believes in any of that crap about sparkles and fairydust and the ordinances of fate. It isn't his style, never has been. If he's honest he's only really been "in love," if that's what you want to call the sensation of having your guts ripped out for another person, with two other people in his thirty-plus years, and he didn't quite have a picture-perfect beginning with either.

Cassidy, she'd been thoroughly researched and vetted even before they'd "accidentally" bumped into each other in the stairwell of her ritzy hotel. He gave her a fake name and a fake card and a fake smile, and pretended to be all "aw-shucks-you-remember-lil'-ol'-me" when she called him back the next morning. (And he pretended to himself that the reason he was glad she took the bait was because he liked the look of her money, not the light in her smile.)

The first time he saw Kate she didn't even notice him, which was ironic and yet not. It was the first night after the crash, and that beach got damn cold real quick, and so he wandered through the wreckage in hopes of mooching off someone else's firewood.

She was huddled by her own fire, skin glowing in the warmth, in the company of the man he would only later learn to resent, leaning half-towards him as he talked, their poses eerily symmetrical. He stopped for a moment to take her in, this strange girl, at the way the light played off her green eyes and lingered on the barely-there freckles dotting her cheekbones. She smiled at something the other guy said, her mouth shy and content, and looked at him from under her eyelashes when he moved to stoke the blaze higher.

For some stupid reason that a shrink would no doubt pay good money to analyze, the air was suddenly cooler than ever, and he kept on moving.

So. Not really the kind of stuff you'd put on a Hallmark anniversary card. But, really, a rocky start to a relationship isn't exactly new terrain, and so he figures that with Juliet it can't get much worse. Nowhere to go but up (har, har), that sort of motivational mumbo-jumbo. But it actually makes sense, in a creepy feel-good way. (Since when is he an optimist?)

Two weeks turn into two months (he can't even remember whose idea it was or why his head hurts at loud noises, but it doesn't matter because when he wakes up her arms are wrapped around his middle and her even breathing is light on his neck) and then two years (he's memorized the echo and weight of her footsteps, knows each individual curved vertebra on her spine, and has actually learned to cook a mean omelet for her on the weekends when she's too tired to get out of bed). Time passes between their linked fingers like pearls on a string, and it's the same ridiculous nonsense as ever, pattern as old as the universe, but it's different, because he knows that she would never leave him, and, more than that, he would never want her to.

He says that he loves her first. That isn't a new thing for him: most of the girls he'd scammed liked the sweet-talking, and he knows every possible variation on those three words like a book--the sexy whisper, the sweet declaration, the emotional outburst, the cue-the-violins-and-chocolates confession. All guaranteed to turn a woman's knees to jelly.

But he'd only meant it twice before. The first time, it hurts to think on, because nine months later (he did the math) there was a baby whose birth he wasn't even around to witness, and he doesn't like dwelling on failure. The second time he'd been terrified for both his life and his heart beneath the bravado, and half-joking, just in case she didn't mean it, and her kiss tasted sweet but also like a con.

This time, it's different: he just murmurs it into the fine hollow between the smooth ridge of her clavicle and the slope of her shoulder, and she turns to face him, slowly, one finger twisting deliberately in an especially shaggy lock of his hair. She makes sure that he's looking right at her before she says, calmly, that yeah, the feeling's mutual, James, and laughs at the content growly sound in his throat when she decides to show him just how mutual.

The rain pounds down in relentless sheets on the thin roof above them (he knows that there's a leak in the kitchen that needs fixing) and tomorrow their cover might be blown and it could all go to hell, but she smiles into him, and he's never been less afraid in his life.