“Il n’y a pas à s’inquiéter,” he assures her for the third time. There is nothing to worry about.

“Merveilleux,” she finally believes him, and I can hear the relief in her voice. Marvellous.

Jeez, she’s so loveable, I think.

“Well, drink up and have a biscuit, and then we’ll go and see Samuel,” she smiles.

I splutter into my coffee. “Samuels here, in the apartment?” Given that Mercy lead us straight into the kitchen, I assumed that the dog breeder hadn’t arrived with him yet. If I’d known that he was already here my desire for coffee and biscuits would have been non-existent. “Where?” I ask, my voice unusually high, and an odd maternal feeling of needing to see him this instant bursting forth inside of me. I’ve never felt this sort of need before.

“He’s sleeping in the living room,” Mercy tells me, apparently pleased by my reaction.

“Not anymore,” Logan chuckles, and when I turn to look at him he nods his head in the direction of the kitchen doorway.

I whip my head back around and see Samuel standing there, only seven inches tall. He looks up at each of us in turn with his large blue eyes, and one of his too-big ears twitches, making Logan and Mercy laugh. I make a strange, airy-sounding gasp at the sight of him, and half-slide, half-fall off of my chair onto the floor. He’s beyond the cutest thing that I’ve ever laid eyes on; the millions of animal sensations on the internet don’t even come close. Though perhaps I’m biased, already.

He hurries over to me, and the way his little legs carry him, as if not able to accommodate his own eagerness, makes me beam up at Logan.

“Meet our baby,” he laughs, clearly enjoying watching me. “We’re calling him Samuel,” he then tells Mercy as Samuel reaches me and starts clambering over my legs.

Unable to resist, I pick him up and cradle him. Oh my god, I think, though oh my dog might be more appropriate. His velvet-like grey fur is interrupted by a white stripe down the length of his tubby belly, and he’s got one white foot that stands apart as well.

“You are adorable,” I tell him. He gazes up at me with sleepy eyes, and I start to believe that we’re having a special bonding moment.

A few seconds later, Logan joins us on the floor. “You’re going to come home with us soon,” he tells the pup, stroking its head, encouraging him back to sleep.

“Logan, he’s amazing,” I say, my voice quiet in case, you know, I wake Samuel up. Silly, Gemima.

Logan grins back at me, nodding.

I glance back down at our sleepy little man. His eyelids flutter open for a moment, and we briefly make eye contact, then he sighs and falls asleep. Yep, I’m in love. Unexpectedly and abruptly in love. Funny, I tell myself, looking up at Logan once more, it’s the second time that this has happened to me in the past four weeks!

A short while later Mercy’s husband, Gilles, arrives home and once introductions have been made, together they start busying themselves in the kitchen and it seems that Logan’s and my invitation to stay for dinner is nonnegotiable. While we sit for our main meal, I’m allowed to keep Samuel nestled in a one-armed hug, which results in me eating my food with some difficulty. Totally worth it. During dessert it’s Logan’s turn, and he becomes so adorably engrossed with Samuel that he misses the majority of the conversation around the table; or perhaps he’s heard these stories before.

I’m all ears as Mercy and Gilles tell me about how they met and fell in love, four decades ago, to the backdrop of quite a different era. They tell me about their three children and eleven grandchildren, and while Mercy makes a round of after dinner coffees, placing those biscuits on the table once again, Gilles disappears momentarily and comes back carrying several photo frames, so that I can put faces to the names. They’re a beautiful family.

It’s past nine PM when the dog breeder arrives to pick Samuel up. In the few minutes we’re chatting back and forth, Logan and I seem to pass her approval test, and before we have to hand our little boy back to her she confirms that we can pick him up for good in ten days time. Thinking ahead, I calculate that that will be a Friday — perfect, I think, we can have the whole weekend to get him settled in. The only thing that the breeder tells us that sounds like a red flag, is the puppy’s need for a stable home, meaning that our to-ing and fro-ing between Logan’s place and mine might be problematic.

“Stability,” Logan grins cheekily once the breeder has gone. He wants that too, I remember.

“I’m sure we’ll make it work,” I mutter. “He’ll be affluent, having two homes.”

“I don’t think affluence matters to puppies,” Logan chuckles.

“You’ll love him to pieces and that’s the main thing,” Mercy pipes up and I nod smugly in agreement.

Still chuckling Logan announces, “Nous devrions partir aussi.” We should leave too.

“Thank you so much for such a wonderful evening,” I say to our hosts.

“If you must leave, take these with you,” Mercy insists, taking my hand and pulling me back into the kitchen. “You barely ate a thing at dinner,” she says to me.

I finished my entire plate, I think, amused. From the fridge she pulls out a plate of muffins, raspberry if I’m not mistaken. I beam at her.

“Mercy, you read my mind,” I laugh.

They’ll save me stopping at the cafe down the road from Pierson House tomorrow morning; they’ll afford me an extra five minutes in bed with Logan, and based on the way that we’ve been looking at each other all evening, five minutes more in the morning might be necessary, because I’ve a feeling that we won’t be falling asleep until very late tonight.

That’s if we sleep at all.

* * *

He lifts my leg a little higher and I whimper in undiluted ecstasy. Oh, fuck!

“Yes, yes, ah!” I susurrate, pushed to the verge.

We’re entangled against the world’s best window, the front of my body pressed against the glass, one leg lifted out to the side, giving Logan better access to me from his position behind me. I revel in the feeling of his tall, firm, muscular structure, delivering my endless stream of pleasure with his quick, heavenly thrusts.

Abruptly his hand releases its hold on my waist and slams onto the glass above my head. He’s bracing himself. Holy shit! That’s so damn sexy! Even when he doesn’t mean to, he manages to turn me on even more by showing just how perfectly undone I am able to make him.

“Oh, Gemima,” he groans, his face buried into my neck.

Abruptly, he looks up and as our eyes pour into one another’s, everything in me goes haywire. My heart rate spikes, and my pleasure seems to expand from its epicentre down below, sending a frisson of carnal gratification through my whole body.

Ah!

As I’m seconds away from free-falling in sheer ecstasy, I vaguely note that this always seems to happen whenever we’re intimate like this — when we gaze at each other on our imminent path to orgasm, the resulting orgasm is one of emotion, as well as physicality.

“I love doing this with you,” he whispers to me.

“Me…too,” I say breathlessly, as he speeds up slightly. Oh, Logan, yes! I orgasm with his next thrust, moaning loudly, and shaking between him and the window.

Relishing the sensation of me around him, Logan holds himself inside of me as I come, which somehow seems to heighten my peak even more. He feels phenomenal! How does he always do this, my mind screams.

He then starts moving his hips again. “Fuck!” His deep, guttural moans are punctuated with airy gasps. His whole body tenses and he’s able to hold my eye contact until the very last moment. “AH!” He calls out effusively, and now it’s my turn to savour the feeling of him coming. I put all of my concentration on how he feels inside of me right now; he’s throbbing.