Chapter 6 #2
She laughed. The sound filled the penthouse, and it was the same laugh that had cracked the nothing in his chest the first time she called from Whitmore, and it was different now, because she wasn't on a phone two thousand miles away. She was here. Six feet away. His wife.
He crossed the room. Her eyes tracked him, and the brown of them was darker in the evening light, and her pulse was visible in her throat, and she was nervous and brave and his.
"Come here," he told her.
The words. The same ones from the kitchen. The ones he'd spoken for the first time without a reason attached, just come here, just the need for proximity, and she'd stood and come to him and put her hands on his face and the world had rearranged.
She came to him now. Stopped in front of him. Close enough to touch. Close enough to feel the warmth of her through the thin silk.
He reached up. Found the pins in her hair. Pulled them out one by one, and her hair fell in sections, across her shoulders, against his hands, and each pin made a small sound when it hit the marble floor, and she stood still and let him, and the letting was its own intimacy.
"Alexei."
"Not yet."
"I need to tell you something."
His hands paused. The last pin between his fingers. "What?"
"Your hands aren't shaking."
He glanced down. She was right. His hands were still. Not the controlled stillness of a man managing his body. The natural stillness of a man whose body was exactly where it wanted to be.
"Is that bad?" he asked.
"That's everything." Her voice cracked. "That's the whole point. That's what I've been chasing since I was sixteen. Not the kiss. Not the— not any of it. This. Your hands, calm, because you're not fighting it anymore."
The last pin fell.
Her hair was loose. Her face was bare. Her eyes were bright with something that wasn't tears.
He kissed her.
Not the ceremony kiss. Not the slow, reverent press of a man performing for an audience.
This was private. This was the sound she made when his mouth opened against hers and the taste of champagne and salt and the way her hands found his chest and her fingers curled into his shirt and pulled, the same way she'd pulled that first night, both fists, the gesture of a woman who had been reaching for him for two years and had finally been given permission to hold on.
His hands found the zip at the back of her dress. One motion. The silk loosened. She pulled back, just enough to meet his eyes, and her expression was nervous and wanting and trusting in a way that leveled him.
"I don't know what I'm doing," she whispered.
"That makes two of us."
"You've done this before."
"Not like this." His voice was raw. "Never like this."
The dress slid from her shoulders. She let it fall. And the sight of her, bare except for the thin fabric beneath, lit gold by the Mediterranean sunset through the windows, hit him in the chest like a fist.
He had seen beautiful things. He owned a casino full of them. Crystal and marble and art that cost more than buildings. None of it had ever done what her bare shoulders did to his ability to breathe.
She shivered. Not cold. The shiver of a woman standing in front of someone for the first time with nothing to hide behind.
"Don't look at me like that," she managed.
"Like what?"
"Like I'm— like I'm something."
"You are something."
"I'm a girl in her underwear in a penthouse. That's a very specific category of something and it isn't the category you're implying."
He pulled her against him. One arm around her waist, his other hand cradling the back of her head, and her body pressed against his chest and the contact, the full-length warmth of her against him with the silk gone and only the thin cotton of his shirt between them, tore a sound from his throat that he didn't recognize.
She made a sound back. Small. Startled. Her face was in his neck and her fingers were gripping his shirt and she was trembling, and the trembling wasn't fear, it was everything, the accumulated weight of two years and a closed door and an opened one and a chair in the dark and a kitchen counter and a proposal that stopped the world.
He lifted her. Carried her down the hall. Not to the guest room. To his room. His door, which had been the first wall between them and was now the last threshold, and he carried her through it and set her on his bed and the click of the door behind them was not a closing.
It was a beginning.
She reached for his shirt. Her fingers found the buttons, and she couldn't get them open, her hands were trembling too hard, and the frustrated sound she made was so perfectly Mia that something behind his ribs cracked.
He covered her hands with his. Helped her.
One button, then the next, their fingers working together the way they'd worked together on the counter when she'd lifted her hips to help him, and the cooperation was its own intimacy, the language of two people who had been learning each other's bodies in pieces and were finally allowed to learn them whole.
The shirt fell. Her palms pressed against his chest, and the touch of her hands on his bare skin sent a tremor through him that he felt in his teeth.
She traced the lines of him the way she'd traced his collarbone on the kitchen counter, the way she traced everything, with the diligence of a woman who kept a mental spreadsheet and was adding a new column.
"Your heart is fast," she whispered.
"I know."
"Faster than in the kitchen."
"I know that too."
He lowered her to the bed. Slowly. His hand cradling the back of her head, her hair fanning across his sheets, his sheets, not the guest room's, and the sight of her there, in his bed, in his room, in the space he had kept empty for twenty-two years, was more than his composure could hold.
He traced her. Collarbone. The line of her shoulder. The curve of her waist. Everywhere his fingers went, her skin rose to meet him, and the sounds she made were small and continuous and wrecked, and each one was a confession she couldn't have held back if she'd tried.
"Alexei—"
"I'm here."
"I know you're here, I can feel you everywhere, that's the problem—"
He kissed her throat. The hollow where her pulse hammered.
The soft skin below her collarbone where his mouth had been before, in the kitchen, except this time there was nothing between his lips and her skin, and the heat of her, the taste of her, the way her back arched when his mouth found the places that made her gasp, turned the room into something airless and burning.
Her fingers were in his hair. Holding him where she wanted him. Not gentle. The grip of a woman who had chased him for two years and had finally caught him and wasn't letting go, and the fierceness of it, the absolute refusal to be tentative, was so brave it made his eyes sting.
He moved lower. Her ribs. The soft plane of her stomach. She shivered and her hands tightened in his hair and the sound she made was his name, broken in half, and he pressed his mouth to her hip and felt her whole body tense.
"Please." Her voice was a ruin. "Alexei, please."
He came back up. His body over hers. His weight settling against her, and she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down and the press of his body against the full length of hers, nothing between them, skin against skin, tore sounds from both of them that filled the dark room.
Her hands found his face. Both palms. The same way she'd held him in the kitchen when she'd said I've got you. She held him now and her eyes found his and in the dark they were black and bright and trusting in a way that leveled every wall he'd ever built.
"I've never—"
"I know."
"If I'm terrible at this—"
"Mia."
"—just add it to the spreadsheet and we'll workshop it later—"
He kissed her. To stop her talking. To stop himself from saying the thing he wasn't ready to say. To stop time, if he could, so this moment, her face in his hands and her body beneath his and her bravery filling every corner of the room, could last.
She wrapped her legs around him. Drew him closer. And the closeness was the threshold, and she felt it, and her breath caught, and her fingers tightened on his face.
"Stay," she whispered. The same word from the kitchen. The one that mattered.
He stayed.
And everything he had spent twenty-two years holding back, he gave her in the dark.
The silence after was enormous.
His face was in her neck. Her arms were around him.
Their breathing was wrecked and tangled and slowly, slowly finding its way back to something that resembled rhythm.
The city lights painted the ceiling. Biscuit scratched at the bedroom door, and Alexei said "No" in a voice so destroyed that the dog retreated immediately and didn't return.
She was still trembling. Small aftershocks. He held her through each one, his thumb tracing circles on her shoulder, and the tenderness of the gesture surprised him because his hands had not been asked to be tender in twenty-two years and they were doing it without instruction.
Her palm pressed to his chest. Over his heart.
The same place she'd put it the night she'd proposed the dare: I'm going to make you say it.
She held it there, and felt his heartbeat, and smiled against his neck with a smile he could feel, and the feeling of being known, entirely known, by a person who had decided to love him before he was ready to be loved, was more than his architecture could hold.
His eyes burned. He blinked it back. He was Alexei Almazov and he didn't cry, and if his throat was closed and his vision was blurred, that was a medical condition and not an emotion.
"Tell me something," she murmured against his chest.
"What?"
"When you sat in the chair. The four hours. What were you thinking about?"