Natan
Her skin is warm under my forehead, her heart hammering against her ribs in a fast, wild rhythm. I lie there on the cold floor of her gallery, holding her close, completely pinned to the earth by the weight of what just happened.
I press a soft, slow kiss to the hollow of her throat, moving my lips up her jaw until I find her mouth again.
“I’ve wanted you since the second I saw you in that café,” I murmur against her lips, kissing her deeply, tasting the sweet, intoxicating heat of her.
“Every single day. I lay awake in my apartment thinking about what it would feel like to touch you like this. It was better. Better than anything I ever imagined.”
She makes a small, delicate sound in her throat, but instead of relaxing into my chest, her body suddenly goes rigid.
Before I can ask what’s wrong, Kimmie shifts, whimpering a little as she pulls herself off my still half-hard cock. The instant loss of her warmth leaves me feeling strangely hollow. She winces slightly as her feet touch the floor, her hands scrambling for her clothes.
She quickly puts her bra on, then shrugs into her dress and reties it at the side with trembling fingers, her breathing fast and shallow.
I get up, pulling my trousers up and adjusting myself, watching her with a heavy, gathering frown. The sudden shift in the air is like a slap to the face.
“Kimmie,” I say, my voice dropping into that low, even tone I use when something is wrong. “What’s wrong? Did I hurt you?”
“No, it’s nothing!” she says quickly. Far too fast. Her eyes darting everywhere except toward me. She smooths down her pink dress with frantic, shaking hands, her cheeks flushed a bright, burning red. “Nothing is wrong. I’m fine. Perfectly fine.”
“You’re not fine,” I say, reaching out to her. My sheer size seems to loom over her again, and for the first time since I walked through her unlocked door, she looks smaller, guarded.
“I just... I have to prepare for the opening,” she stammers, grabbing a pencil from her desk and instantly dropping it.
She crouches to pick it up, her back turned to me.
“There’s so much to do. Tomorrow is the biggest day of my life, and I need to focus.
I really just need to be on my own right now. ”
Every muscle in my back tightens. The enforcer in me wants to demand an explanation, to take her by the waist and pull her back against me until she tells me what shifted. But I see the quiet panic fluttering in her chest, the raw overwhelm in her brown eyes. She isn’t angry, she’s spooked.
I force myself to step back. I don’t want to leave her like this, but crowding her won’t help.
I reach into my pocket, pull out my card, and set it carefully on the edge of her desk next to her stack of label cards.
“My personal cell is on there,” I say quietly, keeping my tone gentle despite the knot tightening in my gut. “Call me whenever you want. Or whenever you need to. Anything at all, Kimmie.”
She nods quickly, keeping her gaze glued to the floor. “Thank you, Natan. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Kimmie.”
I walk out into the cool night air, the heavy gallery door clicking shut behind me. My jaw is set tight as I walk to my car. The drive back to my apartment in the city is long, quiet, and entirely too empty, my hands gripping the steering wheel while her soft gasps continue to echo in my mind.
The bridge is almost empty at this hour. The water is black underneath it, the last of rush hour tapered off leaving the roads wide open. I’m halfway across when the thing that’s been prickling the back of my mind surfaces.
I didn’t use a condom.
I’ve never done that before.
I’ve been careful my entire adult life. There is no version of me that gets careless about this, and yet I sat down on the floor of that woman’s gallery and finished inside her without a single word about it first. She wanted me.
She lined me up herself, with her hand around me and her thighs shaking.
None of that changes the fact that nobody asked her, and that she climbed off me a few minutes later and couldn’t get dressed quick enough.
My apartment is on the eleventh floor and looks like nobody lives in it. I’ve rented it for the better part of the best ten years but it’s just a place I use to sleep.
I shower, then stand in the kitchen with the light off and eat cold chicken out of a container. My phone stays on the counter, face up, doing nothing. Mechislav messages at twenty past nine about the second yard and incoming shipments.
She doesn’t call. I don’t expect her to. I lie on top of the covers until half past one, then give up and get dressed before driving back over the bridge with the heater on and the radio off.
The gallery lights are off and the shutter is down over the door.
AT least she isn’t working into the early hours.
I continue driving down the road towards the street she lives on.
I overheard Sammie saying how Kimmie bought a row house on Linby Road.
It took everything ounce of self-control not to stalk her and find out exactly which one.
SO now I’m sitting at the end of the street watching the houses like they owe me something.
At five thirty, a door opens, and Kimmie appears, her hair tied up, her glasses pushed onto the top of her head.
She turns on the spot just outside the doorway, looking through her purse and patting where she might usually have pockets.
Her hand finally goes to the top of her head, finds her glasses, and she pulls them onto her face.
I don’t know why I find it so endearing, but the kick in my chest tells me it’s something I want to see every day.
She is wearing a skirt that hugs her hips tightly and then flares at her knees.
It’s a deep shade of gray, and her blouse is cream with ruffles that draw my eye straight to her cleavage.
My gut gives a punch as the thought of anyone else seeing her curves like this makes possessive jealousy course through me.
“Get it together, you moron,” I scold myself. But there’s no way anyone looking at Kimmie today isn’t going to want their hands on her. She is the most beautiful woman ever to walk this planet.
I start the car and drive around to the small parking lot nearest the cafe.
Purr & Pour is warm and smells like sugar at seven in the morning. Delilah has her hair tied up and white icing on one forearm. Ten trays are stacked on the end of the counter with wax paper between them.
Jasper is already here, at the end of the counter with his cat mug that was initially a joke by Delilah, and has instead turned into something special between them.
I wait for the thought to make me feel queasy.
All that love and cuteness. But it doesn’t.
Instead, an image of Kimmie, head thrown back, my hand stretched over her hip as she takes me, flashes in my mind.
“You look terrible,” she says when I approach the counter.
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t a compliment, it was a diagnosis.” She slides the top tray a quarter inch to the left. “Did you even sleep?”
“Sleep is for the weak.” I flash her a grin as I reach for one of the cinnamon pastries, but she swats my hand away before I get one.
“She won’t even let me have one,” Jasper laments from the end of the counter.
Lemur appears from the door that leads to the kitchen and sits down directly in front of the pastries with the confidence of an animal who has never once been told no. Delilah moves him. He comes straight back.
“There she is now,” Delilah says, looking past me out of the window.
“Looking foxy,” she wriggles her eyebrows, and I fight the surge of jealousy that I’ve already tamped down once this morning.
“Right, that’s all of them,” she adds, sliding the last of the pastries onto the top tray.
“You two can manage to take these over there without dropping them or eating them, right?”
“Right,” I grumble.
She wipes her hands on the towel over her shoulder and at me. Delilah has a way of looking that Jasper has clearly been teaching her. “Anything I should know about?” she asks.
“No.”
“Hm,” she says.
I pick up the top five trays and head out.
Through the window, the gallery is lit up all the way to the back, and Kimmie is crossing and recrossing the floor with something in each hand. That gray skirt swishing around her knees like my own personal torment.
Delilah gets the door for me, and cross the street.