Chapter Twenty-Two Tristan
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tristan
Sly? Probably.
Necessary? Absolutely.
I could have told everyone I was heading back to the Baron’s Court flat.
No one would have stopped me. Not after months of being monitored, managed, fed, medicated, and emotionally audited by my mother, my father, Mrs Linton, and at least three private consultants who all agreed I was “doing remarkably well.”
And I was.
Physically, I was cleared. The bullet wound had healed into a thin, pale scar along my side.
My leg had long since stopped aching. The ribs no longer reminded me of themselves every time I laughed or breathed too deeply.
I’d finished physio. Returned to work in a reduced capacity.
Sat back in my office. Worn my own suits again.
But recovery wasn’t the same as independence.
Not when my father still had a say in my living arrangements.
Not when my mother still knocked before entering rooms that technically weren’t hers.
Not when my life was still being handled like something fragile that might fracture again if dropped.
And not when the most important part of it was miles away in a bedsit south of the river, with no phone and no way of reaching me except through other people.
Tonight had been necessary.
The dinner.
The conversation.
The unspoken acknowledgement that Richie was no longer something to be hidden, defended, or negotiated.
But it hadn’t been enough.
Because I hadn’t touched him properly. Hadn’t held him without interruption. Hadn’t stood in a space that was mine and let myself feel what it meant that he was free and alive and here.
So yes. I wanted one more thing.
I wanted to claim what had always been ours. Us.
I took my jacket and my keys, muttered something about air and a walk and not needing the car, ordered an Uber before anyone could reorganise my evening, and left the house with my pulse picking up.
Baron’s Court wasn’t far.
Nor far enough.
The driver pulled in, and I was out of the car before he’d even finished his polite farewell. Because there he was. Standing beneath my window. Hands in his pockets. Shoulders tense. Looking up at the building as if he wasn’t quite convinced he was meant to be there.
He turned as I stepped onto the pavement, suspicion in his eyes, as if he half-expected this to be a mistake. Or a test. Or might be taken back if he reached for it too quickly.
“Richie Slade.” I smiled, his name sitting on my tongue, heavy and precious and real.
“Tristan Hale-Fucking-Fitzroy.”
I cocked my head as I reached him. “There’s no fucking in there.”
He grabbed me, splaying his hands on my arse. “Oh, yes, there is.”
And in that moment, with London moving around us and my old life rising behind me, I realised exactly what I needed before anything else could happen.
I needed him in my space.
Not my parents’.
Not his bedsit.
Not a prison cell, a hospital room or a borrowed bed, or a place we were only passing through.
Mine.
So I kissed him.
And he kissed me back.
We’d done it outside before. In the open, in borrowed spaces, in alleys and cupboards that never belonged to either of us.
But this time I wanted him all to myself.
So I slipped away to tug him with me and get him through the door into the building.
He followed without question, his body flush to my back as we climbed the stairs.
He settled his hands on my hips, heavy and familiar, swiping his mouth along the back of my neck, planting kisses there between fervent breaths.
By the third floor, I couldn’t take it anymore.
I spun, caught his mouth with mine, hands on his face to pull him impossibly close and groaning into him as he drove me back against my door.
He then grabbed my arse, lifted me clean off the floor and pinned me there, devouring my mouth while the door rattled on its hinges, no doubt alerting the building to what we were doing.
Maybe we’d never shed the need to be public.
Fuck. It was desperate. Months of restraint collapsing all at once. He tasted exactly as I remembered. Rough and hot and real. And it took everything in me to shove him back even half a step.
“Let’s get inside first.”
He let me go long enough for me to get the door open.
Then he kicked it shut behind us and didn’t give me even a second before he was on me again.
Not that I wanted one.
I never, ever, wanted his hands to stop touching me.
I was addicted to them. To him. His mouth, his weight, the way he took up all the air in the room.
I’d picked my poison a long time ago. Chosen it.
Swallowed it down, knowing exactly what it would cost. And I wasn’t ever going to stop craving him.
Clothes disappeared. Tugged free. Dropped. Forgotten. He pressed me into walls. I dragged him closer. Always closer. As if there still wasn’t enough of him, even with his body flush to mine, his mouth on mine, his hands everywhere at once.
By the time we reached the bedroom, we were naked, hard, and completely gone in each other.
I fell back onto the bed and pulled him down with me.
He followed, draping himself over me, mouths meeting again, bodies sliding together as if reacquainting, as if reminding themselves exactly how this felt.
Real.
Here.
Ours.
He lifted onto one arm, resting his forehead against mine, breath hot and uneven, sweat warming his skin as he looked down at me. He traced his fingertips along my side, achingly delicate and deliciously tender, finding the place where the scar bloomed thick and unyielding.
He swallowed.
I could have said something. That it was fine. That it didn’t matter. That it wasn’t his fault. But words were useless. Because he knew. He knew, because he was here. Touching me. And looking at me as if nothing about me was broken. So I lay back and let him touch me, to work through it.
And he did. He smoothed his hand over the raised, twisted skin where the bullet had torn through me, where I’d been stitched back together, eyes never leaving mine. Everything sat there between us—fear, relief, want, love.
Then he kissed me.
And as he did, he drifted his palm back over the scar, down my stomach, along the inside of my thigh, easing my leg back and apart, before cupping my balls, massaging me.
I tapped around in the drawer beside my head, found the lube and chucked it nearer to him.
Then he closed his hand around my cock, warm and sure, moving slowly as his mouth claimed mine again, tongue unravelling me.
I was gone. Melted into the sheets. Letting him take me apart and put me back together all at once.
“So fucking beautiful when you’re like this,” he whispered, though there was nothing soft in it. Nothing pretty. I didn’t want there to be. Because this was him. Hunger. Possession. A reverence bordering on violence.
I reached for him, biting my fingers into his shoulder as I dragged myself up, desperate for his mouth. But he denied it. He pulled back enough so I couldn’t have it. Not far enough to escape me. But far enough to feel it. The heat of his breath. The almost.
And with that unbearable space between us, with his gaze burning straight through me, he said, “I love you.”
My breath left me.
Those words from him, this hard, unyielding, brutal man, were the most precious thing I had ever been given.
More than any inheritance, any comfort, any protection my world had ever offered.
They were the most powerful thing I had ever been trusted to hold.
I wouldn’t ever crawl away from them. As they’d just rewritten the fucking ground under my feet.
So I grabbed him.
Fisted his hair and hauled him back to me and kissed him. Hard. Staking my claim. Bleeding the same truth back into his mouth.
“I love you too, Richie.”
The sound he made wasn’t pretty. It was wrecked. Torn out of him as if he hadn’t meant to let it exist. He crushed his mouth to mine, hard enough to bruise, as if swallowing the aftermath before it could destroy him.
Then he broke away.
Not to leave.
To come back different.
Focused. Controlled. Dangerous.
His hands were steady as he opened the lube and slicked his fingers. Every trace of frenzy had gone, stripped back to intent. Control. And he watched my face the whole time. Every breath. Every twitch. Every surrender. As if reminding himself exactly how to ruin me.
And I lay there and let him.
The threat of what he was about to do had me opening.
Waiting. Offering myself up without a single touch.
Then he pushed a slick finger into me and I gasped, arching off the bed as my body took him in, heat blooming, breath breaking.
He stayed there a moment, stretching me, stroking, learning the shape of me again before adding another finger, drawing a sound out of me that didn’t feel human.
Only then did he move.
He lifted my legs over his shoulders and lowered himself between them.
He kissed the scar at my side first. Then my stomach.
Then he travelled up my aching length, open-mouthed and unhurried.
He licked the bead of precome from my tip, peering up at me before taking me deep, his throat working as his fingers continued their slow, devastating exploration inside me.
The noise tearing out of me was obscene.
I tangled my hands in his hair, holding him there, guiding him, losing any last scrap of composure to the heat of his mouth and the relentless pull inside me.
He choked on me, a rough, broken groan vibrating through him as he worked me open, as he pushed me higher, rawer, until desperation took over.
Then, as I was right on the edge, he pulled away onto his knees
“Easy there, Tricky.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, eyes dark and intense, before reaching for the lube again and coating himself, hard and flushed and as undone as I was. “Need in you.”
He worked himself slowly, unapologetically, letting me watch.