Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
RONAN
She talks.
She talks and I learn the map of her body through her own narration, which is the most intimate cartography I've ever been part of.
She tells me that the spot below her navel makes her shiver.
That the inside of her wrist is so sensitive my thumb across it makes her gasp.
That when I trace the underside of her breast through that thin lace bra she stops breathing for a full three seconds and the sound she makes when she starts again is something I will hear for the rest of my life.
I take my time. I undo her the way I'd field strip a weapon in the dark, by touch and instinct and the bone deep knowledge of how things are built and where they come apart.
She's trembling and I haven't even kissed her below the jaw yet.
Every instruction I give her she follows with an eagerness that isn't submission for the sake of obedience.
It's submission because she wants to know what happens when she stops holding the wheel.
"Breathe," I tell her when my mouth finds the curve of her neck and her whole body goes taut. "Stay with me."
"I'm with you." Her voice is wrecked. "I'm so with you it's embarrassing."
I pull back to look at her. Firelight on dark skin.
Lace and nothing else. Eyes that have seen combat and are looking at me like I'm the most dangerous thing she's ever encountered.
I want to be worthy of that look. I want to be the man she thinks I am so badly that the wanting is a physical ache behind my ribs.
"Nothing about you is embarrassing," I say, and I mean it with a ferocity that surprises us both.
I lay her down on the couch and take my time kissing from her collarbone to her navel.
I learn that her stretch marks are sensitive and she inhales sharply when I drag my mouth across them.
I learn that she grips the cushion with her right hand and my hair with her left and when the pleasure builds she pulls hard enough that I feel it in my scalp and it makes me want to give her more.
I learn that Zara Montgomery is vocal and raw and completely incapable of hiding what she feels once the armor comes off, and that this woman who has spent her entire adult life being strong for other people melts when someone is strong for her.
When I pull the lace down her thighs and press my mouth to the center of her she says my name.
Not my name. The name she thinks is mine. And I should stop. The lie is right there, pressed between her body and my tongue, and I'm a man who has built his entire identity around integrity and I am failing spectacularly.
But she's arching off the couch and her hand is in my hair and she's whispering please like it's a prayer she just remembered, and I am not strong enough to stop.
I don't think any man alive would be strong enough to stop with Zara Montgomery unraveling against his mouth and saying please with the same voice she probably used to say clear when she was saving lives in a war zone.
I use my tongue and my fingers and the steady patience of a man who would rather die than rush this. I build her up slowly and I watch her face when she crests, and the expression she wears when she comes apart is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Open. Unguarded. Completely trusting.
She trusts me.
That thought cracks something open in my chest that has been sealed since Jess.
Since the morning Jess sat across from me and told me she'd been performing for months and I hadn't noticed.
I swore I would never miss the signs again.
I swore I would pay attention so carefully that no woman would ever have to fake comfort in my presence.
And Zara is not faking. I know this with the certainty of a man who has spent two years studying the difference between genuine response and performance. Every breath, every sound, every involuntary clench of her fingers is real. She is spectacularly, devastatingly real.
I bring her down slowly. Kisses on her inner thighs. My thumb tracing circles on her hip. I pull the throw blanket from the back of the couch and wrap it around her shoulders, and she leans into me with the boneless trust of a woman who has never been held properly after being taken apart.
"That's aftercare?" she murmurs against my chest.
"That's the beginning."
"You didn't..." She shifts, looking down my body at the evidence that I am very much affected and very much ignoring it. "Don't you want to..."
"This wasn't about me tonight."
She lifts her head and stares at me. "You're serious."
"A good dominant puts his submissive's experience first. Especially the first time. Especially when she's learning what she wants." I brush a curl back from her temple because I can't stop touching her and I've stopped pretending I want to. "There's no rush, Zara. We have time."
The word time expands in the space around us and I realize I mean it.
I don't want one night with this woman. I want the time to learn every sound she makes and every scar she carries and every wall she's built and why.
I want Sunday mornings and arguments about nothing and the particular brand of silence that exists between two people who don't need to fill it.
I want things I told myself I'd never have again.
She falls asleep against my chest an hour later.
I carry her to the guest room because I'm not going to let her wake up confused about boundaries, and I stand in the doorway watching her breathe for longer than I should.
Then I close the door and go back to the couch that smells like her and I don't sleep for a long time.
I wake to the smell of coffee and pale gray light filtering through snow covered windows. Zara is in my kitchen wearing my flannel shirt and nothing else, and she's found the good beans I keep in the cabinet above the stove.
"Morning," she says without turning around. "Your coffee maker is better than the one at my rental. I'm considering this a character reference."
I lean against the doorframe and watch her move through my kitchen like she belongs in it.
She opens three wrong cabinets before finding the mugs, and she doesn't apologize for the rummaging, and something about her comfortable determination to figure out my space without asking for help makes me want to tell her everything.
"Zara."
"If you're about to tell me last night was a mistake, I'm going to pour this coffee on your head."
"It wasn't a mistake." I cross the kitchen and stop close enough that I can see the sleep still soft in her eyes. "But I need to tell you something."
She’s suddenly careful now. Guarded. I can see her armor reassembling in real time, plates of protection sliding back into place over the woman who fell asleep trusting me three hours ago.
"Okay," she says slowly.
My phone vibrates on the counter between us. We both look down at it. Flynn's name on the screen and the preview of a text message in clear, unavoidable letters.
Ronan, Callum needs the Whistler survey data. You coming to the compound or should I tell him you're still brooding at your cabin?
“Ronan.”
She reads it before I can turn the phone over. I watch the name register on her face the way I've watched detonations register on a landscape. A slow, terrible dawning followed by the shockwave.
"Ronan." She says it quietly. Testing it. Then she looks at me and every trace of softness, every molecule of the woman who said please against my mouth last night, is gone. "Your name is Ronan."
"Yes."
"Not QuietControl."
"No."
"You're not the man I was supposed to meet last night."
I could explain. I could talk about the blue henley and the split second decision and the way I couldn't walk away from a woman who walked into a sex club alone to meet a stranger.
I could tell her about Jess and the protective instinct and how every minute with her turned the lie into something I couldn't find the exit from.
But she's not asking for explanations. She's asking for the one thing I haven't given her all night.
"No," I say. "I'm not."
The mug in her hand is perfectly steady. Her voice is perfectly even. Her eyes are perfectly, utterly devastated.
"I need to leave."
"The roads are still..."
"I need to leave right now."
She walks past me and the air she displaces smells like my coffee and my flannel and the vanilla underneath that I now know lives in the hollow of her throat.
She disappears into the guest room and comes out four minutes later in her burgundy dress from last night with her shoes in one hand and her phone in the other.
She doesn't look at me when she opens the front door. The cold rushes in and the snow is still falling and she is going to walk into a mountain storm in heels because staying in my cabin for one more second is worse than frostbite.
"Zara. Please let me drive you."
She stops in the doorway. Doesn't turn around.
"The man I was supposed to meet last night," she says, and her voice is controlled in the way that only someone with military training can manage when they're falling apart inside, "might have been a stranger. But at least he was honest about who he was."
The door closes behind her.
I stand in my kitchen with two cups of coffee going cold and the wreckage of the best night of my life scattered across a couch that still smells like her skin, and I think: I did this.
Not the storm. Not the app. Not coincidence or bad luck or the wrong color henley.
I chose this. I chose to lie. And the woman who trusted me enough to say please, to say yes Sir, to fall asleep against the chest of a man she believed was safe, just walked into a blizzard because I proved that she can't trust anyone.
Not even me.
Especially not me.