Chapter 21 #3
“Speak,” he said, eyes still closed, palm still pressed to me. “Please. I want to feel it here. Against my hand.”
I covered his hand with mine. Pressed it in closer. Let the voice find its lowest register, the one that lived in the chest more than the throat, the one that ran through bone and muscle and skin.
“I’m here,” I said, and felt it travel through his palm, up his arm, into whatever part of him was still learning to believe this.
“I’m not performing. I’m not behind a screen.
I’m not coming through speakers in the dark of your flat.
I’m here, and I’m speaking to you, Bram, and you don’t have to let go. ”
His breath fractured. His head dropped forward, forehead to my shoulder, the weight of him settling against me like relief. The bone-deep exhale of a man setting down something heavy. Something he’d hauled around so long his body had forgotten how it felt to stand up straight without it.
“I don’t know how to let go,” he whispered. “That’s the problem. Once I hold something…”
“Then hold me.” I turned my head. Found his ear with my lips. “Hold me the way you hold your scripts. The way you grip your pen. Like something you mean to come back to. Like something worth being careful with.”
His arms tightened. Slow. Sure. The hold shifted from holding me up to wrapping me whole, his hands moving over my bare back with the same patience he’d given my front, learning the line of my spine, the wings of my shoulder blades, the warm place where the scent pooled at the base of my neck.
Every vertebra got its moment. Every inch of skin got acknowledged.
Then his mouth moved.
Down from my shoulder. Along the ridge of my collarbone, both sides, each one traced with lips that pressed and stayed before moving on.
The hollow of my throat, where he paused and breathed me in again, the honey-scent filling his lungs in a way I felt through his chest expanding against mine.
Lower. The center of my breastbone, over the warm print his palm had left, his lips on the bone like he could reach the heartbeat through it.
I made a sound. Small and involuntary. Rawer than the musical scraps of the last two days. The noise a body makes when it’s being touched so carefully the care becomes its own kind of intensity.
“Tell me if…” he started, lifting his head.
“Don’t stop.”
He held my gaze. One beat. Two. Reading something in my face with the same attention he gave a room, a script, the temperature of a scene about to tip. Whatever he found there settled something behind his eyes. The last argument over. Permission granted. Not from me. From himself.
His mouth went back to work.
He kissed the curve of my breast the way he’d kissed my mouth, one careful point at a time, building the whole understanding from the edges in.
The outer slope first, where the skin was soft.
Then lower, following the weight of it, his lips moving along the underside with something close to reverence.
When his mouth finally closed over the peak, the sound I made wasn’t small at all.
It was a word.
His name.
“Bram.”
The voice wrapped around the one syllable and turned it into something that shook his whole body against mine. I felt all of it, the groan against my skin, the hands clenching at my back, the hips pressing forward with an urgency his mouth was still refusing to match. The stoicism cracking further.
“Again,” he breathed against me. “Say it again.”
“Bram.” Lower this time. Warmer, the honey thickening, answering his attention, the slow devastating worship of his mouth. “Bram. I’m here. I’m yours.”
He sank. Gradually, no rush about it, his knees finding the carpet, his hands sliding down to my waist, his mouth tracing my ribs like a text he meant to memorize.
Each rib. The space between. The soft ground of my stomach, where he turned his face sideways and just breathed, three long shaking inhales, his cheek against my belly, his eyes closed, his face stripped down to something so open it was like looking at a wound.
A man on his knees. Bram St. James, who ran rooms with a glance, who ran whole campaigns with the certainty of someone who’d mapped every outcome, who had never once needed to be anything but the authority in any space he was in.
Down on the library carpet with his face pressed to my skin and my voice still ringing in his bones.
The stoicism had never been the truth. The truth was this.
This coming-apart. This shaking, meticulous surrender to something he’d refused to name for years.
Every minute of professional distance, every practical, every locked hand and measured tone and careful four feet of space, all of it had been a man drowning in feeling and stacking walls fast enough to keep his head above the water.
There was no water line anymore. Just the deep.
My fingers found his hair. Threaded through the silver and the dark, fine and soft under my hands. I held him there, his face against my belly, his breath warming my skin in pulses, and I let the quiet do what words couldn’t.
He turned his head. Kissed the skin above my hipbone. Then below. His fingers found the waistband of my leggings and stopped there, hovering, his breath coming in measured intervals, his composure held by will alone.
“Tell me what you want,” he said. Asking for direction. A man whose whole instinct was to lead, choosing to follow. “I want to do this right. I want…”
“You’re doing it right.” I tipped his face up with my fingers under his chin. His eyes, when they met mine from below, dark and wet and burning, pulled at me with a sweetness so sharp it landed like pain. “You’ve been doing it right since the honey jar.”
His mouth curved. The same startled almost-smile I’d seen in his penthouse, small and a little disbelieving, the look of a man being told something good his habits kept insisting couldn’t be true.
“The honey jar was two weeks ago,” he said.
“You started doing it right years ago, when you heard my voice through speakers and let yourself feel something. You just didn’t know you were doing it for me,” I said.
He gave me a quiet little moan before his hands drew the leggings down, slow, the way everything was slow with him, each inch of bared skin getting its own moment, its own regard.
When I stood bare in front of him in the amber light of my library, books on every wall, his peppercorn wound through every corner of the room, he didn’t surge forward. Didn’t rush.
He pressed his forehead to my hip and stayed there.
“I’m going to learn how to deserve this,” he said.
“You already do.” My voice was barely a whisper now. The lowest it went, the most private. The sound I’d never record, never perform, never give anyone but the man on his knees with his composure in ruins and his heart finally, completely open.
His mouth found me with the same careful devotion he’d brought to my collarbones, my breasts, my ribs, focused now until the edges of my vision went white and my hands tightened in his hair.
He explored. Studied. Found what made me gasp and came back to it, not to finish, not to push toward an ending, but to understand.
To build the whole map. To know me here the way he knew me everywhere else, completely, refusing to skip a single variable.
My voice broke loose, pure response. His name, over and over.
Fragments that dissolved into the low frequencies only an omega coming undone could make.
Whines and half-words and the sound of me falling apart under the hands of a man treating my pleasure like something to be studied, learned, and thoroughly, devastatingly mastered.
When I came apart, it was with his name on my lips and his mouth on me and his hands bracketing my hips in a gentle, unbreakable grip that wouldn’t let me fall.
The sound I made filled the library, rich and real, no faking it, no muting it.
The voice of an omega calling out because her body had found exactly what it needed and wasn’t ashamed to say so.
He held me through it. Patient. Present. His mouth gentling but not leaving, his hands soaking up the tremors, his body the fixed point I could shake myself apart against and come back together on the other side of.
When the aftershocks eased, he rose off his knees. Slow, a body that had been in one position too long and didn’t care. His hands slid up me as he stood, hips to waist to ribs to shoulders, until he was at full height again and I had to tip my head back to see his face.
His face undid me.
The mask was gone. The stoicism. The careful blankness that had defined every single thing between us. What was left was a man feeling, openly, with the full force of whatever lived inside Bram St. James under all the structure he’d spent a lifetime building to keep it down.
It turned out there was a lot of it.
“I heard you,” he said. His voice was wrecked, barely above a breath. His forehead found mine, close enough that I could see each lash framing his dark eyes, the fine lines at the corners, the warmth that had taken over from the cool entirely. “Every sound. Every one. I heard you.”
I kissed him. Tasted myself on his lips, honey and warmth and the sharp counterpoint of his peppercorn, the two of them threaded together until they didn’t feel like a collision anymore. Like two things that had always been meant to sit side by side.
“Stay,” I said against his mouth.
“I’m staying.”
I drew him toward the sofa. He came, led instead of leading, finding something unfamiliar and necessary in handing over the direction.
When we reached the leather, I turned. Found the buttons of his shirt.
Opened them with less finesse than he’d given mine, my hands still unsteady, my body still ringing with what he’d just done, but he didn’t seem to notice the clumsiness.
He was watching my hands like the sight of them on him was the thing he’d wanted all along.