Chapter 5 #3
I keep moving. I answer questions before they become problems. I fix the timing on dessert service, redirect one drunk uncle away from the bride’s grandmother, make sure the candles are trimmed before the wax starts to run, and send two servers back out with fresh champagne at exactly the moment the room needs something cold and sparkling to help people forget what they just watched.
No one brings it up again. Not to my face.
Camille avoids me unless she has to speak to me. Ethan avoids me too, though I catch him looking twice, like he still can’t decide whether he’s angry, embarrassed, or just irritated that the evening stopped bending around him.
Viktor says nothing more to me.
That almost makes it worse.
I can feel him in the room even when I’m not looking.
A shift in the air. A weight behind me. The sense of being watched by someone who doesn’t waste his attention.
Once, when I’m speaking quietly to Nadine near the service doors, I glance up and find him across the room, one hand around a glass, already looking at me.
He doesn’t look away.
Neither do I.
Not quickly enough.
By the time the rehearsal dinner finally winds down, my face aches from holding it together.
I make it upstairs on instinct. Out of my shoes, out of my coat, out of the dress that feels like it’s been clinging to my nerves all night.
I wash my face, brush my teeth, take my vitamins, sit on the edge of the bed in the dark little room and breathe through the ache in my back and the low, heavy pressure of the baby shifting inside me.
I should be too tired to feel anything except relief. Instead, my whole body still feels lit from the inside.
I switch off the lamp and slide under the blankets. The sheets are cool. The room is quiet. Rain taps softly at the window.
I tell myself not to think about the terrace. About his voice. About the way he looked at me after making Ethan apologize. I tell myself a lot of things.
Sleep comes anyway. And with it, him.
I’m back in that open stone passage, only it’s darker now, quieter, the lantern light low and gold against the walls. The air is cold, but he’s standing close enough that I don’t feel any of it.
“Sienna,” he says.
Just my name.
His hand comes up to my face, large and warm, thumb brushing my cheek with a gentleness that undoes me more quickly than roughness ever could. I lean into it before I can help myself.
Then his mouth is on mine.
Slow at first. Deep. Thorough. Like he’s been thinking about this longer than he wants to admit and now that he has me, he means to take his time. I make a sound into his mouth and feel him smile against me, one hand sliding around my waist, the other settling low on my back to hold me there.
I kiss him harder. I can’t help it.
He tastes like whiskey and heat and something dark that seems to belong only to him. His mouth is hungry, but never rushed. He knows exactly how to kiss a woman until she forgets every good reason she has to stop.
“Tell me no,” he murmurs against my lips.
I shake my head.
He kisses me again, deeper this time, until my knees go weak and I’m clinging to his shoulders just to stay upright. His hands move over me with slow certainty, down my sides, over my hips, then back up to cup my breasts through the thin fabric between us.
I gasp when his thumbs brush over my nipples, already hard, and my whole body goes tight.
“Sensitive,” he says softly.
“Viktor.” My voice sounds wrecked already.
He kisses the corner of my mouth, then my jaw, then the side of my throat. Every touch is deliberate. Every breath he lets out against my skin makes me shiver.
His hand slides down between us. I know what he’s about to do before he does it, and I’m already wet enough in the dream that the thought alone makes my thighs press together.
He notices that too.
Of course he does.
“Open for me,” he says.
The command goes straight through me. I part my legs and his hand slips under the hem of my nightgown, over my bare thigh, higher, higher, until his fingers find me and I cry out.
He groans under his breath when he feels how wet I am. “Christ.”
Then he strokes me once, slow and firm, and I jerk against him.
“Soaked,” he says, like the word pleases him. “And I haven’t even gotten on my knees yet.”
The sound I make is half whimper, half plea. He takes it as invitation.
The next moment I’m on the bed, though I don’t remember getting there, spread open beneath him with my nightgown shoved up and my thighs shaking as he settles between them. He pushes my knees wider with those big hands and looks down at me like he could stay there all night.
Then he lowers his mouth to me, and I arch so hard I nearly leave the mattress.
His tongue slides over me once, slow and broad, and my whole body jolts. I reach for his hair on instinct, fingers sinking into it, and he makes a low sound against me that vibrates straight through my hips.
“Oh God,” I gasp.
He licks me again, deeper, more focused now, and I can barely think. He knows exactly where to put his mouth, exactly how to use it, exactly when to soften and when to press harder until my thighs start trembling around his shoulders.
“Look at you,” he murmurs against me, voice rough. “Already close.”
I am.
Hopelessly.
He kisses the inside of my thigh, then licks me again, and I feel the pressure building so fast it scares me a little. My whole body is open and aching and too sensitive, every nerve turned toward his mouth.
His fingers dig into my thighs, holding me apart while he eats me like he has all the time in the world.
“Please,” I whisper.
He hums, almost amused. “Please what?”
I can’t answer. I can only squirm and moan and clutch at the sheets while he keeps going, licking me in slow, devastating strokes that make my hips lift off the bed.
Then he sucks gently at my clit and I break.
The orgasm hits me hard and deep, tearing a cry from my throat. My back bows. My legs shake helplessly around him. I come with his name in my mouth and his tongue still working me through it, dragging out every last wave until I’m oversensitive and pleading and still he doesn’t stop.
I wake with a gasp.
Dark room. Cold sheets. My heart pounding.
For one disoriented second I don’t know where I am. Then it comes back all at once. The staff room. The estate. The rehearsal dinner. Viktor.
My thighs are pressed together. My skin is damp. The ache between my legs is so real it takes me a second to realize what happened.
I came in my sleep.
Heat rushes into my face even though there’s no one there to see it.
“God,” I whisper into the dark.
My body is slow to come back to itself. I lie there for what feels like forever, staring into the dark, trying to breathe past the heat still clinging to my skin.
The sheets are twisted around my legs. My nightgown is bunched high on one thigh. My pulse won’t settle. Every time I close my eyes, I see his mouth between my legs again, feel the drag of his tongue, hear that low, rough voice asking me what, exactly, I’m begging for.
I let out a shaky breath and push myself upright.
I need water.
Cold water. A shower, maybe. A new body.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed, and that’s when I hear the knock. Three uneven hits against the door.
I push myself up, wincing a little at the stiffness in my back, and reach for my robe. The digital clock on the bedside table reads 1:17.
Nobody should be knocking on my door at one in the morning.
I cross the room and open it a cautious few inches. “Who is it?”
A beat.
Then, from the other side, a man’s voice. “Sienna.”
My stomach drops.
Ethan.
“It’s late,” I say. “Go back to your room.”
He laughs under his breath. “Still bossy.”
I don’t answer. The handle doesn’t move, but I step back anyway.
“Sienna.” His voice drops, not kinder, just lower. “Open the door.”
“No.”
A longer silence this time.
Then, “Come on. You owe me that much.”
I actually stop breathing for a second, but then decide to open it anyway. He’s not going anywhere until I do, and I don’t want to cause a scene. Maybe I can send him away after he tells me whatever he has to.
I regret it immediately as I open the door. My stomach drops.
He’s tieless, jacket gone, shirt half-unbuttoned at the throat, hair slightly mussed. The smell of whiskey hits me almost immediately.
I keep the door half-closed. “What do you want?”
He smiles, but it’s sloppy around the edges. Wrong. “So cold,” he says. “You used to at least pretend to like seeing me.”
I tighten my grip on the door. “Go back to bed, Ethan.”
He looks past me into the room. “This is where they put you?”
I don’t answer.
He lifts one shoulder. “Figures.”
“Leave.”
Something in his face shifts. Not dramatically. Just enough to make fear slide cold down my spine.
He’s drunk.
Really drunk.
“You made a scene tonight,” he says.
My mouth falls open. “I made a scene?”
He leans closer, and I instinctively lean back. “You stood there looking wounded so my father could play hero.”
I feel the floor tilt a little under me.
“You made it weird,” he continues in that accusatory tone.
A laugh almost comes out of me, but it dies somewhere in my throat.
“I made it weird?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No,” I say. “I really don’t.”
He exhales hard, impatient now. “You had to stand there looking like that.”
I stare at the door.
Looking like what? Humiliated? Cornered? Fat?
My mouth goes dry. “I said leave.”
“No,” he says.
“Are you insane?”
“Don’t.” He points at me, unsteady but rough enough to make me flinch. “Don’t take that voice with me. Like you’re innocent. Like you didn’t know exactly what you were doing.”
I can hear my own breathing now.
“I’m closing the door.” I start to push it shut.
His hand shoots out, and the door slams back against the stopper with a crack that makes me jump.
“Ethan—”
He grabs my wrist.
Hard.
Panic flashes through me so quickly it feels electric.
“What are you doing?” I yank against him, but he’s stronger than I remember and drunk enough not to care. “Let go of me.”
“Do you know how I looked tonight?” he says, voice low and ugly. “In front of everyone?”
“I don’t care how you looked.” My heart is pounding so hard I can hear it. “You need to let go of me right now.”
He steps into the room.
I back up automatically, and that’s when the real fear hits. Not just because he’s here. Because I’m suddenly aware of how alone I am. Of the baby. Of how badly this could go before anyone heard me.
“Ethan,” I say, and my voice shakes despite everything I do to stop it. “Don’t.”
He tightens his grip. “You always did this. Acting pathetic so people would feel sorry for you.”
I wrench again, harder this time. “Get out.”
His eyes drop, wild and unfocused for a second, then come back to my face. “Maybe I should’ve ended this properly in Spain.”
The words hit me like ice water.
And then a second voice, cold and deadly calm, cuts through the room behind him.
“Take your hand off her.”
Ethan freezes.
So do I.
I know that voice immediately.
Viktor.