12. Scarlett #2
Reid follows me over a breath later, a low, animal growl ripping from his throat as he thrusts one last time, burying himself as deep as possible, pinning me to the floor.
I feel the hot, thick jets of his cum pumping into me, filling me up, and he holds me down against him like he’s afraid I’ll dissolve.
For a long moment neither of us moves.
We stay locked together, our hearts hammering against each other’s ribs. My forehead drops to his, and we breathe each other’s air, and he’s smiling, I can feel it.
“What?” I say, my voice raspy.
“Nothing.” His hands draw lazy lines down my back, his touch tender now, lingering. “Just recalibrating. I had a whole theory about how tonight would go.”
“And?”
“And you threw it out the window.” He laughs, low and wrecked.
I’m laughing too, surprising myself with it, the tension of the last few years finally snapping.
Reid takes advantage of the moment to sit up with me still wrapped around him, one arm banded under my thighs, and then he’s standing, lifting me clean off the floor as if I weigh nothing.
“What are you doing?”
“Being romantic. Don’t ruin it.”
“You’re going to throw your back out.”
“I am a grown man in excellent shape, thank you, and if you keep talking I’m going to drop you on the very expensive rug on purpose.”
He carries me down the hall, and I’m laughing into his neck, and it occurs to me somewhere between the living room and the bedroom that I haven’t laughed like this, loose and unguarded and real, in longer than I can remember.
He sets me down on the bed like I’m made of glass after all, which ruins his whole tough-guy act, and I tell him so, and he kisses me to shut me up.
We end up tangled in his sheets with the lights off and the city glowing through the glass, and I lie with my head on his chest while he draws slow circles on my bare shoulder, and the quiet is so easy it almost frightens me.
“You’ve gone thinky,” he says. “I can hear it.”
“I have another plan.” I trace a line down the center of his chest. “For Vincent. I’ve been building it in my head since the car.”
His hand stills on my shoulder. “Tell me.”
“Not all of it. Not tonight.” I press a kiss to the warm skin over his heart.
“But I know how this ends now. He thinks he’s won, which means he’s stopped being careful, and a man who’s stopped being careful will reach for anything that makes him feel powerful again.
Especially an audience. Especially me, on my knees, telling him he was right about everything. ”
“You’re going to give him that.”
“I’m going to give him a stage.” I feel the shape of it settle, clean and certain.
“And his own ego is going to do the rest. The thing he’s most proud of, the way he’s always been the smartest man in the room, that’s the exact thing that’s going to take him apart.
I just have to put him somewhere he can’t resist performing, and let him. ”
Reid is quiet, and I can feel him fighting himself, the part of him that wants to lock me in a tower and the part that knows better.
“You’re not going to tell me to stay out of it,” I say. It isn’t a question.
“No.” His hand starts moving again, combing slow through my hair. “I learned my lesson in the parking lot. You don’t need me to fight your battles. You need me to hand you your sword and get out of your way.”
He presses his lips to the top of my head. “But I’m going to be close. That’s not negotiable. You can run the whole thing your way, and I’ll stand wherever you tell me to stand, but I will be in the building.”
“I can live with that.”
“Good. Because it’s happening regardless.” There’s a smile in it. “Some things I don’t bend on. You’re one of them.”
I let myself lie there in the dark and feel it, the strange new shape of being protected without being managed, supported without being owned. It’s so foreign I keep waiting for the catch, the moment the price reveals itself.
It doesn’t come. It just keeps not coming, and slowly, I’m starting to believe it might never.
I lift my head and look at him, at the line of his profile in the city light, and I make a decision that feels bigger than the plan, bigger than Vincent, bigger than any room I’ve ever walked into.
“I spent my whole life living for other people,” I say.
“My father. The family name. The debt I never owed. Vincent and his empire with my work inside it. I made myself small enough to fit whatever shape they needed, and I called it love, because I didn’t know there was another kind.”
I push up so I’m looking down at him, and I don’t let myself flinch, don’t let myself hide, don’t do a single one of the thousand small things I’ve trained myself to do to take up less space.
“I’m done. I’m going to live for myself now. I’m going to take up every inch of room I was told I couldn’t have.”
“Good,” he says softly.
“And that includes you.”
My heart is slamming, but my voice doesn’t shake.
“I’m not going to keep what I feel for you locked in a box because I’m scared of what it costs. I’ve been doing the math on this since the alley, deciding it’s too dangerous, too much, too soon. I’m done with the math.”
I hold his gaze, steady, unguarded, the wall I’ve kept up my whole life just gone. “I’m not all the way there yet. I can’t say the thing I think I’m going to say to you someday. But I’m not hiding from it anymore. You should know that. Whatever this is, I’m in it. With my eyes open.”
Reid looks up at me like I’ve handed him the one thing he never let himself ask for, and he reaches up and tucks my hair back, his thumb tracing my cheekbone, and he doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t have to.
This time, I’m not bracing for the bill.
I’m just here. Choosing it, choosing him.
Choosing me.
And in the morning, I’m going to start building the room where Vincent Kensington learns exactly who he spent ten years underestimating.