Chapter 16
Siobhan
* * *
He kisses me, and fourteen nights of waiting end.
Not gentle, like the wedding. That kiss was a question.
Not frantic, like the desk. That kiss was a fight.
This one is deep and consuming and unhurried, two weeks of restraint dissolving into heat, and the relief of it is so total that my knees almost give.
He catches me. Of course, he catches me.
One arm around my waist, the other hand still cradling my face, and I melt into him the way I've wanted to since the dark kitchen, since the zipper, since the first morning he made me coffee and I knew I was in trouble.
His mouth moves against mine, and I taste him.
Clean. Warm. The ghost of scotch. My hands find his chest. Bare skin, warm skin.
His heart is hammering under my palm, and this time I'm not pressing my hand there because he grabbed my wrist and placed it.
I'm choosing to feel this. The steady rhythm of a man who controls everything is going unsteady because of me.
His fingers find the straps of my nightgown.
He pauses.
Not a hesitation. A question asked with his eyes, not his voice, the way he's asked at every threshold since the wedding night. The nightgown straps, the altar kiss, the open door. Always giving me the exit. Always letting me walk through or walk away.
I nod.
He slides the straps down. One shoulder, then the other. The ivory silk slips off my body and pools at my feet, and the cool air hits my bare skin and I'm naked in front of him, completely, in his bedroom, in the room where no woman has ever stood.
The sound he makes is low and wounded, dragged out of his chest involuntarily. "Christ."
He's looking at me. Not the way men usually look.
Not appraising, not performing hunger for my benefit.
He's looking the way he looks at everything that matters to him: with precision.
With total attention. His eyes trace the freckles across my shoulders that even I forget are there.
The curve of my waist. The place where my hip meets my thigh.
He's building an inventory, the way he's been building one for two weeks.
The sweater, the coffee, the bare feet, the collarbone.
Except now the inventory is complete and his eyes are dark, and his breath has gone ragged and the man who catalogs everything has run out of categories for what he's seeing.
I don't cover myself. Don't shift. I let him look. I chose to be here, I chose the silk, I chose to wear nothing beneath it. The permission to see me is an act of will, not surrender.
Then I reach for him.
My hands find the waistband of his pajama pants and I push them down.
He inhales sharply. A sound I've never heard from this man who controls his breathing the way he controls his empire.
I wrap my hand around him. Hard. Hot. The weight of him in my palm makes heat clench low in my stomach, and the sound he makes when I tighten my grip is broken and desperate and mine.
I'm claiming him. The way he said mine in his office, the way I said it back in the hallway of my own head. This is the physical contract. My hand on him. His breath caught. His forehead dropping to mine because the sensation is too much, and he needs to anchor himself somewhere.
My other hand finds his ribs.
The scar.
The long silver line that runs from below his ribs to his hip. The one I reached for in the dark kitchen two weeks ago and stopped an inch from his skin in my bedroom an hour ago when I said tonight, I'll touch it.
I trace it.
Slowly. From the raised edge just below his ribs, down, following the ridge with my fingertip the way a blind woman reads a language she's just learning.
The skin is different here. Smoother than the rest of him, the tissue knitted back together by time and stubbornness.
He got this at twenty-two. The worst night.
A knife. He got between someone he loved and a blade meant to kill them.
His breath catches. His whole body goes still under my hand, a stillness I recognize from before in him before negotiations and before violence.
The stillness of a man holding everything together by force of will.
My finger reaches the end of the scar at his hip.
I flatten my palm against it. Cover the length of it with my hand.
Neither of us speaks. The touch says everything: I know what made this. I know what you are. I know what your hands do and what's been done to you and I walked thirty feet of hallway and knocked on your door and I am here. With all of it. With all of you.
His eyes are bright. He blinks. Once. He kisses me again. Different now. The first kiss was controlled hunger. This one is unguarded, open-mouthed, a man who's been seen and is terrified and grateful in equal measure. I kiss him back and taste what I've never found in any kiss before: trust.
He lifts me. I wrap my legs around him and feel the strength of him, the heat, the hard press of him against me.
The sensation makes me gasp into his mouth.
He carries me to the bed. His bed. The bed that's only ever held him.
He lays me down. His sheets smell like him.
Warm. Clean. The scent I've been stealing from t-shirts for two weeks, and now I'm surrounded by the real thing, and I'll never sleep anywhere else and we both know it.
He doesn't rush.
His mouth finds my neck. The hollow below my ear, the place where my pulse hammers.
His lips trace the line of my throat and every press lands like a brand.
He's mapping me the way I've been mapping him.
Through details, through inventory, through the specific geography of a body he's been studying from a distance and is finally allowed to touch.
My collarbone. The one his eyes tracked every morning when his stolen t-shirt slipped off my shoulder. His mouth lingers there, and his breath is warm and unsteady, and my fingers thread through his hair and grip.
Lower. His hands cup my breasts, and his thumbs sweep across and the sound I make is involuntary, helpless, a sound I don't recognize from my own throat.
He replaces his thumb with his mouth and my back arches, and my hand tightens in his hair and I hear him make a low, satisfied sound against my skin, the sound of a man who's found another data point, filed it, committed it to permanent memory.
He's cataloging me. With his mouth. With his hands.
With the tactical precision he brings to everything.
The focus I've watched him use in boardrooms and warehouses, applied now to my body, to the specific spot below my left breast that makes me grip his hair, to the sensitive line below my ribs that makes me inhale sharply.
Lower.
His mouth traces my stomach. My hips. His hands grip my thighs and part them and his breath comes first, warm, a ghost of sensation, and then his mouth is on me, and the world narrows to a single point of contact.
My head falls back. My hand finds his hair.
He's reading me. I can feel it in the way he adjusts, in the way his tongue slows when my breath catches and quickens when my hips lift, in the devastating patience of a man who has decided to learn me the way he learns everything: thoroughly, precisely, without rushing.
His hands grip my hips. I move against his mouth because I'm not just receiving this.
I'm taking it, chasing the feeling, my body knowing what it wants before my mind can form the thought.
He finds the rhythm. God. The exact rhythm. His tongue shifts and my vision goes white at the edges and my thighs tighten against his ears and my hand pulls his hair hard enough that a sound escapes him, low and rough, vibrating against me, and the vibration pushes me closer.
I'm climbing. Fast. His hands anchor my hips when I start to shake and his mouth doesn't stop, doesn't slow, doesn't waver with a precision that should be illegal, and I shatter.
I come with his name on my lips. The second time tonight I've said it to the dark. In the hallway it was a whisper, a test, the weight of his name in my mouth. Now it's a breaking point. Now it's a sound ripped from somewhere I didn't know existed.
He presses his mouth to my inner thigh. His breath is ragged. I can feel him trembling. His shoulders. His hands. The tension in his body that tells me his control is a thread stretched to snapping. He would stay here. He would wait for me to tell him the next step. He would give me all night.
I pull him up.
My hands on his shoulders, pulling him over me, pulling him to where I need him. He comes, bracing himself above me, and his eyes find mine and in the dim light they're darker than I've ever seen them. Gold gone amber, gone liquid, the color of something on fire.
"Please. Nico. I need —"
"Tell me."
"I need you inside me."
His hand finds my hip, positioning, and the blunt press of him at my entrance, and he watches my face with an attention so total that it lands like another touch.
He enters slowly.
The fullness. God. The stretch and the heat and the overwhelming rightness of him inside me, filling me, the completion of what started in a dark kitchen with a hair tuck and a scar I didn't touch.
I feel every inch. My breath catches and holds, and my hands grip his shoulders and my eyes don't leave his because I need him to see what this is doing to me.
His jaw is tight. His arms shake with the effort of going slow.
A sound escapes him, low and guttural and wrecked, and his forehead drops to mine and for one moment neither of us moves.
The weight of him above me. The heat of him inside me.
The silence of a room that's held one person for years, holding two for the first time.
Then he moves. Slow. Deep. A stroke that makes me arch off the bed and grip his back. Another. He's everywhere. Inside me. Above me., his breath against my neck, his hands cradling my hips.
"Harder."
He obeys.
The pace shifts. Faster. His hand grips the headboard. I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper. Sounds I've never made. I hear them and they're mine and I don't care. He shifts angles. Searching. Precise even now, even with his breath ragged and his composure dissolving. He finds it.
"There?"
"Yes… there…please…"
He doesn't stop. His hand slides between us, finds me, works me while he moves, and I can't — the dual sensation — I can't think.
My back arches. His rhythm falters for the first time.
His hips stutter and a sound tears from his chest, raw and low, the sound of a man who controls everything losing control.
My hand finds his face. I make him look at me. His eyes. My eyes. Everything between us. The arrangement. The terms. The separate bedrooms. The blood. The knock. The hallway. The thirty feet. The fourteen nights. All of it. Right here.
"Nico —"
"Siobhan —"
I shatter. The orgasm hits like a detonation, radiating outward from where we're joined, my whole body clenching around him.
He follows me over. Two thrusts. Three. And his whole body shudders and my name is the only sound in the room, broken and reverent, and he buries his face in my neck and I hold him through it.
I hold him the way I held him after the warehouse, the way I've been holding him since the first morning he made me coffee. I hold on.
The silence after is different from any silence I've known.
Not the heavy silence of the hallway. Not the careful silence of the kitchen. Not the loaded silence of two people deciding what they mean to each other. This silence is warm. Full. A silence that has nothing left to carry because we just set everything down.
He stays inside me. His forehead against mine.
Our breathing returns in stages. Fast, then slower, then slow.
His heartbeat under my palm finds a rhythm that matches my own and I think about the first time I put my hand on his chest, in his office, when he grabbed my wrist and pressed my palm flat and said you feel it too.
His heart was racing then. It's racing now.
But the register has changed. Then it was challenge. Now it's home.
He pulls back enough to look at me. His eyes are warm and wrecked and soft in a way I've never seen.
"Stay. In my bed. Tonight."
"Okay."
He pulls free gently. I stare at the ceiling of his bedroom and think about the woman who stood in a different room an hour ago folding a t-shirt and putting on silk and I don't know her anymore. I'm someone else now. Someone who knocked. Someone who stayed.
He settles beside me. His arm comes around my waist, and I fit myself against his chest and there's a geometry to it.
The angle of his shoulder, the curve of my back, the way my head finds the hollow below his collarbone.
A geometry that suggests our bodies have been planning this longer than we have.
His hand rests on my hip. My fingers trace the scar on his ribs one more time, idly, learning it in the dark the way I'll learn it in daylight tomorrow.
I fall asleep in the arms of a killer and have never felt safer.