Chapter 9 Too Close
Del was pulling the shot glasses off the back rail one by one, checking each for chips before she racked them for tomorrow, when she heard the front door pull open on a lock she'd turned herself twenty minutes ago.
Her hand closed around a shot glass hard enough that the rim bit her palm.
"Sienna, if that's you coming back for your phone, I already put it in the safe."
Nobody answered.
She set the glass down slow. Reached under the bar for the baseball bat she kept there for exactly this kind of silence, wood cool against her fingers, and rounded the corner already half through the calculation of who she'd call first if this went the wrong way, Nico or the two men Nico used for cleanup, in that order.
Matteo stood in the middle of her empty dance floor with his hands in his pockets.
"You changed the entry code Tuesday," he said. "Wasn't hard to get the new one."
"Are you insane?"
"Possible."
"Whose head am I taking for this?"
"Not your door guy. He didn't tell me anything.
" He didn't move. Didn't step closer, didn't step back, just stood there in the low blue service lights with his jacket off and his sleeves already pushed up to his forearms like he'd been driving with the windows down.
"Your ice supplier. I ran into him at Obsidian's back dock two hours ago and asked.
He gave me the code before I finished the sentence. "
"I'm firing him."
"He has three kids and a wife with a bad kidney. You're not firing him."
"Then I'm firing you."
"From what?"
Del set the bat down on the nearest four-top with more care than the situation strictly required, because her hands had started shaking somewhere between the front door opening and the moment she realized who it was, and she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of a rattled grip.
"From walking into my club after hours. From standing in the middle of my floor at two a.m. like you have a standing invitation.
From whatever you think you're doing right now. "
"I'm not doing anything yet."
He walked toward her. Not fast. Not slow.
The specific pace of a man who'd already made the decision in the car and was just walking out the terms of it now, and Del's back found the edge of the bar without her having decided to retreat there, the polished wood cool through her blouse, her whole body going still the way animals went still when they'd stopped believing running was going to help.
"Matteo."
"Yeah."
"I have not slept with anyone since I opened this club."
That stopped him. Two feet away. Close enough that she could see the smear of something dark on his cuff that wasn't wine and wasn't ink and that she chose, actively, not to ask about tonight.
"Why not?" he said.
"Because I don't fuck people who could cost me my business."
"That's a policy I'm about to make a lot of trouble for."
"I'm aware."
"Then tell me to go."
She looked at him. Really looked, for maybe the first time since he'd sat uninvited in her chair a month ago, without the armor she wore in every business room they'd ever shared.
He looked tired. Not the polished, camera-ready tired of a man who wore exhaustion like cologne, actually tired, dark under the eyes, something ragged around the mouth she'd never seen him let show before.
Whatever four hours he'd spent before driving here had cost him something. She could see it on him.
"You didn't come here to negotiate," she said.
"No."
"You didn't come here to apologize."
"I don't apologize."
"Then why did you come?"
He didn't answer that. He closed the last two feet instead, one hand coming up to the side of her jaw, thumb tracing along the line of it slow, and Del's breath left her in one uneven exhale as his eyes dropped to her mouth and stayed there.
"Say no now," he said, "or I'm going to kiss you."
"Say what you actually mean."
"I mean I've had my hand on a door handle three different times tonight trying not to come here, and every one of those times I got back in the car anyway.
" His voice had dropped, rough, the syllables landing closer to bitten than spoken.
"I mean I don't know what to do with you, Del. I mean say no."
"No isn't what I want to say."
He kissed her.
Not gentle. Not testing. His mouth found hers hard, the kind of kiss that had been waiting three weeks to happen and refused to waste time pretending otherwise, and Del's hands came up and closed in the front of his shirt and pulled instead of pushed, dragging him against her until the bar edge pressed into her lower back and every other part of her pressed against every other part of him.
He tasted like whiskey and something sharper underneath it, adrenaline maybe, or the last hour of whatever he'd been doing before he'd broken into her club, and when she made a sound into his mouth that wasn't a word he made one back that was worse.
His hand slid from her jaw down her throat, over her collarbone, and closed around her hip through the thin fabric of her skirt, and Del bit his lower lip hard enough that he flinched and then pushed into her harder, one thigh pressing between hers, walking her back against the bar with the flat, deliberate pressure of a man who wasn't going to be talked out of anything now.
"Bar top," she said against his mouth.
"Yeah."
His hands hooked under her thighs and lifted, and she went up onto the polished wood in one motion that knocked a rocks glass off the edge and sent it shattering on the tile below.
Neither of them looked. Her legs came around his waist automatic, pulling him in, and he made a sound low in his chest at the contact, forehead dropping to her shoulder for a second like he needed the pause.
"How long?" she said.
"You know how long."
"Say it."
"Since your office." His mouth found the side of her throat, teeth grazing the tendon there, and Del's spine arched off the bar top hard enough that his hand had to catch the small of her back to hold her steady.
"Since you told me your club wasn't for sale and I sat there wondering what else you'd never sell. "
"That's disgusting."
"You asked."
"Keep talking."
He laughed against her skin, dark and short, and then his hand slid up under her skirt and every joke went out of the room.
His fingers hooked the edge of her underwear, dragged it aside instead of taking it off, and Del made a sound she didn't fully recognize as one finger pressed into her slow, then another, curling in a way that made her hips lift off the bar without any input from her brain.
"Fuck." Her head dropped back against the wood. "Matteo."
"There she is."
"Don't get smug."
"Too late."
His thumb found the spot he clearly already knew he was looking for and pressed slow circles into it, unhurried, like he had all night and intended to use it.
Del reached down and grabbed his wrist, not to stop him, to hold on, because the other option was leaving handprints on the polished wood she'd have to explain to Sienna tomorrow.
He didn't answer with words this time. His mouth found the sensitive skin below her ear and his fingers curled again, harder, and the sound that tore out of her wasn't language, just breath and heat and the particular high catch in her throat right before she lost the thread of herself entirely.
She bit down on his shoulder through his shirt to keep the rest of it from carrying, her whole body clenching around his hand in a wave that left her boneless against the bar and gasping for air she couldn't quite catch.
When she opened her eyes he was watching her, every layer of composure she'd ever seen him wear stripped clean off. Just want, naked and unhidden.
She reached for his belt. He covered her hands with his own and finished it himself because her fingers weren't working right yet, and then his mouth was back on hers and her legs pulled him in and he pushed into her in one long stroke that made them both go still and silent for a full second, foreheads pressed together, breathing the same air.
"Christ," he said.
"Move."
"Give me a second."
"Move, Matteo."
He moved slow. One hand braced flat on the bar beside her head, the other gripping her hip, and Del wrapped her legs tighter and rolled her hips to meet him, unhurried at first, both of them finding a rhythm that had nothing to do with the war they'd been fighting for a month and everything to do with three weeks of standing too close in rooms full of other people.
The bar creaked under her back. A shaker cup rolled off somewhere near her elbow. Neither of them looked.
His mouth dragged down her throat, over her collarbone, teeth scraping skin, and the low broken sounds he pulled out of her weren't words either, half breath and half his name mangled into something unrecognizable, her nails dragging down the back of his neck hard enough to leave marks of her own.
He slowed further at the peak of every stroke like he wanted her to feel every inch of it, and she cursed him for it low and rough, and he laughed against her throat, dark and satisfied, and did it again anyway.
"Look at me," he said.
She opened her eyes and found his already there, dark and blown wide, and the second climax built slower than the first, longer, until it broke over her in a shudder that pulled a sound out of her chest with no shape to it at all, just heat and his name and the cold wood against her shoulder blades.
He followed seconds later, jaw tight, a low groan he didn't bother to swallow, and pulled out of her at the last second, spilling against her thigh instead, warm and messy, his hand still braced hard against the bar to keep himself upright while his forehead dropped to her collarbone.
A thin trail of him slid down the inside of her leg in the aftermath, and Del didn't move to wipe it away yet, too wrung out to care, her whole body still humming.
The quiet that followed had weight to it. Not the good kind. The kind that arrives after something you can't take back, when the only sound left is your own breathing and the refrigeration humming behind the bar and the faint reek of spilled whiskey from whatever had shattered on the tile.
He straightened first. Reached for a bar towel without asking, pressed it into her hand instead of using it on her himself, a small mercy that told her he understood exactly how much composure she had left to spend on being touched right now.
"Well," she said, cleaning herself up with more efficiency than the moment probably called for. "That happened."
"It did."
"I'm not apologizing for it."
"Didn't ask you to."
She pushed off the bar and her bare foot came down on something sharp. She swore, sharp and immediate, and he caught her weight before she'd fully registered the pain, lifting her onto the nearest barstool without asking permission first.
"Don't move," he said, already crouching.
"I'm capable of checking my own foot."
"I'm faster." He turned her ankle in his hand, inspecting the sole with the same clinical focus she imagined he brought to a supply contract. "Glass. Not deep. You'll bleed for a minute."
"Bar towel's in the bottom left drawer."
He got it himself, pressed it to the cut, held pressure with a steadiness that had nothing gentle in it and everything competent, and Del sat there watching the top of his head, unable to reconcile the man wrapping her foot with the man who'd had his teeth in her collarbone ten minutes ago.
"This doesn't change the war," she said.
"I know."
"I still own this club."
"I know."
"You still want it."
"I want it less than I want other things right now." He didn't look up from her foot. "I'm still making the offer again. You're still saying no. That part isn't over."
"Good."
He finished the wrap, sat back on his heels, and looked up at her from the floor with an expression she didn't try to name.
"You should go," she said.
"I should."
He stood. Picked up his jacket from where it had ended up half under a barstool. Straightened his cuffs. Looked at her one more time from the middle of the dance floor before he crossed to the door, and paused there with his hand on the handle.
"Del."
"Yeah."
"Lock the door behind me this time."
"I locked it the first time."
"Better locks."
He left. The door clicked shut, and she sat on the barstool in the empty club with a bar towel pressed to her foot and the taste of him still on her mouth, and did not move for a long time.
Eventually she got up, cleaned the broken glass, and racked the shot glasses she'd been checking when he'd walked in, one by one, because she was a woman who finished what she started and because standing still meant thinking about what she'd just let happen, and she wasn't ready for that yet.
The bruise on her hip had come up dark by the time she got upstairs. She pressed her thumb into the shape of his fingers in the bathroom mirror, once, to see if it hurt. It did. She kept pressing anyway.
She showered, slept, and dreamed of nothing.
In the morning she'd have to figure out what she'd done.
Not tonight.