4. Cillian
CILLIAN
I should have left the dining room.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to, in the aftermath.
The clear and obvious decision was to stand up from that table, tell her we were done for the night, and walk away.
I’ve walked away from worse. I’ve walked away from men twice her size who were considerably more threatening than a furious twenty-six-year-old in a silk dress, and I did it without breaking a sweat.
Instead I stayed. Then I mentioned her mother. Then I twisted the knife by calling her a well-trained girl.
Then she threw her wine glass at my head, which, for the record, I saw coming and I probably deserved it. What I didn’t see coming was everything that happened after.
The wine glass hits the wall and shatters and the sound of it is still ringing in the air when Valentina looks at me from across the table.
Her chest is heaving.
Her dark hair has come partially loose from wherever she’d pinned it, falling across her shoulder in a wave, and her face—god, her face. I’ve seen the cold anger she uses in public, but that’s not what this is.
This is something rawer.
The careful facade completely gone, nothing left but the fire underneath it, and she is—
She is magnificent.
That’s the only word my brain unhelpfully produces.
“You fucking bastard,” she says, and her voice is shaking with anger. “You smug, cold, miserable—”
“You missed,” I remark, nodding at the broken glass on the floor.
Wrong thing to say.
She grabs a decorative bowl from the sideboard, and she hurls it at the wall behind me with the full force of her body behind it. It detonates against the plaster with a sound like a gunshot and I don’t flinch.
I’ve been in rooms with actual gunshots and the reflex has been trained out of me, but I do reassess her little temper tantrum.
“Feel better?” I ask dryly.
“No,” she snaps as she rounds the table before thrusting her finger at me, aiming it at my chest.
She’s close enough that I can see how dark her eyes have become.
They’re almost black, the brown gone so dark it’s disappeared.
She is close enough that I can smell that damned intoxicating perfume of hers.
“You—you don’t get to talk about my mother,” she snarls, her cheeks pink with her anger.
“You don’t get to sit there in my dining room eating my food and drinking wine I poured for you and tell me I don’t have a self. You don’t know me—”
“I know enough—” I interrupt, folding my arms over my chest.
“You know nothing,” she barks, and her voice breaks slightly on the nothing.
“You know what you decided I was at Leo’s wedding before I said ten words to you.
You decided I was soft and decorative and easily dismissed and you’ve been treating me like a mild inconvenience ever since, and the fact that it isn’t working is driving you absolutely insane—”
“Driving me insane?” I repeat in disbelief. Is that what she seriously thinks? “You want to talk about insane? You want to talk about what it’s been like living with someone who schedules her entire day around avoiding me—”
Valentina’s eyes flare. “Because you’re impossible to be around—”
“Because you’re scared,” I shoot back, and I lean forward slightly.
Every instinct is telling me to stop and I should stop, but I don’t.
“If you actually had to be in the same room as me for five consecutive minutes without a fight to hide behind, you’d have to deal with the fact that I’m not what you decided I was either, and that is genuinely scary for someone who needs to be right more than they need to breathe—”
“Scared?” she laughs nearly hysterically as she shakes her head.
“I am not scared of you. I am bored by you. I am bored by the constant posturing, the big silences meant to be intimidating. I’m bored by the…
” She waves her hand at me with a gesture that encompasses my entire person and finds it distasteful “All of this. The big dangerous Brennan enforcer act. It’s so tedious, Cillian.
It was tedious at Leo’s wedding and it’s tedious now and the only reason you’re still doing it is because you have nothing else—”
“I’m tedious,” I say flatly.
Her eyes gleam. “Profoundly,” she draws out the word.
I scoff. “You’ve been timing your coffee around me for two weeks,” I say, stepping closer now, and I watch her register the step. There’s a slight adjustment of her weight and her chin goes up, “because I’m so tedious.”
Valentina rolls her eyes. “I do it to preserve my sanity, not because you’re threatening—”
“You do it,” I say, my voice dropping, “because every time we’re in the same room something happens that neither of us knows what to do with, and avoidance is easier than dealing with it.”
Dead silence. Her eyes widen, the victorious look gone.
She looks at me. I look at her. The broken bowl is still scattered across the floor behind me by the wine glass. We’re standing close enough that I can see the pulse in her throat, moving faster than her expression is letting on.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says evenly and it’s completely unconvincing.
“Yeah,” I respond grimly. “You do.”
“Get out of my sight,” she hisses but there’s almost a waver to her voice now that I haven’t heard before. “I cannot stand to look at you for one more second. Get the fuck out. Get out of this room right now—”
I move around the table toward her, fast enough that she doesn’t have time to do anything about it.
She backs up instinctively—one step, then two—until her back meets the wall and I’m in front of her.
The space between us is nothing, barely the width of a breath, and I can see every detail of her face from here.
The flush across her cheekbones.
The dark hair wild around her shoulders.
That full mouth pressed into a furious line, the lower lip slightly swollen from where she’s been biting it.
I’ve noticed it’s a tell.
She bites her lip when she’s holding back something she hasn’t decided whether to say yet.
“Are you done?” I ask quietly.
She licks her lips and my eyes focus on her tongue. “Done with that?” she asks, her chest heaving.
“Running your mouth. Are you finished?”
“Go to hell,” she says, her voice shaking slightly. Her hands come up to my chest to shove me back. It’s harder than I expect, enough that I actually take a step back. “I hope you die there, I hope—”
I kiss her.
It’s not a romantic kiss from those bullshit novels Emma devours.
No, this is a hard kiss.
My hand comes up to her jaw, my thumb finds her chin and tilts her head back, and my mouth covers hers with a force that’s half anger and half, well, I don’t know.
She tastes like the wine she threw at me and something underneath it that’s just her.
For one moment she goes absolutely still.
Like she didn’t know this was coming even though we’ve both been walking toward it since the night she drew a line down the center of a bed and dared me to cross it.
Then she kisses me back.
There’s nothing soft and romantic about it. Both her hands come up and she fists them in my shirt hard enough that I hear the fabric strain.
She kisses me like she wants to win something, like this is the continuation of the argument by different means.
Her nails find my shoulders through the fabric and dig in, and I make a sound low in my throat and pull her closer.
I break the kiss because I need to see her face.
She’s breathing hard, and her lips are parted.
The flush across her cheekbones is so deep it reaches the base of her throat, and she looks at me with those wide near-black eyes that are stunned and livid all at once.
Her expression is cycling through things too fast for me to read any of them.
Her lipstick is ruined and she stares at me in shock.
Then, she slaps me.
Fuck, she slaps hard.
It’s an open palm slap across my cheek, and the sound reverberates around the room.
I feel the sting bloom across my face but I don’t move.
I just look at her.
Her hand is still suspended in the air between us, the imprint of it still registering in my nerve endings, and her chest is heaving.
I look at her and she looks at me and neither of us says a single word.
Then she grabs my shirt and kisses me again.
It’s harder than the first time, if that’s even possible.
Both her hands are pulling me toward her, her fingers twisted in the fabric, and this kiss isn’t stunned or hesitant.
She’s making a decision, a fully conscious, fully furious decision, and I feel it in the insistence of her mouth against mine, in the small desperate noise she makes when my hands find her waist and pull her flush against me.
I walk her backward without breaking the kiss, her back hitting the table.
Her legs shift and her hips press into mine.
I exhale something that sounds embarrassingly close to her name against her mouth.
“Don’t,” she says, her lips still brushing mine, “say anything.”
I chuckle. “Wasn’t planning to,” I tell her.
She pulls back just far enough to look at me, her fingers still in my shirt, her dark eyes moving across my face like she’s checking for something.
I don’t know what she finds, but she makes a decision about it then her hands move from my shirt to the buttons of it.
I lift her onto the dining table.
Something crashes behind us and I assume it’s the dinner she “made”, but clearly neither of us cares.
She wraps her legs around me and pulls me into the circle of her body.
She is simultaneously kissing me and calling me something vicious in Italian that I don’t understand, but I am intelligent enough to guess what it is.
I find the curve of her neck with my mouth and she makes a sound that I feel more than hear, her head tipping back, her fingers curling into my hair.
“Asshole,” she breathes, but there’s none of her normal venom behind the words.
I find the curve of her neck with my mouth and she tips her head back to expose her long olive-skinned throat, the pearl earrings she’s still wearing catching the light.
Her fingers tighten in my hair and she says something else but I’m not listening to the words anymore.