Chapter Sixteen Charlotte #2
"I'll come find you when it's done," he says.
"Third floor. Emilio's taking me."
"Okay."
I lean up. Kiss him. Not hard, not desperate, not the collision of the farmhouse or the claiming of the cabin. Soft. Slow. The kind of kiss that says I'm here and I'll be here when you're done and doesn't need anything else.
He kisses me back. His hand finds my jaw. Holds me there for three extra seconds. Then let’s go.
I turn and walk back to Emilio, who is studying the ceiling with the exaggerated fascination of a man pretending he didn't just watch his brother kiss a woman outside an interrogation room.
"Not a word," I say.
"Wouldn't dream of it."
"Your face says otherwise."
"My face is a liar. Family trait."
He leads me upstairs. Third floor. A clean room with a bed and a bathroom and a lock on the door. He leaves me with a bottle of water, two beers, and a look that says more than his words.
"He's different with you," Emilio says from the doorway. "You know that, right?"
"Different how?"
"Human." He shrugs. "My brother's been a machine for twenty years. You make him a person. Don't break that."
He closes the door.
I shower.
Not because I'm dirty. Because I need the heat and the noise and the pressure of water on my skull to process the last three hours.
The bathroom is better than the motel. Real tiles.
Real pressure. Hot water that stays hot.
I stand under the spray and let it beat against my shoulders, and I close my eyes and I don't count anything.
I don't count the tiles. I don't count my breaths. I don't count the exits or the seconds or the vertebrae.
I just stand there and feel the water and think about the look on Salvatore's face when he broke. The micro-expression. The tightening around his eyes. The moment the loyal soldier dissolved, and the real man surfaced, cold and calculating and trapped.
I did that. I stood in a room and said his name and the whole thing collapsed.
The power of that settles into me like warmth.
Not pride, exactly. Something deeper. The bone-level knowledge that I am not the woman who ran from Daniel Voss on a Greyhound bus.
I'm not the woman who hid in apartments and counted things and told herself that survival was enough.
I'm the woman who stood at a window and identified a traitor and kissed a man outside an interrogation room and walked away with her spine straight.
Emma Wren couldn't have done this. Charlotte Richardson did.
Maybe they both did. Maybe that's the point.
I hear the bathroom door open. The cool air hits my wet skin. I don't flinch. I know the sound of his footsteps.
"You're early," I say through the steam.
"It'll take a while. Leone's starting the first round. I have twenty minutes before I go back."
I open the glass door. He's standing in the bathroom doorway, sleeves still rolled, his hair damp from the corridor's humidity. His eyes move over me. Naked, wet, steam curling around my body. He doesn't hide the look. Doesn't pretend he's here for any reason other than the one written on his face.
"Twenty minutes," I say.
"Could be less."
"Then don't waste them."
He strips. Fast. Efficient. The shirt over his head, jeans kicked to the floor, boxers after. He steps into the shower and the space shrinks to nothing, just water and steam and his body and mine.
I pull him under the spray. The water hits his shoulders and runs down his chest in rivulets, and his skin is hot under my hands when I press my palms flat against his stomach. He backs me against the tile. Cool against my spine, his heat against my front, and the contrast makes me gasp.
His mouth finds my neck. Open, wet, his tongue tracing the line from my jaw to my collarbone. I tip my head back against the tile and let him taste me. His teeth graze my pulse point and I moan, the sound bouncing off the tile walls, amplified by the small space.
"I watched you through the glass," I say. My voice is rough. The steam and the heat and his mouth on my skin are turning my brain to static. "I watched you sit next to him and take him apart with words, and I wanted you. Right there. In that room."
He growls against my throat. Low. The vibration travels through my skin and settles between my legs.
"You can't say things like that."
"I'll say whatever I want. You like it."
His hands slide down my body. Over my breasts, thumbs dragging across my nipples, and I arch into the touch.
Down my ribs. Over my hips. He grips my waist and lifts me like I weigh nothing, and I wrap my legs around him and my back is flat against the wet tile and he's between my thighs and the head of his cock presses against me, hard and thick and slick from the water.
"No condom," I say.
He stops. His eyes find mine through the steam. Searching. Making sure.
"I've got an IUD," I say. "And I'm clean. I haven't been with anyone in three years."
"I'm clean too. Tested six months ago." His voice is strained.
Tight. He's holding himself at my entrance and the effort of not pushing forward is visible in every muscle of his arms, his shoulders, the cords standing out in his neck. "Charlotte. Are you sure? I’m not worried about disease so much as filling you with my baby before you’re ready. "
"I'm sure. Plus, the IUD is pretty foolproof. I want to feel you. Just you. Nothing between us."
He pushes into me.
The sound I make isn't language. It's the raw, animal noise of a woman feeling a man inside her without a barrier for the first time, and the difference is immediate and devastating.
Every ridge, every inch, the heat of him, the pulse of him.
He fills me and I feel it everywhere. In my thighs, in my belly, in my chest, in the backs of my eyes.
"Fuck." His forehead drops against my shoulder. His arms are shaking where they hold me against the wall. "You feel. Fuck. Principessa, you are deadly."
"Move."
He pulls back and thrusts in and my spine slides against the wet tile and my nails dig into his shoulders.
The angle is deep. Deeper than the bed, deeper than the cabin.
Gravity and the wall and his strength holding me open while he drives into me with a rhythm that starts slow and doesn't stay slow.
The water pours over us. His hair is plastered to his forehead. My hair is stuck to my back and the tile. Steam fills the bathroom until I can barely see his face, just the shape of him, the dark eyes, the set of his jaw, the mouth that finds mine and kisses me while he fucks me against the wall.
"Harder," I say into his mouth. "I won't break."
He gives me harder. His hips snap up into me and the force of each thrust pushes a sound out of me that's half moan, half cry. I grip his hair with one hand, his shoulder with the other, holding on while he takes me apart in a shower that smells like soap and steam and sex.
"You're so tight." His voice against my ear, rough and broken. "So fucking wet. I can feel everything."
"Good. I want you to feel everything."
He shifts the angle. Hitches my hips higher, and the new position drags the head of his cock against my front wall on every stroke and my vision whites out.
I cry his name. Not Charlotte's voice. Not the controlled, measured, ice-queen voice.
Something rawer. Something from before the armor and the name and the three years of silence.
"There," I gasp. "Don't stop. Don't you dare fucking stop."
He doesn't stop. He drives into me with a relentlessness that borders on brutal and lands on perfect, his mouth on my neck, his hands gripping my thighs hard enough that I'll have bruises shaped like his fingers tomorrow and I want them.
I want every mark. I want proof that this man held me against a wall and fucked me like the world was ending and we had twenty minutes to make it count.
His thumb finds my clit. In the tight space between our bodies, his hand working between us, circling me with a pressure that's precise and devastating.
The dual sensation of his cock inside me and his thumb on my clit sends me spiraling, the orgasm building fast and hard, a coiled heat in my gut that tightens with every thrust.
"I'm close," I manage. "Claudio. I'm going to—"
"Come," he says. "Come on my cock. Take me apart, principessa."
I shatter. The orgasm tears through me and my whole body seizes around him, my legs locking behind his back, my nails raking his shoulders, my voice echoing off the tile in a sound that is not quiet and is not Charlotte and is not anything I'd ever let anyone hear except him.
I pulse around him, tight and rhythmic, and I feel every contraction in a way I've never felt before because there's nothing between us, just skin and heat and the raw wet friction of two bodies trying to merge.
He follows. Three more thrusts, deep and hard, and then he buries himself inside me and groans against my neck.
I feel him come. Actually feel it, the pulse and the heat and the flood of warmth inside me that's new and shocking and impossibly intimate.
He throbs against my walls, and I clench around him and we ride it out together, pressed against the tile with the water pouring down and the steam swallowing us whole.
He holds me there. Against the wall. Inside me. His forehead on my shoulder. His breathing ragged and hot against my wet skin. I hold him back. My arms around his neck, my face in his hair, my heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my fingertips.
"I love you," I say.
The words come out before I've decided to say them. Quiet. Almost lost under the sound of the water. But he hears them. I know he hears them because his whole body goes still. Not tense. Still. The stillness of a man who has just heard a sound he wasn't sure existed.
He lifts his head. Looks at me. Water running down his face.
Those pale eyes, stripped of every defense, every wall, every layer of distance he's spent twenty years building.
Just him. Just a man holding a woman in a shower, inside her, surrounded by steam and silence and the echo of three words he didn't expect.
"Say it again," he says.
"I love you."
He kisses me. A burning kiss. Deeper than sex. The kind that makes a promise neither of us has put into words yet but both of us understand.
"I love you," he says against my mouth. "I didn't know I could. But I do."
He lowers me to the floor. My legs are shaking. He keeps his arm around my waist while the water runs over us, washing away the sweat and the sex and the fear of the last nine days. Not the memory. The fear. The memory stays. The memory is ours.
He reaches for the soap. Washes me. Slowly.
His hands moving over my skin with the careful attention he gives to everything he values, every inch treated like evidence he's cataloguing, except this isn't tactical.
This is worship. This is a man who disassembles weapons in the dark using those same hands to trace the line of my hip, the curve of my waist, the space between my shoulder blades where my spine lives.
I wash him back. His scars. His tattoo. The bruise on his jaw from my fist. The scratches on his shoulders from my nails, pink and raised, already fading.
We stand under the water until it goes cold.
He wraps me in a towel. Dresses. Kisses my forehead.
"I have to go back down," he says.
"I know."
"It could be hours."
"I'll be here."
He pauses at the door. Turns. Looks at me standing in the bathroom in a towel with wet hair and swollen lips and his marks on my thighs.
"Emma," he says. Soft. The first time he's used it.
Everything in me shatters. But in a good way.
"Charlotte," I correct. But I'm smiling. I kinda like the way it sounds falling from his lips. "Emma's in the car, remember?"
"She's not in the car. She's standing right in front of me.
" He holds my gaze. "They're both here. They're both you. And I love both of them. I know I said I wouldn’t use your name until you asked, but I wanted to see how it tastes. It’s heaven and hell and every one of my sins being erased and forgiven. "
He leaves. The door closes.
I sit on the bed in my towel and press my fingers to the back of my neck.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Still here. Both of me.
And loved.