Chapter Twenty-Four
Lauren
I knock on the office door.
“Come in.”
He’s still at the desk, shirt half-unbuttoned, sleeves pushed up, the blue light of the monitor cutting across his jaw. He looks up when I push the door open—takes me in with one quiet sweep—and the corner of his mouth moves slightly.
That’s all it takes.
Four years of grief and eighteen days of proximity and I am apparently no more immune to him than I ever was.
I cross the room and lean against the edge of the desk. “You have a minute?”
“For you.” He leans back in the chair. “I have five.”
The low register of it does not help me. I have things to say—things that need to be said before Claire comes back tomorrow.
“I wanted to talk to you about something.”
He stands. Not quickly, not with urgency. He simply unfolds from the chair and closes the distance between us in two unhurried steps, and then his hand is at my jaw, tilting my face up.
Every thought I arrived with exits the room.
“Niko—”
“Talk,” he says quietly, eyes on mine. “I’m listening.”
The problem is that the way he’s looking at me as he says it does something in my panties that has nothing to do with Claire, or Ronan Aslanov, or the danger we’re in. Whatever I came here to tell him becomes briefly inaccessible.
Shit.
Why does he have to be so damn hot?
“I—” I reach for the thread. “I wanted to—”
His thumb traces along my cheekbone.
Holy hell.
I close my hand around his wrist and stop pretending. I suppose Claire can wait another thirty minutes. She won’t be back till tomorrow anyway.
He doesn’t say anything else. Just looks at me the way he occasionally lets himself look at me—like the careful distance he keeps the rest of the time has a cost, and right now he’s done paying it.
His hands find my waist and I stop thinking in full sentences.
The kiss is slow at first, deliberate, his mouth warm against mine—and then something shifts, the way it always does with him, from patience into want, and I stop cataloguing the difference and just follow it. He tastes of coffee and something warmer underneath.
He picks me up and carries me to the couch in the corner, and the urgency between us does the rest—his hands sure and careful, mine less so, both of us stripping away the distance we’ve been maintaining today.
When his hands move over me there’s nothing performative about it.
No theatre. Just the particular attention of someone who has wanted this and waited and is no longer doing either.
I have missed this. Not the heat of it—though God, yes, that too—but the specific quality of being known.
The way he reads my body without asking.
The way four years collapsed the moment he touched me and somehow it felt like no time at all, like my body had simply been waiting with more patience than I’d given it credit for.
His mouth finds my throat and I exhale against his hair and outside the window the city carries on, indifferent and distant, and in here there is nothing but this—his hands, his weight, the way he says my name like it means something.
It always meant something.
He keeps the pace slow, deliberate, like he has something to prove that has nothing to do with urgency.
I press back against him and feel him exhale—that small, undone sound he makes when his control slips—and something in me responds to that more than anything else.
Not the pleasure, though that’s considerable.
The fact that I do this to him. That after everything, after four years and all the distance and all the grief, it’s still this between us.
I feel him everywhere. Not just where we’re joined but outward from it—warmth spreading to my chest, my fingertips, the backs of my knees. My body has been waiting a long time to remember this, and it’s remembering now with considerable enthusiasm.
“Nikolai—”
“Lapochka moya. I have you.” Low, certain, right against my ear.
He does. He always has, and that’s the thing I’ve been most afraid to look at directly.
When the pleasure crests it takes everything with it—thought, breath, the careful architecture of self-possession I’ve been maintaining for days. I come apart quietly, face pressed into the cushion, his hands steady on my hips through all of it.
He follows a moment later, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, a sound leaving him that he’d never make anywhere else.
We stay tangled together afterward, his heartbeat gradually finding its way back to something ordinary beneath my cheek. The office is dark and quiet. Outside, the city hums its low indifferent note.
He tucks the hair back from my face, his touch unhurried now, and holds me against his chest.
“I love you.” His voice is low, rough at the edges. “I have for a long time.”
I close my eyes.
I’ve known it. Some part of me has known it and refused to let it land because landing it made it real, and real things can be taken away.
But it’s already real. It’s been real since before Hannah was born, since before he disappeared, since before I spent four years learning to live around the shape of him.
I turn my face into his chest.
“I love you too,” I say. “I’ve been terrible at it. But I do.”
His arms tighten around me.
Neither of us says anything after that.
The quiet holds, warm and complete.