Chapter 37 #2
Her fingers slide into mine, and I draw her in.
My hand settles at the small of her back, and I feel the breath go out of her in a single quiet stutter before she catches it.
For half a second, her whole body goes still under my palm, like she’s deciding whether to allow this.
Then the music takes her, and she relaxes into me.
She moves with so much grace. Infuriatingly elegant. But her hand on my shoulder isn’t steady. The pulse at the base of her bare throat races faster than the music. She can wrap herself in all the diplomatic composure she wants. I can still feel the truth of her beneath my hands.
The rest of it blurs. Zahra laughing freely with Marcelina.
Chiara with Hyun-seok and the Romanos. Bobby chatting with Camila.
Alexei nursing his whiskey, somewhere far behind his own eyes.
It all dissolves into noise until there’s only the weight of her in my arms and the space between us I can’t stop wanting to erase.
“You know what I find interesting?” Her gaze is fixed on me now.
“That’s rarely good news.”
“You get jealous when another man so much as stands near me. But you’re the one who keeps pushing me away. Who spends most of his time pretending I don’t exist.”
I go still for half a step. Then resume.
“I’m not pushing you away.”
“You did. Yesterday.” She says it gently, and it’s somehow worse than the challenge. “In the corridor. Before breakfast.”
I open my mouth to answer—and her heel snaps.
Her balance gives way beneath her, a sharp tilt sideways, and I have her before she’s finished falling.
My arm clamps around her waist, pulling her flush against my chest. Both her hands land flat over my heart, close enough that I feel her gasp more than I hear it. A few couples around us pause mid-turn.
“My heel,” she breathes.
I glance down. Snapped clean at the base.
Of course it is. It seems the entire universe has conspired against us getting one full sentence out before something breaks.
And I’m done letting it.
I look back up and meet her gaze. Her lips part. Her eyes move slowly over my face, as though she’s reading something she was never meant to find. The terrace narrows to the heat of her hands through my shirt, the want clawing up the back of my throat.
Her fingers curl into the front of my jacket.
My eyes drop to her mouth, then lift back to hers.
One more inch. That’s all it would take.
I clear my throat and step back from the edge of it. Not here. Not in front of two hundred people. Instead, I bend and lift her clean off the floor, into my arms.
A small gasp escapes her. “Aric—”
“Your shoe is broken.”
“And this is necessary?”
“Yes.”
Her arms slide around my neck because there’s nowhere else for them to go, and I carry my wife off the dance floor.
The crowd parts—amused, curious, a few openly delighted.
Camila looks like she’s witnessing the single best moment of her life.
I ignore all of them and take Ayanna toward the far end of the terrace, where the stone arches open onto the sea and the music thins to something distant.
I set her down against the balustrade, and she exhales slowly.
“I’m beginning to think you enjoy a dramatic exit,” she retorts.
“I enjoy keeping you off a broken ankle.”
Her mouth twitches, and she raises her chin, almost daring me, a hint of amusement glinting in those dark irises. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“Which one?”
“What made you lose control yesterday?”
I rest one hand against the railing behind her, closing the space until there’s almost none left.
“I told you,” I murmur, “it wasn’t Chiara.”
“Yes. You said that.” Her eyes search mine, her chest rising and falling heavily. “You never said what it was.”
“It doesn’t matter what it was.” Our breathing falls into the same rhythm. “Because today, sitting beside you through that whole ceremony—”
My free hand settles at her waist while my grip on the railing tightens. Her breathing turns ragged.
“—the only thing I could think about—”
Her brows pull together, her gaze caught between my eyes and my mouth.
“—was you.”
An involuntary gasp escapes her.
“Not Chiara. Not the wedding. Not a single thing in my past.” My voice drops to almost nothing. “Just you, Ayanna.”
Her lips part. For a moment she says nothing. Then she whispers, “That’s a dangerous thing to say.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve spent weeks pretending you don’t want me.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.” My thumb drags across her waist, and a shiver runs visibly through her. I feel it beneath my hand, feel what it costs her to stand still beneath my touch. “I’ve spent weeks trying not to want you.”
Her breath stops completely. “What did you say?”
Everything I’ve kept chained since she walked down that aisle hating the sight of me, I unleash now.
“I tried not to want you.” My eyes drop to her mouth and stay there. “I’m done trying. Now I’ll ruin anyone who tries to take you from me.”
Something gives way behind her eyes—the last wall, the one she’s kept between us longer than any of the others.
The wind moves through the arches. The lanterns sway.
The music plays on somewhere a hundred miles behind us.
None of it reaches me. There’s only her, and the way she’s looking at me like she’s just understood something there’s no turning back from.
I lift my hand to her jaw and tilt her face up to mine. Her mouth is a breath from mine now.
“If I kiss you,” I murmur, “this stops being an arrangement.”
Her eyes darken with the want she’s fought for weeks to keep buried. “Good.”
That’s all the permission I need, and the chain breaks.
I take her mouth like I have weeks to answer for, because I do. There’s nothing careful left in me—the restraint I’ve worn since the altar, the nights I lay rigid on my side of the bed listening to her breathe and refusing to move. All of it goes at once, snapped clean as that heel.
She gasps against my lips, and I swallow the sound. Then her fingers fist in my jacket, hauling me closer instead of holding me off, and that—that—undoes whatever was left.
My hand slides from her jaw into her hair, cradling the back of her skull, angling her face toward mine so I can kiss her deeper.
She gives it back with that same fire—heat and weeks of denial collapsing between us.
My other arm bands around her waist and lifts her flush against me, off the cold stone.
She comes willingly, a soft, broken sound catching in her throat.
She tastes like champagne and something warmer underneath, something that’s only her.
I am a man who has spent his whole life controlling every breath he takes, and I cannot find a single reason to control this. Her hands climb to my jaw, my neck, into my hair, holding me to her like she’s afraid I’ll remember myself and pull back.
I won’t. I’m past it. Past the contract, past the cold, past every lesson my father ever beat into me about what caring costs a man.
Let it cost. I’ll pay it.
I kiss her until the music and the sea and the whole dangerous, gilded world of them goes silent, until there’s nothing in Palermo but her mouth on mine and her heart slamming against my chest—and only when she’s breathless, only when I feel her knees buckle and my arm catches her weight without either of us acknowledging it, do I finally, barely, ease back.
Just far enough to rest my forehead against hers. Both of us breathing as if we’ve run for our lives.
“Still think it’s an arrangement?” My voice is wrecked, but I don’t care.
Her eyes flutter open, dark and dazed and furious and wanting, all at once.
“Shut up, Aric,” she breathes.
And pulls me back down.