Chapter 33 #2
When he rose over her, she reached for him — velvet-soft and fever-hot against her palm despite the heat of him, the deep blue-black of his skin, the ridges she remembered from before that sent her breath stuttering.
She guided him to her and watched his face as he pressed forward — slow, deliberate, letting her feel every ridge catch and release as he filled her completely.
His jaw was locked. His eyes were open and fixed on hers, the ice-blue gone dark and present and entirely human in the least human face she'd ever loved.
"You are—" His voice broke. He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
She pulled him down and found his mouth with hers and answered with her body instead.
They moved together on the paint-streaked floor, and she memorized every detail with the greed of an artist who knew she was living inside a masterpiece: the weight of him above her, the impossible gentleness of hands that could crack stone, the places where beast-skin met man-skin beneath her palms and pulsed warm.
The sound of her name in his mouth, repeated between ragged breaths like a word he'd just learned and couldn't stop saying.
The growl sustained low beneath everything, vibrating through every point of contact until she couldn't separate the sensation from the sound from the heat from the specific devastating tenderness of a man who had spent seven years alone and was finally, catastrophically, not.
She felt him losing control by degrees — the rhythm deepening, his breath fracturing against her neck, the claws she felt carefully retracted against her skin as he gripped the drop cloth on either side of her.
She pulled him closer instead of away. Locked her legs around him and moved with him and felt the third orgasm build from somewhere deeper than the others — structural, inevitable, the kind that started in the bones and worked outward.
"Octavia." Her name shattered in his mouth.
She took him with her.
His arms locked around her. Every muscle in his body went rigid.
The sound that tore from his chest was nothing Lord Skarreth had ever made — nothing the aristocrat or the operative or the monster had ever allowed — raw and broken open, her name fragmenting inside it, the beast and the man both finally saying the same thing at the same time.
She held him through it. Felt him come apart in her hands the way paint dissolves in turpentine: completely, irreversibly, down to what was real underneath.
When the world went white and silent and infinite, she kept her eyes open. She watched his face. She saw everything.
The studio floor was freezing, but neither of them moved.
The two portraits watched from their easels — the monster on one side, the man on the other, both accurate, both incomplete.
Between them, the third portrait leaned against the far wall where it had landed during the chaos, and in the studio light, the beast and the man looked out from the same face with ice-blue eyes that held everything.
Octavia lay across his chest, her cheek pressed to the warm expanse of him, paint drying in her locs and smeared across her shoulder and streaked along her ribs where she'd rolled across a puddle of cadmium yellow during a moment she was absolutely not going to regret.
His arm curved around her back, his hand spanning the distance from her shoulder blade to her waist with room to spare.
His other hand rested on the crown of her head, fingers tangled in her hair, not moving. Just holding.
"I'm going to need a bigger studio."
A real laugh escaped him — warm and rough and startled, as if his body had remembered how to make it without consulting his brain first. It rumbled through his chest and shook her where she lay, and the warmth of it settled into her bones.
She was going to spend the rest of her life chasing that sound.
"A bigger studio," he repeated. "The east wing is rubble. We'll have to rebuild."
"Good. I want better light. Southern exposure for the afternoon work. And I want a wall long enough for large-scale pieces. And I'm not painting on the floor again."
"You seem to be painting on the floor right now."
She lifted her head. Cadmium yellow striped her forearm. Cobalt blue smudged his chest where she'd been lying. They looked like a collaboration — two artists who'd rolled through each other's palettes and come out the other side marked, matched, claimed.
"This doesn't count. This is accidental."
"Nothing about this is accidental."
She laid her head back down. Pressed her ear to his chest. Listened.
Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Thu-thump.
Steady. Present. Hers.
"I'm keeping this one," she said.
His hand stilled in her hair. She felt the question form in his chest before he spoke it — felt the slight hitch in that steady rhythm, the catch of someone bracing for an answer they're afraid to want.
"My studio?"
"Your heartbeat."
The silence lasted three beats. Four. Five.
Then his arm tightened around her, drawing her closer against him until no space remained, until she could feel every breath expand his ribs and every exhale warm her hair, and his voice, when it came, was quiet and rough and stripped of everything except the truth.
"It was always yours."
Octavia closed her eyes.
Home was a heartbeat. Home was the smell of cold stone and something wild gone warm.
Home was the rough vibration of a laugh she'd earned and the weight of an arm around her back and the quality of silence between two people who had stopped performing for each other and started simply being in the same room.
In the steady pulse beneath her ear that said, with every beat: here. here. here.
For the first time since she could remember, Octavia Tate was home.