Chapter Ten #2
Low, from somewhere deep in his chest, a sound that was half groan and half prayer and all desperation, and his hands came up to my face.
Both of them. Those big, tattooed hands that I’d thought about more times than I would ever admit, cupping my jaw so gently that it shattered me, thumbs against my cheekbones, fingers in my hair, and he held my face like it was the most precious thing he’d ever touched, and he kissed me back.
The world caught fire.
Not the gentle, warming kind. The kind that consumed.
The kind that left nothing standing. His mouth opened against mine and I tasted him, coffee and heat and something underneath that was purely, unmistakably Kieran, and the hum in my chest detonated into something so loud and so overwhelming that I gasped against his lips and he swallowed the sound.
He stood up. The chair rolled back and hit the wall and he was on his feet and his hands were still on my face, and now that he was standing, the full height and breadth of him surrounded me.
He was everywhere. His scent, his heat, the solid wall of his chest against mine.
I had to tilt my head back to keep kissing him and he bent to meet me, folding himself around me, and the tenderness of that, this enormous, dangerous man curving himself down to reach my mouth, broke something open inside me that I’d been keeping sealed for twenty-seven years.
My hands found his chest. The fabric of his shirt was warm and I could feel the hard planes of muscle underneath, could feel the rapid hammer of his heartbeat against my palms, and the discovery that his heart was beating as violently as mine made a sound escape from me that I barely recognized as my own voice.
He pulled back. Just enough to separate our mouths. His forehead rested against mine, our noses touching, our breath shared. His hands were shaking. I could feel the tremor running through his fingers where they cradled my face.
“Nora.” My name, ragged. Wrecked. “I need you to be sure.”
I opened my eyes. His were inches away, dark and dilated and burning with so much want that it should have been terrifying, but underneath the want was fear.
He was afraid. Afraid of pushing too hard, of taking too much, of being the thing people warned you about when they told stories about Kieran Ashworth.
This man. This beautiful, dangerous, trembling man who had waited and waited and waited for me to come to him.
“I’m not sure of anything,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded like someone who had just woken up. “But I don’t want to stop.”
Something cracked in his expression. Relief and desire and a tenderness so fierce it looked like it hurt, all of it breaking across his face in a wave that I felt in my own body, and then he kissed me again.
This kiss was different. The first had been a question.
This was an answer. His mouth moved against mine with a certainty that liquefied my spine, deep and thorough and unhurried, like he had the rest of his life to learn the shape of my mouth and intended to use every second.
His hands slid from my face into my hair, tilting my head back, and I let him because the angle opened the kiss into something deeper and because the feeling of his fingers in my hair was so good it made my knees buckle.
He caught me. Of course he did. One arm went around my waist, pulling me flush against him, and I could feel all of him. The heat. The solidity. The controlled strength that vibrated through his body like a current. He could have crushed me. He was holding me like I was made of glass.
I fisted my hands in the front of his shirt and pulled, and the sound he made against my mouth, a low, broken groan that I felt in my teeth, was the most intoxicating thing I’d ever heard.
We kissed like that for a long time. Against his desk, in the amber light, with the city glittering outside and the building empty around us.
His hands learned the curve of my waist, the line of my spine, the dip at the small of my back, and every place he touched burned.
Not with the supernatural hum of the scent match.
With something simpler and more devastating.
Want. Just want. The basic, human, aching want of a woman being held by a man she desired, and being desired back with an intensity that bordered on reverence.
He didn’t push for more. His hands stayed above my clothes.
He kissed me and held me and made sounds that I was going to replay in my head every night for the foreseeable future, and he didn’t push, and the restraint of that, the iron-willed control of a man who was clearly burning alive and choosing, actively and continuously, to let me set the pace, made me want to give him everything.
Not tonight. Not yet. The wanting was enough. The wanting was a revelation.
We pulled apart eventually. Not because either of us wanted to, but because we had to breathe, really breathe, the kind of deep, shaky breathing that came after something that had rearranged your molecular structure.
His forehead was against mine again. His hands were still in my hair.
My fists were still twisted in his shirt.
“I should go,” I whispered.
“Yeah.” He didn’t let go. “In a minute.”
We stood there for longer than a minute.
Breathing. Being. Existing in a space that felt outside of time, where the world’s opinions about alphas and betas and scent matches and designation didn’t reach, and there was just his heartbeat and mine, settling into a rhythm that felt, impossibly, like they were learning to match.
When I finally stepped back, his hands fell away from my hair with a reluctance that was almost audible. He looked at me. I looked at him. His mouth was swollen and his eyes were black and his hair, the hair that was always pushed back in careless perfection, was wrecked from my fingers.
I did that, I thought. I wrecked him.
The thought sent a bolt of something hot and electric through me that I was absolutely not going to examine right now.
“Goodnight, Kieran,” I said.
“Goodnight, Nora.” His voice was destroyed. Rough and low and scraped raw, and the sound of it made me want to walk right back into his arms and never leave.
I gathered my things. Picked the folder up off the floor. Smoothed my hair with hands that were trembling so badly I almost dropped my laptop bag. I walked to the door of his office on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else.
In the doorway, I turned back. He was standing behind his desk, one hand braced against it, looking at me with an expression that was going to live in my memory forever. Like I was the sunrise. Like I was the first good thing he’d ever let himself believe in.
“The spreadsheet is fixed,” I said, because I was a person who deflected with professionalism when her emotions got too big, and because the absurdity of it, the magnificent mundanity of it, felt like the only thing solid enough to stand on.
He laughed. Again. That low, startled, beautiful sound.
“Thank you, Nora.”
I turned and walked down the hallway, and the sound of his laugh followed me like a hand pressed to the small of my back.
· · ·
Jonah was in the hallway.
Not waiting, exactly. He was coming out of his own office, bag over his shoulder, coat in hand, clearly on his way out. But when he saw me, he stopped.
I must have looked exactly the way I felt, which was to say: demolished.
My lips were swollen. My cheeks were flushed.
My hair was doing things that no amount of smoothing had fixed.
I was walking with the careful, deliberate gait of a person whose legs had recently forgotten how to function and were improvising.
Jonah looked at me. His green eyes moved over my face, cataloguing the flush, the swollen mouth, the dazed expression, and I watched the understanding land.
He smiled.
Not a smirk. Not a knowing look. Not the complicated, jealousy-tinged reaction that the world would have expected from a pack omega whose alpha had just kissed someone else. It was a real smile. Open, warm, genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy.
“Good night?” he asked.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Tried again. “I fixed the spreadsheet.”
Jonah’s smile widened into a grin so bright it could have powered the building. “I bet you did.”
He fell into step beside me, walking me to the elevator, and the ease of it, the utter lack of tension or judgment or competition, made something warm and disbelieving bloom in my chest. This man’s alpha had just kissed me in a dark office and he was grinning about it.
He was happy about it. Not because he was selfless or performatively generous, but because he genuinely, truly wanted this.
He wanted me in their lives. He wanted Kieran to have this.
He wanted it enough to light up a hallway with the force of his joy.
We rode the elevator down in companionable silence. At the lobby, he held the door open for me.
“Nora?”
“Yeah?”
“For the record, I’ve never heard him laugh before either.”
I looked at him. He winked, the same warm, ridiculous wink from the day we’d met, and then he was walking toward the parking garage with a wave over his shoulder, and I was standing in the lobby of Ashworth Crisis & Strategy with swollen lips and shaking hands and the echo of Kieran’s laugh living inside my chest right next to the hum that had never faded and was never going to.
I drove home.
I didn’t text Sadie. I didn’t call Maren. Some things needed to be held alone first, felt alone first, before you could share them. Some things needed to exist in the quiet space between the moment they happened and the moment you tried to put them into words.
I parked. I went inside. I stood in my apartment and pressed my fingers to my mouth and felt the ghost of him still there, the warmth and the pressure and the way he’d held my face like it was the answer to every question.
The pen was on my nightstand. The sticky note was in my wallet. And now the memory of his laugh was in my chest, right where it belonged, right beside the hum, and together they made a sound that I was only just beginning to recognize.
It sounded like a beginning.
It sounded like mine.