Chapter Twenty-Seven
Nora
I was spending most weekends at the penthouse now.
It had happened gradually, the way most significant changes in my life happened: not through a single decisive moment but through an accumulation of small ones.
A toothbrush in the bathroom. A change of clothes in Kieran’s closet.
My particular brand of tea appearing in the kitchen cabinet, placed at eye level, which was Declan’s height and not mine, and which meant he’d put it there so he could see it when he opened the cupboard.
The evidence of me, infiltrating the penthouse in increments.
Saturday afternoon. Jonah appeared in the living room wearing a jacket that was suspiciously pressed for a man who ironed nothing.
“Kieran and I are going out,” he announced. His face was the picture of casual innocence, which on Jonah meant he was orchestrating something with surgical precision. “Dinner. Maybe a movie. We’ll be gone for hours. Many, many hours.”
“Subtle,” I said.
“I have no idea what you’re implying.” He kissed my cheek. Whispered in my ear: “Declan bought new sheets. He’s been in the kitchen for forty minutes pretending to review a strategy deck. Go put him out of his misery.”
He winked. He actually winked, which was so brazen that I briefly considered revising my assessment of omegas as the diplomatic designation.
Kieran appeared behind him. He looked at me over Jonah’s head with an expression that combined amusement, encouragement, and the particular possessive warmth of an alpha who was very comfortable sharing the person he loved.
“Have a good evening,” he said. The subtext was approximately three pages long.
They left. The penthouse went quiet. And somewhere in the kitchen, Declan Voss was pretending to read a strategy deck.
· · ·
I found him at the counter.
He was standing exactly where Jonah had said he’d be, laptop open, a glass of wine poured and untouched beside him.
He was wearing a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, which was Declan’s version of casual and which exposed his forearms in a way that should not have been as distracting as it was.
He looked up when I entered. And there it was. The thing I hadn’t expected. The thing that undid me more than any controlled kiss or precisely chosen word.
Declan Voss was nervous.
Not the anxiety of a man who didn’t know what he was doing.
The deep, trembling uncertainty of a man who wanted something so much that the possibility of having it was more terrifying than the years of not having it.
His hand on the countertop was not quite relaxed.
His jaw was held with a tension that had nothing to do with boardrooms. He was looking at me the way a person looked at something that might vanish if they moved too quickly.
This man. This brilliant, infuriating, precise, terrified man who had commanded restructuring deals and dismantled corporate empires and spoken my name like a vow across a white tablecloth, was standing in his kitchen being afraid that I would disappear.
I was learning that sometimes, with these powerful men, the thing they needed was for me to take the first step.
I crossed the kitchen. I stopped in front of him, close enough that I could smell his scent, clean linen and something sharp, and close enough that the heat of his body was a physical presence against mine.
I reached up and closed his laptop.
His eyes tracked the movement. Then returned to my face. His blue gaze was direct and clear and full of the controlled fire that I’d tasted on the sidewalk outside the office, the burn underneath the precision.
“You’re not working,” I said.
“No.”
“You’ve been standing here for forty minutes pretending to work.”
“Jonah told you.”
“Jonah tells me everything.”
A breath of something that was almost a laugh. Almost. The sound of a man whose control was a millimeter from slipping and who was holding on with everything he had.
“I bought new sheets,” he said. As if confessing a weakness. As if the act of purchasing bedding for the possibility of having me in his bed had cost him something fundamental.
“I heard.”
“They’re Egyptian cotton. Six hundred thread count. I researched...” He stopped. Closed his eyes briefly. “I researched thread counts.”
“Declan.”
He opened his eyes.
“Stop researching,” I said. And I kissed him.
· · ·
Making love to Declan Voss was like being taken apart by a man who intended to put you back together better than he found you.
He kissed me in the kitchen first, the same controlled burn as the sidewalk, his hands on my face, his mouth moving against mine with focused, devastating attention.
But this time, there was no audience, no public sidewalk, no reason to hold back, and I could feel the difference immediately.
The control was tighter, which meant what was underneath it was bigger, pressing against the seams like a fire behind a closed door.
We moved to the bedroom. His bedroom, not the shared room. The sheets were new. I could tell because they smelled like nothing yet, blank and clean and waiting to be marked, and the absurdity of this man researching thread counts for me made me want to laugh and cry simultaneously.
He undressed me with precision. Each button of my shirt unfastened deliberately, his eyes following his hands, cataloguing every inch of skin as it appeared with the attention he gave to financial statements.
He did not rush. He did not fumble. He removed my clothes the way he removed every obstacle in his life, with methodical, competent efficiency, and the efficiency should have been clinical but instead it was devastating because every movement said I am paying attention to you.
Every removed layer said I see this. I see you.
When I reached for his shirt, he went still.
I felt the tension in his body, the held breath, the coiled restraint of a man who was about to be naked in front of someone who mattered and was not certain he would survive it.
I unbuttoned his shirt slowly, giving him time, and when it fell away and he was standing before me bare-chested in the lamplight, I saw what the tailored suits had hidden.
He was lean and strong and his body carried the particular tension of a man who held everything tight, and the vulnerability of him, this armored, precise, controlled man standing before me without his armor, made my chest ache.
I put my hand on his chest. Over his heart. It was hammering.
“I’m here,” I said. The same words I’d said to Jonah in the nest. The same words, with a different meaning. I’m here. I see you. You don’t have to be perfect.
He exhaled. And then he lifted me, which I did not expect because Declan did not do physical displays of strength the way Kieran did, and the surprise of it, being picked up by a man who preferred spreadsheets to spectacle, made me gasp.
The new sheets were cool against my back. He was warm above me. And then his hands were on me and his mouth was on me and every assumption I had ever made about Declan Voss was systematically, thoroughly, comprehensively destroyed.
He was attentive. Obscenely attentive. His hands mapped my body with the same focus he applied to market analysis, and the focus was its own form of worship, because this man did not give his full attention to things that did not matter.
He found the places that made me arch and he catalogued them and he returned to them with the precision of a man building a database of exactly how to undo me.
His mouth trailed down my body. My neck.
My collarbone. The space between my ribs.
The curve of my hip. Each place received the same deliberate, devastating attention, and by the time his mouth reached the inside of my thigh, I was shaking.
Not from cold. From the accumulated weight of being studied by a man who had finally decided to give me his full attention after months of pretending I didn’t exist.
“Declan.” His name came out broken.
He looked up at me. His blue eyes were dark now, the careful composure replaced by something raw and hot and barely contained. He was on the edge.
“Let go,” I said. Because I could see it. The control holding the fire back, the restraint keeping the burn contained, and I didn’t want contained. I wanted the fire. I wanted to know what Declan Voss was when the precision fell away. “Declan. Let go.”
He let go.
The control fractured and what was underneath was extraordinary.
He was fierce. He was consuming. He moved over me and into me with an intensity that was Kieran’s equal in heat and completely different in kind, because where Kieran’s passion was a wildfire, Declan’s was a detonation.
Concentrated. Focused. Every ounce of the precision that had been holding him back redirected into the act of making me feel everything.
He was vocal in a way I hadn’t expected. Not loud. Vocal. Low, broken sounds against my neck, my name repeated like an incantation, Nora, Nora, Nora, and the sound of Declan Voss losing himself in my name was the single most erotic thing I had ever experienced.
I came apart beneath him. Hard. Completely. My body shattering into pieces that his hands immediately gathered back together, and when he followed, his forehead pressed to mine and his breath ragged and his body shuddering, I felt the blue thread in my chest blaze like a star going supernova.
· · ·
After.
We lay in his new sheets, six hundred thread count, Egyptian cotton, and they were very good sheets and I was never going to let him forget the researching.
His arm was around me. My head was on his chest. His heart had slowed from its earlier hammering to a steady, strong rhythm that I could feel against my cheek.