Chapter 7
Simone
The line was gone, and the whole slow spring of not-quite-touching rushed in behind it like water finally breaking through a dam that had held far longer than anyone expected it to.
They'd left the celebration at the clubhouse without a word to anyone, both of them understanding, in the way they'd learned to understand each other over the past weeks, that whatever came next belonged only to the two of them.
The drive to the grove had passed in charged, anticipatory silence, Simone's hand resting on the console between their seats, close enough to Elliot's that she could feel the warmth of him without either of them closing the last inch.
"You're quiet," he'd said, glancing over at a stoplight.
"I'm thinking."
"About?"
"About how many weeks I spent telling myself this was purely professional."
"And how many weeks was that, exactly?"
"All of them. Every single one." She'd looked over at him, at the small, satisfied smile he was fighting and losing to. "You knew, didn't you. The whole time."
"I suspected. I'm patient, not blind."
"So how long have you actually known? Really known, not just suspected."
"Since the day you called my honesty 'uncomfortably accurate' and then looked at me like you wanted to arrest me for it instead of kiss me." He glanced over, something warm and amused in his expression. "I figured it out fast. Took longer to figure out what I was supposed to do about it."
"And what did you decide?"
"Wait. Same as always. Seemed to work out."
"Barely. I nearly talked myself out of the whole thing about four separate times."
"I know. I could tell. You get this very specific look right before you're about to overthink something into oblivion."
"I do not have a specific look."
"You absolutely do. Little furrow, right here." He reached over at a red light and pressed one finger gently between her eyebrows, and she swatted his hand away, laughing despite herself.
"That's an invasion of detective privacy."
"Noted for future reference."
They'd parked at the edge of the dirt turnoff and walked the last stretch to the grove together, not touching yet, both of them letting the anticipation build with the same unhurried deliberateness that defined everything about him, until they reached the center of the trees and the last of the daylight caught gold in the branches overhead, and neither of them could stand the distance a moment longer.
Elliot met her halfway across the grove and stopped just short of her, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off him, could see the small, undone way he was looking at her — like a man who had waited a long time for something and still couldn't quite believe he was allowed to reach for it now.
"You're sure," he said, because he would ask, because that was who he was, honest to the last possible second even with something this obvious hanging between them.
"I have never been more sure of anything in my professional or personal life," Simone said. "Kiss me before I write it up as an official statement."
He laughed — low, real — and then he kissed her, and it was nothing like the careful, contained man she'd spent months learning. This was months of restraint finally let off its leash, unhurried but not gentle, thorough in the exact way she'd have expected from a man who never did anything halfway.
The evening was warm around them, the olive leaves stirring in a breeze that smelled like spring finally deciding to commit to itself, the last of the daylight going gold and soft through the branches. She fisted a hand in his shirt and felt him smile against her mouth.
"Careful, Detective," he murmured. "This is technically still a crime scene. Public grove."
"It's after hours," she said, breath already uneven. "I know a very thorough detective. I'll ask her if we're clear."
"And what does the detective say?"
"The detective says you're a menace."
"The detective," Elliot said, walking her backward, unhurried, toward the old stone wall, "has excellent judgment."
He undressed her like he did everything — deliberately, like there was no possible reason to rush a thing worth doing right, his mouth following the trail his hands made, patient enough that she felt every second of it, restless and aching and finally, finally allowed to want this out loud instead of behind the careful walls she'd been maintaining for weeks.
"You're overthinking," he murmured against her collarbone, feeling her breath catch and hold.
"I'm a detective. Overthinking is a professional requirement."
"Not tonight it isn't." His hands were warm and unhurried at her waist, tracing slow, deliberate patterns that made her want to arch into every single one of them. "Tonight the only thing I want you thinking about is exactly how this feels."
"That's a very specific assignment."
"I'm a very thorough man."
She laughed, breathless, and the sound dissolved into something else entirely as he found the curve of her neck with his mouth, patient and thorough exactly the way he'd promised, until laughing was the furthest thing from what either of them had in mind.
His shirt joined hers somewhere in the grass, and she got her hands on him properly for the first time — warm skin over hard muscle, a faint scar along one shoulder she filed away to ask about later, the steady, quickening thud of his heart under her palm when she pressed her mouth to his chest. He made a low sound at that, something that cracked straight through the composed, patient man she'd spent weeks learning, and she felt a fierce, unfamiliar satisfaction at being the one to do it.
"There she is," he murmured, voice rough, tipping her chin up to kiss her again. "I wondered when the detective was going to stop being careful."
"I'm never careful with you. That was always the problem."
He laid her back against the soft spread of his jacket on the grass beneath the apple trees, spring air warm against her bare skin, and took his time there too — a slow, deliberate path of attention down her throat, her collarbone, lower, his hands mapping her like he intended to remember every inch of it.
She arched under him, fingers threading into his hair, breath coming faster with every unhurried thing he did, every place his mouth lingered a fraction longer than strictly necessary, like patience really was the whole point of him even here, especially here.
"Elliot." His name came out half plea, half warning.
"I heard you." He didn't hurry. If anything he slowed further, deliberate, savoring, until she was trembling and gasping and entirely beyond any pretense of the composed, guarded detective she'd been for the past twelve years, until she reached for him with both hands and pulled him back up her body, done waiting, done being patient on his behalf.
"Now," she said. "Elliot. Now."
"Bossy," he said, grinning against her mouth, but he didn't argue, settling over her at last, skin against skin, the two of them fitting together like something they'd both been rehearsing for months without ever admitting it.
She'd built a career on not trusting people.
She'd built a life on expecting betrayal in the fine print, on assuming the clean surface always hid something rotten underneath if you dug deep enough.
And here was a man who had spent months proving, brick by brick, honest answer by honest answer, that he meant exactly what he said — and he meant this too, in the way his hands were reverent instead of rushed, in the way he kept checking her face like her pleasure mattered more to him than his own, in the low, rough murmur of her name against her skin like it was something worth savoring rather than rushing toward.
"Elliot," she breathed, and it came out like his name was the only word she had left in her whole vocabulary.
"Right here," he said, and he was — steady, present, giving her every ounce of the attention he gave a chessboard he intended to win, except this was so much better than winning, warmer and messier and entirely, gloriously undignified in a way she suspected the very controlled Elliot Rourke rarely allowed himself to be.
When they finally came together it was slow at first, deliberate, both of them savoring the exact moment the last of the distance between them finally closed — his forehead dropping to hers, breath mingling, a long, suspended beat where neither of them moved at all, just felt the whole shape of what they'd been waiting for settle into place.
Then it built, unhurried at first and then anything but, the release of months of held breath, of every glance they'd swallowed and every not-touch they'd rationed out like it might run out before they were allowed to have it.
Spring air moved warm around them. The grove rustled its old approval, olive leaves and apple blossoms shivering loose in the breeze.
Her hands found his shoulders, his back, the place where muscle met scar, holding on like she could keep the whole moment from ending if she just held tight enough.
She lost track of where the ache ended and the answer to it began, only knew that it was Elliot's name she said, more than once, into the dusk, and that his hands never once stopped being gentle even when neither of them had any interest left in being gentle, and that when they finally, together, reached the end of all that patient waiting, he said her name like it was the only prayer he'd ever meant.
Afterward, tangled together on his jacket spread beneath the apple trees, her head on his chest and his heartbeat slowing under her ear, she started laughing.
"What," he said, sounding pleasantly wrecked, one hand still tracing lazy patterns along her spine.
"We just did that in a public grove."
"Told you. After hours." He pressed a kiss to her hair. "I'll double-check with the detective, but I believe we're in the clear."
"The detective says you're a menace," Simone said again, grinning against his skin.