Chapter 12 #3
His thumb moves slowly across my wedding ring.
“Yes.”
The answer is so simple it makes me look at him.
Moonlight softens his face.
No suit jacket.
No tie.
Hair already losing whatever order it had earlier.
Ghost underneath Blackwell.
My husband underneath both.
“Do you regret it?” I ask.
He doesn't pretend not to understand.
“The marriage?”
I nod.
“No.”
“That was fast.”
“I've had several hours.”
“Very thorough.”
“I'm known for it.”
I smile.
Then ask the question I probably shouldn't.
“What if your father is right about me?”
Xavier's expression changes.
“He isn't.”
“You can't know everything.”
“No.”
“You said you did.”
“I corrected myself.”
The dog circles twice near the edge of the blanket and collapses into the grass.
Xavier watches him.
“We definitely own that dog now.”
I laugh.
“Focus.”
“I am.”
He sets the champagne aside.
Then steps closer.
“What if I am dangerous?” I ask.
“You are.”
“That isn't what I meant.”
“I know.”
His hands settle around my waist.
“I've known you were dangerous since the first time you rewrote part of my code and left a smiley face in the comments.”
“That was art.”
“That was vandalism.”
“You admired it.”
“Unfortunately.”
I look up at him.
“What if being with me destroys something you built?”
His expression doesn't move.
“Then I decide whether it deserved to survive.”
My breath catches.
“Xavier.”
“I married you, Sabine.”
His hand lifts.
Knuckles brush my cheek.
“I understood there might be consequences.”
“You married me because it was practical.”
One dark brow rises.
“Did that ceremony feel practical to you?”
No.
Nothing about the way he looked at me beneath those trees felt practical.
I don't answer.
His thumb traces my lower lip.
“There she is.”
“Who?”
“The woman who goes quiet when she knows I'm right.”
“I dislike her.”
“I don't.”
His mouth touches mine.
Softly.
One kiss.
Then another.
Not urgent.
Not yet.
I curl my fingers into the front of his shirt.
“You wore too many clothes to our wedding.”
His mouth curves against mine.
“I wore a shirt.”
“Exactly.”
He laughs softly.
Then kisses me again.
The sound disappears into my mouth.
Everything else follows.
The cottage.
The investigation.
ARGUS.
His father.
Mine.
For once there is nothing between Ghost and Vesper except air, and even that doesn't last long.
His hands move into my hair.
Mine slide around his neck.
The kiss deepens.
Warm.
Slow.
Then hungry in that way we've both spent years pretending wasn't inevitable.
I feel his wedding ring against the back of my neck.
That tiny pressure does something ridiculous to me.
I pull back just enough to look at it.
Xavier follows my gaze.
“What?”
“You're married.”
“So I've been told.”
“To me.”
“Unfortunately.”
I shove his shoulder.
He catches me around the waist before I can move away.
“Very unfortunate,” he murmurs, dragging me back against him.
“You're horrible.”
“You married me anyway.”
“Temporary lapse in judgment.”
His mouth finds the side of my neck.
My argument dies.
He knows it too.
I feel the smile against my skin.
“Don't.”
“Don't what?”
“Look pleased with yourself.”
“I can't see my own face.”
“I can feel it.”
Another kiss beneath my ear.
My fingers tighten in his hair.
There are moments when the years online disappear completely.
Then there are moments like this, when every one of them seems to exist inside the touch.
Every time Ghost told me what he would do if he ever caught me.
Every time I told him he never would.
Every photograph.
Every challenge.
Every midnight conversation that wandered too close to desire and then retreated behind jokes.
None of it was imaginary.
It was waiting.
For hands.
For mouths.
For us.
Xavier lowers the blanket into the grass.
I look at it.
Then him.
His dark eyes search mine.
No assumption.
No command.
Even now.
“You sure?”
The question is quiet.
I touch his face.
For all his arrogance, for everything Blackwell is, this is the man who stopped kissing me in London because I had been frightened.
The man who remembered honey.
The man who stayed online seven hours and nineteen minutes while a girl he didn't know mourned her father.
Ghost.
“Yes.”
Something inside his expression loosens.
He kisses me again.
We sink onto the blanket beneath a sky so full of stars that the darkness between them almost disappears.
The wind moves softly through the field.
His hand slides along my side.
My dress gathers beneath his fingers.
I pull his shirt free and finally touch warm skin instead of fabric.
He inhales sharply.
That thrills me.
Xavier Blackwell is not supposed to lose his breath because of anything.
I do it again.
His forehead drops to mine.
“Trouble.”
“You knew that.”
“I underestimated.”
“Your first mistake.”
“Not remotely.”
His mouth finds mine before I can ask for the list.
The kiss turns open-mouthed and deep, slow enough to taste every year we spent wanting this without ever saying it. His tongue strokes against mine, deliberate, and the low sound he makes pours straight into me. I answer with one of my own.
He eases the dress higher, palm sliding over the bare skin of my thigh. The wool of the blanket is slightly rough beneath my back; the night air is cool against the places he bares. When his fingers reach the soft inner curve of my hip he pauses, waiting, even now.
I lift into his touch.
“Mon Dieu,” he breathes against my mouth. “Tu es si douce.”
His hand continues upward, tracing the line of my body as if memorizing what photographs could never give him. When he finds me already wet for him, his forehead presses to mine and he stills completely.
“Vesper.”
The name is almost a prayer.
I open my eyes. His are nearly black in the starlight, watching every flicker of feeling that crosses my face.
“Xavier.”
He kisses me again—hot, open, unhurried—while his fingers stroke me with devastating patience. I rock against his hand, chasing the slow build, and he whispers filthy, beautiful French against my lips between every kiss.
“Comme ca… oui… juste comme ca, ma femme.”
When I am trembling and aching and half out of my mind, he shifts over me. The weight of him is solid and real and so long imagined that tears sting the corners of my eyes. He braces on one forearm, looks down between us, and carefully nudges my creamy thighs apart with his knee.
The first slow push of him inside me steals the breath from both of us.
Xavier’s entire body shudders once—subtle, almost restrained—as he sinks deeper into his Vesper.
A low, broken sound escapes him, half French, half nothing at all.
His eyes close for a heartbeat, lashes dark against his cheek, as if the pleasure is almost too much after years of only imagining this.
I feel him pulse with pleasure inside me.
He’s huge. Hot and it fills so good as his cock stretches me.
“Fuck,” he whispers, the English rare and wrecked. “Sabine.”
I feel every inch of him. The thick head… the heat. The impossible rightness of finally being joined with no screens, no encryption, no distance left between Ghost and Vesper.
He holds still, buried to the hilt, giving me time. His mouth finds mine again in an open, shaking kiss while his body trembles with the effort of restraint.
“Tu me détruis,” he breathes against my lips. “You destroy me.”
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper.
That is all the permission he needs.
He begins to move—slow, deep strokes that make the stars blur above us.
Every thrust is measured, deliberate, as if he is still learning me by heart.
His mouth never leaves my skin for long: open-mouthed kisses along my throat, the soft underside of my jaw, the corner of my mouth.
Between them he speaks low, heated French that turns my blood molten.
“Ma Vesper… mon épouse… tu es si parfaite autour de moi.”
I answer him with soft, broken sounds and the tight clutch of my hands in his hair.
The years of wanting pour through every place we touch.
When the pleasure begins to crest I whisper his name like a secret, and he drives into me just a little harder, a little deeper, watching my face as if the sight of me coming undone is the only thing that has ever mattered.
“Viens pour moi,” he orders softly against my mouth. “Come for me. Let me feel it.”
I do—shaking, crying out against his open mouth, every muscle locking around him. Xavier follows a moment later with a deep, shuddering groan, his body tightening above mine as he pours into me, forehead pressed to mine, whispering my name like it is the only word left in any language.
We stay like that for a long time, breathing the same star-cooled air, still joined, wedding rings warm against each other’s skin.
There is laughter once when the dog chooses an extremely inappropriate moment to stand, stretch, and wander closer.
Xavier lifts his head.
“No.”
I bury my face against his shoulder, laughing.
The dog stares.
“Go away.”
“He doesn't understand English.”
Xavier switches to French.
The dog sits.
I laugh harder.
“He likes you.”
“He's a voyeur.”
“He was our wedding witness.”
“Exactly. His duties are complete.”
Eventually the dog loses interest and wanders back toward the cottage.
Xavier looks down at me.
My hair is spread across the blanket.
His white shirt is somewhere near my feet.
The simple wedding band on his finger catches starlight.
I touch it again.
His eyes soften.
No humor this time.
“Still okay?”
“Yes.”
“You tell me if—”
I pull his mouth down to mine.
“I know.”
That is what matters.
I know.
And he knows I know.
The rest belongs only to us.
Not Ghost and Vesper hiding behind encryption.
Not Blackwell and Beaumont fighting over the past.
Xavier and Sabine.
Husband and wife beneath the same stars I watched as a child.
The world narrows until there is only warmth, breath, whispered names and the almost unbearable intimacy of finally being known without disguise.
Later, I lie curled against Xavier's bare chest beneath both blankets.
Warm.
Boneless.
Completely incapable of doing anything productive for the foreseeable future.
His fingers move through my hair.
Slowly.