Chapter 1
Rovin
It’s five days after the dinner and Claudia is in the kitchen making tea, wearing a silk robe over her pajamas. Her hair is loose around her shoulders, and I am done waiting.
I’ve been patient and given her space to become accustomed to her new normal.
I have let her settle into my home, learn its rhythms, become familiar with her life here.
She has explored the house, reorganized the bookshelves, started running in the mornings with the security detail trailing her at a respectful distance.
She has had dinner with my brothers and the varying women they found at the auction dinner.
She has spoken to my household staff with the quiet authority of someone who was born to manage people, and they respond to her already as though she belongs here.
She does belong here. That is no longer a question. The question is how long I can sustain this controlled distance between us before I break apart.
The answer is: no longer.
"Claudia."
She turns from the kettle. The robe is deep blue, catching the warm light. Her collarbones are bare where it peels open against her skin, and the silk moves against her body when she breathes.
"Come here."
She reads something in my voice, in my face. I see the recognition in her eyes, the way her pupils dilate, the way her lips part on an inhale. She sets the kettle down.
She walks to me.
I take her face in both hands. She is looking up at me with those gold eyes, and I can feel her pulse fluttering against my palm where it rests at the side of her neck.
"I told you that when I took you to my bed, it would be permanent," I say.
"Yes."
"I'm taking you to my bed, now."
She rises on her toes and kisses me, and the kiss is different from the one on the sofa.
This one has no patience in it. Her mouth is hot and open and demanding, and her hands grip my shirt, pulling me down, pulling me closer, and I let her.
I let this woman pull me off my foundation because I have been waiting for someone strong enough to do it.
I lift her. Her legs wrap around my waist and the robe falls open, and I carry her to my bedroom. My room. The room she hasn’t been inside, the room I haven’t let her enter because I knew that once she was in it, I would not be able to let her leave.
The bed is large and dark and made with military precision, and I lower her onto it and follow her down. Her hair fans across my pillows, dark against white, and reverence surges through me.
"I need you to hear me," I say. I am above her, my weight on my forearms, my body between her thighs.
The silk of her robe has parted and I can feel the heat of her skin through the thin fabric of her sleep clothes.
"What happens in this bed is not a negotiation.
It's not a transaction. When I'm inside you, you are mine, completely and permanently, and I need you to want that. "
"I want that." Her voice is barely above a whisper, but it has steel in it. "I have wanted that for six years."
There it is again. Six years.
“What’s six years?” I ask as I move my lips from her mouth to her jaw, her earlobe.
I kiss her throat. I find the place where her pulse is strongest and I press my mouth against it, and I feel her heartbeat against my lips, rapid and fierce.
She moans before answering me. “The first night I met you. I knew I wanted you to be my everything.”
I unwrap the robe from her body slowly. She is wearing a thin top and shorts underneath, and I remove both with a deliberation that makes her arch beneath me.
Her skin is smooth and golden in the dim light, and I put my mouth on every inch of it I can reach, her collarbone, the space between her breasts, the soft plane of her stomach.
“Everything?” I ask.
She nods in response, pulling at my shirt. I let her strip it off. Her hands find my chest, my shoulders, the hard ridges of my abdomen, and she touches me with the focused attention I've come to recognize as uniquely hers, as though everything she touches is being memorized.
"You're extraordinary," she says, and the way she says it, reverent and hungry, makes my blood run hot.
I kiss my way down her stomach. Her muscles tense and release under my lips. When I reach the waistband of her shorts I pull them down, and she lifts her hips to help me. I look at her, all of her, laid out on my bed, bare and willing and watching me with eyes that hold no fear.
"Tell me what you want," I say against the inside of her thigh.
Her breath shudders. "You know what I want."
"I want to hear you say it."
"I want you inside me. I want to feel you. I want..." She swallows. Her hand finds my hair, fingers threading through it. "I want you to make me yours. Completely. Only yours. Never anyone else’s."
“You’ve never had sex?”
“No.”
The realization registers in my brain just before it short circuits with the new information. She saw me when she was nineteen, and then waited until she had the opportunity to be mine.
I put my mouth on her.
She tastes like nothing I've ever experienced, warm and sweet and entirely, devastatingly real.
I learn her with my tongue, slowly at first, mapping the places that make her gasp and the ones that make her moan and the one, precise spot that makes her fist her hand in my hair and pull until my scalp stings.
She comes apart under my mouth with a sound that breaks the careful silence of the house, a cry that is my name and a plea, all at once. I feel her body arch and shake, and I hold her hips in my hands, pressing her down against the mattress, keeping her exactly where I want her.
When the tremors slow, I rise up over her. Her eyes are glazed and dark and desperate.
"Rovin. Please."
I strip what's left of my clothing. Her eyes drop to my body, taking in every detail, and her lips part at what she sees.
I settle between her thighs. The head of my cock presses against her, and she is wet and hot and ready. I have to close my eyes for a moment because the sensation is almost too much to process.
"Look at me," I say.
She does.
I push inside her.
The sound she makes shatters me. It is small and sharp and full of a relief so profound it sounds almost like grief, like she has been waiting for this exact thing, this exact moment, this exact fullness, for her entire life.
I hold still inside her. She is tight around me, her body adjusting, her fingers digging into my shoulders. I watch her face and I see every micro-expression, every flicker of discomfort giving way to pleasure, every breath she takes to steady herself.
"Okay?" I ask, and my voice is wrecked.
"Yes," she whispers. "It’s even better than I imagined."
Fuck. She imagined this?
I begin to move. Slowly, at first. I set a rhythm that is smooth and deep, pulling nearly all the way out and then sinking back in, watching her face as I do it. Each thrust draws a sound from her, and each sound tightens the coil in my chest until I think I might come apart from the inside out.
Her legs wrap around me. Her hips rise to meet mine. She matches my rhythm with an intuition that stuns me, as though her body already knows mine. As though we have been doing this in some parallel existence for years.
I press my forehead against hers. Our breath mingles, hot and ragged, and I can see my own reflection in her eyes.
"You feel like everything," she says, and her voice cracks on the last word.
I increase the pace. She gasps and clutches at my back, and I feel her nails score my skin, the sharp sting of it drives me higher.
"Tell me," I say against her mouth. "Tell me what you came to the dinner for."
"You." Her hips roll against mine, meeting every thrust. "This. Six years..." she breaks off on a gasp.
"Tell me what you want."
"I want your name." She is panting, her body straining against mine. "I want your children. I want to belong to you."
The words detonate inside me. I grip her hip with one hand and her jaw with the other, and I kiss her, hard and consuming, and I drive into her with everything I have.
"You want my children," I repeat, and the words taste like possession.
"Yes."
"You want to carry them."
"Yes." She is close, I can feel it, her body tightening around me, her breath coming in short, broken gasps.
"Every morning you'll wake up in this bed." My voice is low, my mouth at her ear. "And every morning I will look at you and know you chose me. That you walked across a room and claimed me. That the children sleeping down the hall exist because you were brave enough to step into my world and stay."
She breaks. Her orgasm hits her, and she cries out, her body clenching around me in pulsing, rhythmic contractions that pull me over the edge with her. I bury myself inside her as deep as I can go and I come with a force that whites out my vision.
We lie tangled together afterward. Her head is on my chest. My hand is in her hair. The penthouse is silent around us, holding us in its dark and empty spaces like a vessel waiting to be filled.
"I'm not going back to the guest room," she says.
I tighten my arm around her. "No. You're not."
She tilts her head up and looks at me. Her eyes are soft and fierce and sated and still hungry, all at once.
"I'm keeping you," she says, and she says it the way I have been saying it inside my own head for days, like a fact of nature, like gravity.
I pull her closer. I press my mouth against her hair. I think about children and permanence and the aching, empty rooms in this house that have been waiting, all this time, for exactly this.
For exactly her.