Chapter 2
Katriona
It’s been five days and I’m vibrating with feelings that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before.
Each day has gradually gotten better and better.
Less pain has meant less pain relief, so less drowsiness and fogginess, more mobility.
The stitches in my abdomen feel tighter than ever, which is a sign I’m healing well, apparently.
But I can’t get Akyl and that damn kiss out of my mind. Because he hasn’t kissed me since.
My desire towards Akyl has done nothing but grow, and he has barely been anywhere near me.
Standing in the doorway each morning, checking on me.
Then when he gets back from meetings with his brothers, or jobs he has been on…
The most he has done is touch the back of my hand where the bruise from the cannula is fading.
I can’t wait any longer. I throw back the duvet and climb out of bed. The stitches pull but the pain is nothing compared to what I’m used to.
I find him in his office, his fingers steepled against his bottom lip as he stares into space.
“You’re up,” he says, when I push open his door and lean against the frame. “Are you okay, do you need anything?”
“I’m fine, Akyl.” I hear the frustration in my voice and wince. He must hear it too because his left eyebrow arches perfectly, almost in challenge.
He stands and comes around his desk.
“Then what can I do for you?” he asks, moving towards me, looking all menacing and threatening and divine all at once.
“I think it’s hormones,” I offer as heat spreads over the back of my neck. “I uhm…”
His head tilts while he processes the information. I see the exact moment it all clicks into place for him and he takes a sharp inhale through his nose.
“I see.” His hands come up and stroke the tops of my arms. “You know we can’t do anything, what if your stitches tear…”
Grateful that he understands without me having to embarrass myself any further, I tip my head back and look at him.
“You won’t come anywhere near me,” I say after a beat.
“Ah.” He nods, as though everything is now making sense to him. “That’s because it’s getting more and more difficult to be around you without doing something that you might not be ready for. Physically,” he adds, “and mentally.”
“Urgh,” I say, shrugging from his grip and pacing to his desk. “I am ready, Akyl. So ready to live the rest of my life with you.” I heave a sigh and push my hands through my hair.
He's looking at me like I've said something he needs to translate first.
I probably look insane. Unbrushed hair, bare feet on his office floor, five days out of surgery and apparently desperate enough to march in here and announce I'm ready to live the rest of my life with him as though that's a normal thing to say to a man who has kissed me exactly once.
"Katriona." His voice is careful in the way it gets when he's managing something that isn't purely logistical.
"Don't." I hold up a hand. "Don't use that voice on me."
"What voice?"
"The one where you're deciding which version of the truth I can handle." I turn to face him properly. He's leaning against the front of his desk now, arms crossed, watching me with those dark eyes that give nothing away and somehow still say everything. "I'm not fragile."
"I know you're not fragile."
"Then stop treating me like I might shatter if you say the wrong thing."
He's quiet for a moment. "What would you like me to say?"
This is the problem with him. He asks the right questions at completely the wrong moments and then just waits for me to answer them. I fold my arms because it gives my hands something to do, and I look at him, and try to organize the interior mess of the last five days into something coherent.
"I want to know what we're doing," I say.
"I know I came to this arrangement for specific reasons and so did you and I know what the contract says.
But I want to know what we're doing, Akyl.
Because I've been in this house for a week and you've been in every room I'm in and you haven't touched me since the hospital and I can't tell if that's because you're being careful or because you've decided I'm not what you wanted after all and I'd rather you just told me. "
He holds my gaze for a long, steady moment.
"Come here," he says.
"I'm not going to just come to you on command like—"
"Katriona. Come here."
I go. I hate that I go, and I go anyway, because my body has apparently made a separate decision from my mouth and they're not currently consulting each other.
I stop two feet in front of him and look up at him with what I hope is not the expression of a woman who is entirely undone by how good he smells.
He uncrosses his arms and puts both hands on my face, tilting it up, and just looks at me. This is another thing he does that completely dismantles me. He looks at me like I'm something he's still figuring out how to hold correctly.
"You are exactly what I wanted," he says.
"You are more than what I wanted, because what I wanted before I met you was a wife who would fit, and what I've found is a woman who doesn't fit anywhere because she's so much more.
" His thumbs trace my cheekbones and his voice drops lower.
"I haven’t touched you because if I start, Katriona, I won't stop, and you have twelve stitches in your abdomen and I refuse to be the reason they don't heal correctly. "
"I haven't been thinking about the stitches," I say.
"I know." Something in his eyes darkens. "I think about them constantly. It’s the single most difficult act of restraint in my entire adult life."
I look at him. "What would you do? If I wasn't healing. If I was healed."
The muscle in his jaw moves. "That's not a conversation we should be having right now."
"Why?"
"Because you're standing in my office in the aftermath of major surgery and the last thing you need is—"
"Akyl, please." I hold his gaze. "What would you do?"
He exhales, and his hands drop from my face to my waist, resting there carefully, aware of the incision sites, his thumbs at my hip bones.
"I would start with your mouth," he says, and his voice has changed entirely, shed the careful management, gone somewhere lower and more honest. "I've been thinking about your mouth since the auction.
How you speak. How precise you are with your words.
" He pauses, letting his eyes roam to my lips and stay there.
"I want to take all of that precision apart.
I want to make you incapable of that control. "
Something warm rolls through my lower abdomen and I would appreciate it very much if my body could be slightly less obvious about this.
"And then?" I manage.
His thumbs press fractionally deeper at my hips.
"Then I want to learn every part of you that's spent years being in pain, and I want to replace the association.
" He says this quietly, seriously, in a tone that is somehow more devastating than anything purely physical could be.
"I want you to know what it feels like for your body to be a place that gives you pleasure instead of only taking it away. "
I stare at him. "You can't say things like that."
"Why?"
"Because it's very unfair when I can't do anything about it."
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Not a full smile, just the suggestion of one. He lifts one hand from my hip and touches my jaw, just the backs of his fingers, the way you'd touch something you wanted to handle carefully.
"When Marsh clears you," he says, "I want to take my time with you. I want every hour we should have had. I want you to have nothing to think about except what I'm doing to you." His eyes hold mine. "Can you wait a little longer for that?"
The honest answer is absolutely not. The answer I give him is, "I'm going to reorganize your filing system while I wait. As punishment."
He laughs. It's a short sound, but it's real and warm and it lands somewhere directly behind my sternum. I don't think I'll ever get used to that sound. I don't think I want to.
"Sit down," he says, pulling out his desk chair and wheeling it toward me. "You've been standing for too long."
"I'm fine, Akyl, I'm not made of—" The stitches remind me of their presence with a sharp pull when I shift my weight and I stop talking and scrunch my nose.
He gives me a look that says everything. I sit in the chair.
"Thank you," I say, with as much dignity as I can manage, which is not a lot.
He leans against the desk again and looks at me with that expression he's been wearing more frequently, the one where he's decided something and is working out the best moment to say it.
"Tell me what you want from this," he says. "Practically. Once you're well."
I think about this. "I want to be useful.
" I sigh, knowing he needs more than that.
"I mean useful to you. To what you're building.
I know I was brought into this arrangement as a wife, and I understand what that means, but I'm also," I pause, looking for the word, "a person with a functional brain who has spent years having nothing to do with it except survive. I'd like to do something with it now."
He's watching me very carefully. "What kind of something?"
"I don't know yet. I need to know more about what you actually do before I can tell you where I'd be useful. The legitimate side." I meet his eyes. "And eventually the less legitimate side, if you'll trust me with it."
"Eventually," he says.
"I'm not asking for everything now. I'm asking for the door to be open."
He nods. "The door is open."
Something settles in me. "There's something else," I say.
"Go on."
"There are so many women like me..." He nods, silently urging me to go on. "I gave her my number. She texted me yesterday. Her insurance won’t cover the cost of the surgery. She's been managing her pain with over-the-counter medication because she can't afford anything stronger." I hold his gaze.
He's very still. "What are you asking?"
"I'm not asking you to fix it. I'm telling you what I found so you know what I'm going to do about it.
" I sit forward slightly in the chair. "I want to help her get access to a specialist. I have Marsh's name.
I have the knowledge of what to ask for and what to refuse.
I want to use that. And I think—" I pause, feeling the edges of something larger.
"I think there are a lot of women in her position.
Not just with this condition. Women who have been dismissed or underfunded or told they're being dramatic, who don't know what they're entitled to ask for.
And I have a lot of time on my hands right now, and I'm quite good at being angry on other people's behalf. "
He looks at me for a long moment. Something is happening in his expression that I can't fully read from the outside.
"You want to build something," he says.
"I want to try. I don't know exactly what shape it takes yet." I meet his eyes. "But yes."
"All right," he says. Straightforward, no qualification.
"All right?"
"You'll need resources. Staff eventually, if it grows. Access to the right medical network. I'll talk to Marsh about a referral arrangement." He pauses. "And Rovin knows people who can—"
"Akyl." I stop him. "I want to do this properly. I don't want it to exist because you made some calls. I want to look into starting my own charity. For women. By women. Not be scary Bratva men in suits with guns."
"I understand." He tilts his head slightly. "But you are going to be my wife and my name is going to be attached to whatever you build. Which means the people who might otherwise overlook you will reconsider. That's not me doing it for you. That's the weight of a name you chose."
I think about that. "Fine," I say. "The name. But I direct it."
"I would never suggest otherwise."
I look at this man leaning against his desk in his expensive shirt with his arms crossed and his eyes on me like I'm the most interesting problem he's ever been handed, and I think about what my life looked like just over a week ago.
The rationed medication. The temp agency shifts.
The daily calculation of what I could afford to feel.
"You're nothing like what I expected," I tell him, the truth of it startling me.
"What did you expect?"
"Someone who bought a wife because he needed one. A transaction in a suit." I keep my eyes on his. "I didn't expect someone who would stay in a waiting room for seven hours and wait for me."
The muscle in his jaw moves. He says nothing.
"I didn't expect you to be kind," I say. "I was prepared for fair, but not kind."
He pushes off the desk and crosses to me, and he crouches down in front of my chair so that we're at eye level, which is such an unexpectedly intimate gesture from a man who takes up space the way he does that it almost winds me.
"When you're well," he says, very quietly, "I'm going to show you exactly how kind I can be.
" His eyes drop briefly to my mouth. "And some ways I can't be at all.
" He holds my gaze. "But right now I need you to go back to bed and rest, because you've been on your feet too long and ‘ve had enough stitches of my own to know how uncomfortable they can be. "
I take his hand because it's easier than arguing and also because his hand is warm and I've been thinking about it all week because I'm only human.