Chapter 4
Katriona
Six weeks.
That's how long it's been since Marsh went in and rebuilt the wreckage that used to be my pelvis, and now I'm sitting on the edge of an examination table in a paper gown, swinging my feet like a child, while he reads something on his tablet and makes the small approving sounds of a man whose work has gone well.
Akyl is in the chair against the wall. He came in with me, because he comes in with me to all of them, and because I stopped pretending I minded around week two.
He's wearing a charcoal suit and an expression of careful neutrality and he hasn't said more than four words since we arrived, but I can feel his attention on me like a hand at the small of my back.
"Everything looks excellent," Marsh says.
There's that word again. I've stopped flinching when I hear it. I've almost started to expect it.
"The internal healing is complete. The excision sites have closed beautifully.
Your last bloodwork was the best I've seen from you, and your pain journal shows what I'd hoped for.
" He sets the tablet down and looks at me over his glasses.
"You're a different patient than the woman who first came to see me. "
"I'm a different person," I say. "It turns out chronic agony was doing wonders for my personality."
Akyl makes a low sound from the corner that might be amusement.
Marsh smiles. "I want to keep you on the hormonal treatment, and I'll see you again in three months.
But as far as restrictions go." He pauses, and I swear he glances at Akyl for half a second, because the man is not stupid and he has eyes.
"You're cleared. Fully. Normal activity.
Exercise, work, travel." A beat. "Everything. "
"Everything," I repeat.
"Everything," Marsh confirms, with the diplomatic blandness of a doctor who knows exactly what he's authorizing and intends to never acknowledge it directly.
"Listen to your body. If something doesn't feel right, you stop, and you call me.
But there's no reason for you to hold back from any part of your life anymore. "
I should say thank you. I should say something composed and gracious. What I actually do is turn my head and look at Akyl, and find he's already looking at me. The careful neutrality is gone from his face entirely.
What's underneath it makes my mouth go dry.
The drive home takes twenty-two minutes.
Neither of us speaks. His hands are steady on the wheel in a way that I'm learning to read as the opposite of calm.
The more controlled Akyl appears, the more is happening underneath.
I've watched him sign a contract that moved eight figures with less visible tension than he's carrying in his jaw right now.
I put my hand on his thigh, just above the knee. I feel the muscle go rigid under my palm.
"Katriona." His voice is very even. "If you want to arrive home in one piece, you'll move your hand."
"And if I don't move it?"
His knuckles whiten on the wheel. "Then I pull over on a public road and that's not how I intend the next several hours to go."
Heat blooms low in my stomach, in the place that for years only ever meant pain and now means something else entirely. I leave my hand exactly where it is.
He drives slightly faster.
We get home and the house is empty. He arranged that too, I realize.
Kasimir gone, the staff dismissed, the whole of it ours and silent and gold-lit in the late afternoon.
He's thought about this. He's planned every part of it, and the knowledge of that, that I am the thing he has been planning around for six weeks, undoes something in me before he's even touched me.
The door closes behind us. I turn to face him in the hallway and he's right there, closer than I expected, and for a moment neither of us moves.
"You waited," I say.
"I told you I would."
"Six weeks. You gave me oral on the night you proposed and then you didn't touch me again. Not really." I look up at him. "Do you know what that did to me?"
"I have some idea." His voice drops. "I know what it did to me.” He lifts one hand and brushes my hair back from my face, and the touch is so gentle and so deliberate that it makes the rest of me ache. "Marsh said everything."
"He did."
"I want to be very clear about something before I take you upstairs.
" His thumb traces the line of my jaw. "We stop the moment anything is wrong.
The good kind of intensity, I want all of it.
The other kind, you tell me, and I stop.
I won't be disappointed, and you won't apologize.
Those are the terms. Do you accept them? "
I think about every man who ever made me feel like my body was an inconvenience. Every doctor who told me the pain was in my head. Every time I learned to swallow a wince so I wouldn't be a burden.
And I think about this man, who has spent six weeks memorizing the difference between my flinch of pain and my shiver of want so precisely that I trust him to know my body better than I do.
"I accept your terms," I say. "Now stop talking and take me upstairs before I change my mind about how romantic you are."
He doesn't carry me this time. He takes my hand and he leads me, and there's something about the walk up the stairs, the deliberate unhurried pace of it, that's almost worse than being carried. Every step is a promise. By the time we reach the bedroom door I can barely breathe.
Inside, the light is low and warm. He turns me to face him and just looks at me, the way he always does.
"Stop assessing me," I say.
"I'm not assessing. I'm appreciating. There's a difference. You taught me the difference."
He reaches for the hem of my T-shirt and lifts it, and the fabric stretches and slides, and he eases it over my head and lets it fall.
Then the leggings which he slides over my hips and thighs in a way that allows the palms of his hands to stroke over my skin.
I stand in front of him and I don't reach to cover anything, because the way he's looking at me makes covering up feel like an insult to us both.
"Six weeks ago I told you I was going to be thorough," he says, walking me backward toward the bed with slow, certain steps. "Repeatedly. For a very long time."
"I remember. I wrote it down."
"You did not write it down."
"I committed it to memory. Same thing. I have an excellent memory for promises I intend to collect on."
The backs of my knees hit the mattress and I sit.
He follows me down, easing me back against the pillows with a care that hasn't left him even now, even with whatever is burning behind his eyes.
He braces over me, his weight on his forearms, and he kisses me, and this time there's nothing careful in it at all.
This is the kiss he's been holding back for six weeks.
It's deep and consuming and it has intent behind it, and I feel it everywhere, in my chest, in my hands, in the place low in my body that has waited so long to mean something good.
I fist my hands in his shirt and pull, and buttons give way, and I get my hands on the warm bare plane of his chest and feel his heart going hard and fast beneath my palm.
"You're wearing too much," I say against his mouth.
"You're impatient."
"I've waited too long to feel good in my own body and six weeks for you specifically. I think I've earned impatience."
Something shifts in his expression at that, goes darker and softer at once, and he sits back on his knees and strips the ruined shirt off and the rest follows until there's nothing between us.
He settles over me again and the first full press of his skin against mine pulls a sound out of me I didn't plan to make.
He takes his time, using his hands and his mouth, slow and reverent. He pays attention the way only he pays attention, total and unhurried, reading every breath and every shift, and each time I make a sound he files it away and comes back to whatever caused it.
When his mouth finds the soft skin below my navel near the still-pink surgery scars, he pauses. He presses a gentle kiss there, to the place that used to be a battlefield.
"This body," he says quietly against my skin, "carried you through everything. I'm going to spend the rest of my life making sure it only ever knows this from now on."
I press the heel of my hand against my eyes because I will not cry during sex, I will not, and he feels it, and he moves back up to kiss the corner of my eye where the tear escaped anyway.
"Good kind or bad kind," he murmurs.
"Good kind. The best kind. Don't you dare stop."
He doesn't.
When he finally moves over me, when there's no more space left between us and he's watching my face for the exact thing he's spent six weeks learning to read, I expect the old fear. The bracing. The part of me that has always associated this with something that would cost me.
It doesn't come.
There's only him, and the slow careful press of him. The moment my body opens to it without a single note of the old pain, just fullness and heat and the overwhelming rightness of it, I understand what he meant about replacing the association.
"Okay?" His voice is wrecked, his control hanging by something thin.
"Better than okay." I get my hands in his hair and pull him down so I can see his eyes. "It feels good. Right."
He begins to move.
What follows is slow and deep and devastating, and he keeps his eyes on mine through almost all of it, and he says my name like it's a thing he's still amazed he's allowed to say.
He's careful even now, even past the boundary of his own restraint, attentive to every shift in me, and somehow that care makes it more intense rather than less, because I have never in my life been touched by someone paying this much attention to whether I was alright.
I feel it building, the heat low and tightening.
He feels it too, then he adjusts to find the angle and the rhythm and the exact pressure I need, and when I break it's nothing like the careful contained pleasure of six weeks ago.
This time it takes all of me, head to feet, and I cry out his name and grip him like an anchor while he holds me through it, murmuring things against my throat that I'm too far gone to fully hear.
He follows me a few strokes later, his whole body going taut, a low broken sound torn out of him as he buries himself deep and holds there, shaking, his forehead dropped against my shoulder.
We stay like that for a long moment, both of us breathing hard, his weight a warm and grounding thing above me.
"I'm not crushing you?" he asks against my neck.
"No. Stay." I wrap my arms around his back. "Don't move yet."
He stays. After a while he shifts us so we're on our sides facing each other, still tangled, and he brushes the damp hair off my face and looks at me with an expression of such naked tenderness that I have to remind myself this is the man his enemies are afraid to be in a room with.
"Was any of it bad," he asks. "The real kind."
"None of it." I press my hand flat against his chest, over the heart that's still slowing down.
"Akyl. None of it hurt. Do you understand what that means?
I just did that, and nothing hurt, and it was the best thing I've ever felt, and I didn't think I'd get to have this.
I'd written it off. I'd put it on the list of things that were for other women, healthy women, women whose bodies worked. "
"Your body works." He kisses my forehead. "Your body is extraordinary. And now it's mine to take care of, and I take exceptional care of what's mine."
"Possessive."
"Profoundly." He doesn't apologize for it. He never does.
I laugh. "I have something to tell you," I say into his chest, when I've collected myself.
I feel him go still. "Go on."
"Not bad. Don't tense up." I tilt my head back to look at him. "The foundation got its approval today. It’s official." I can’t stop grinning. “It means I can finally start helping other women.”
His arm tightens around me. "You did that."
"We did that. Your name opened the door. I just refused to let it close again." I settle back against him. "There's going to be so many people I can help, Akyl. A lot more. I can feel it. I'm going to be very busy and very loud and probably very irritating to a number of medical administrators."
"Good." I feel him smile against my hair. "I look forward to funding their distress."