Chapter 20 #3
“There?” he asked breathlessly, his eyes on mine.
“There. Don’t you dare move.”
He didn’t move. Not away. He moved deeper, harder, with a rhythm that was building toward something I could feel in every nerve ending.
My nails dragged down his back and he hissed.
His pace faltered for one beat before quickening.
The tension coiled in both of us, tighter with every movement, every breath, every whispered word that was half my name and half something wordless and desperate.
His mouth found the spot below my ear, his teeth grazing the skin there, his hot breath vibrating against me. I turned my head and caught his mouth, kissing him hard and messy. He kissed me back with the same desperation, his tongue against mine, his groan swallowed by my mouth.
His hand found mine on the pillow above my head. His fingers laced through mine, pinning my hand there. The gesture was possessive and tender at once, and I curled my fingers around his and held on.
“Look at me,” he said, his forehead against mine, his eyes open and dark, more vulnerable than I’d ever seen him. “I want to see you.”
The release hit me first. It built and built, crested and broke through me in a wave that started in my core and radiated outward until my whole body was shaking, his name leaving my mouth half cry, half breath, entirely without composure.
My fingers tightened in his. My back arched off the mattress.
My vision went white at the edges, and I came apart in his arms with a completeness that was terrifying and beautiful and nothing I’d ever experienced before.
He watched me through it. Every second. His eyes never left mine. And when I came back to myself, trembling and gasping, he kissed me once, deep and tender, and then he let go.
He followed me over the edge with a groan that was low and broken and muffled against my neck. His body shuddered against mine, his hips pressing deep one final time, his arm wrapping around my waist and pulling me flush against him like he wanted to erase the space between us entirely.
I felt him come undone as I just had, completely and without reservation, and I held him through it as he’d held me, my hands in his hair, my lips against his temple, my heart beating so hard it felt like it might break free.
We stayed like that. Tangled and trembling and breathing each other’s air.
His weight on me was heavy and warm and grounding and I didn’t want him to move.
Not yet. Not for a long time. I wanted to stay exactly here, in this bed, with this man who had never let anyone this close.
I wanted the rest of the world to wait outside the door until we were ready to let it back in.
His lips found my shoulder and pressed there, lingering. His breath was warm and uneven against my skin.
“Stay,” he said. One word. Rough and quiet, carrying everything he hadn’t been able to say during the argument or any of the weeks before it.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. And this time, I meant it in a way that went far beyond the contract.
He rolled to the side eventually, pulling me with him, my back against his chest, his arms wrapped around me, his face pressed into my hair.
Neither of us spoke for a long time. There weren’t words for what had just happened.
There were sounds. The rain easing against the windows.
Our breathing found the same rhythm. His heartbeat under my ear, fast and gradually slowing.
The wind was dying down. The storm was passing.
I broke the silence first. “I don’t know what happened between you and your brother.
I don’t have every piece. Probably never will.
” I waited until I had the right words. “But in my eyes, Christopher, you’re better than Dominic in every single way.
And every person in your life who looked at both brothers and chose his side must have had terrible, abysmal, genuinely embarrassing taste. ”
He was still behind me. For a second I thought I’d pushed too far, said the wrong thing, stepped into a place he wasn’t ready to let me into.
Then I felt his chest shake. Once. Twice.
He was laughing.
He kissed my forehead. My eyelids. The tip of my nose. The corner of my mouth.
Christopher Vale kissed differently now. The hunger was still there underneath, I could feel it in the way his fingers tightened on my waist, but there was also something new.
Something careful, gentle, and true.
I lay in his arms and wondered if this meant as much to him as it did to me. If the tenderness was real or just the afterglow. If the man who’d said mine against my skin with so much desperation meant it the way I wanted him to mean it or the way the contract required him to.
The rain eased. His breathing evened out. His arms didn’t loosen.
I closed my eyes and pressed my face against his chest and listened to his heart and thought: I am so far over my head that the surface isn’t even visible anymore.
I wasn’t sinking. I was diving, on purpose, with my eyes wide open.