23. Zoe
ZOE
The shower had been running long enough that the whole room had gone soft at the edges, the mirror fogged, the air thick and warm against my skin.
I was supposed to be getting dressed. I had a towel in my hand and one honest intention, and then the glass door opened and every plan I had walked straight out of my head.
He stepped out into the steam with water still tracking down him, and I forgot, for a few full seconds, how to do anything but look.
I have seen him in a thousand expensive rooms wearing armor cut by men who charge by the inch.
None of it has ever done him justice. This was the truth of him, stripped of the suits and the cold and the careful distance he keeps from the world, all that hard-earned muscle moving under wet skin, the old scars he never explains catching the light, the lines of him that two decades of a dangerous life had carved and never once softened.
Forty looked obscene on this man. It was not fair, and I had stopped pretending to be above noticing.
“I never realized how much I missed that body of yours,” I said, leaning back against the cool tile with the towel forgotten in my hands. “Look at you. That is genuinely unfair to the rest of us. So hot it is almost rude.”
He went still, the way a big animal goes still, and lifted his eyes to mine through the steam.
“Be careful what you say to me right now.” His voice had dropped into that low register that lives somewhere under his ribs, the one that goes straight through me every time. “I have missed you far more than you know.”
“Why would I be careful?” I let the towel fall. I watched his gaze follow it down and then climb slowly back up me, and I felt that look land on every inch it crossed. “I happen to like exactly what you want to happen.”
“Are you certain about that?” He came a step closer, near enough now that the heat of him reached me before his hands did, and the question was not really a question. It was a door he was holding open for me to walk through first.
“Yeah.” I tipped my chin up so he had to look at me. “But you control yourself, Mr. Kuznetsov. I am pregnant, remember?”
Something moved across his face when I said it, something that was hunger and tenderness wearing the same expression, and it undid me faster than any line he could have used.
“I will be careful with you,” he said, bringing one hand up to the side of my throat, his thumb resting just under my jaw where he could feel my pulse already running.
“So careful you will lose your mind over how careful I am. I am going to take my time with you until slow is the cruelest thing anyone has ever done to you, and you are going to be the one who begs.”
“I do not beg,” I told him.
“We will see.”
Then he kissed me, and the argument ended before it began.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was a man who had spent a week believing he had lost this, pouring all of that fear and all of that relief into my mouth at once, his hand sliding from my throat into my wet hair to tilt my head exactly where he wanted it.
I went up on my toes and gripped his shoulders and kissed him back like I was trying to prove something, and the slick heat of his skin under my palms turned my whole body into one long pull toward him.
He tasted of warm water and want. When I dragged my nails lightly down the hard plane of his chest he made a low sound into my mouth, and I felt the exact moment his control started to slip, felt it in the way his hands tightened and his breathing went ragged against my lips.
He walked me backward out of the steam and into the cooler air of the bedroom without ever breaking from my mouth, his hands learning me again like he had been away years instead of weeks.
He drew the thin robe off my shoulders and let it pool at my feet, and then he simply looked at me, and the way he looked stripped me far more thoroughly than the robe had.
“You are even more beautiful than I let myself remember,” he said, low, almost rough. “And I let myself remember constantly.”
“Stop talking and prove it,” I said, which was a mistake, because he smiled, slow and certain, and I understood immediately that I had just handed a very patient man an excuse to make me wait for every second of it.
He laid me back on the bed like I was something breakable and got there himself without hurry, settling his weight on his forearms so almost none of it pressed on me, and he kissed his way down from my mouth with a thoroughness that bordered on cruelty.
My throat. The hollow beneath it. He took his time at my breasts, drawing one tight peak into the heat of his mouth and rolling his tongue over it until I gasped, then the other, his hand cupping and kneading the one his mouth had left, until I was arching up off the sheets and pushing myself into him and saying things I would not repeat in daylight.
He scraped his teeth gently over me and soothed it with his tongue and I felt the answering pull of it low in my belly, a slow clench of need that had me already wet and aching before he had gone any lower.
He paused at the still-flat plane of my stomach, and I felt him press one kiss there that had nothing to do with want and everything to do with what was growing under it, and my eyes stung without my permission.
Then he kept moving lower, and the tenderness sharpened into something else.
He settled between my thighs and pushed them wider with his shoulders, and then he put his mouth on me, and the first slow drag of his tongue through the heat of me pulled a sound out of my throat I did not know I had been holding.
He licked into me unhurried and thorough, finding the place that made my hips jump and then circling it with the flat of his tongue, again and again, learning the exact rhythm that made me shake.
One heavy hand splayed across my lower belly to hold me still.
The other gripped my thigh open so I could not close against the feeling.
When he closed his lips around that aching knot of nerves and sucked, slow and deep, I cried out and bucked up into his mouth, and he let me, holding me there and working me with his tongue while I came apart at the seams. He built it and built it, climbing me right to the brink and then easing off the second I clenched, leaving me hanging and desperate, then climbing me again, until I had both hands fisted in his hair and the careful, composed woman I show the world had dissolved into nothing at all.
“Andrei.” His name came out wrecked. “Please. I swear to God.”
“There it is,” he murmured against me, insufferably pleased with himself, and I would have hated him for it if he had not picked that exact moment to relent.
He sealed his mouth over me and pushed two thick fingers slowly inside me at the same time, curling them up against the spot that made my whole body jerk, working them in rhythm with his tongue until the pleasure wound tighter and tighter and there was nowhere left for it to go.
I shattered with my back arched off the bed and his name torn out of my mouth, clenching around his fingers in long pulses while he carried me through every last wave of it, his free hand laced tight through mine to anchor me while the whole room went white at the edges.
I was still shaking when he came up over me, kissing the tremor out of my jaw, my cheek, the corner of my mouth.
“Tell me you still want this,” he said against my lips, and underneath all that control I could hear how close to the edge of his own he was. “Say the word, and I will worship you so gently it ruins you for anything less.”
“The word is yes,” I said, pulling him down by the back of the neck until there was no space left anywhere between us. “All of you. Now. Gently, before I lose my patience and take it myself.”
He notched himself against me, still slick from my own release, and pressed in slowly, watching my face the entire time, reading every flicker of it the way he reads everything, ready to stop at the smallest wrong breath.
There was no wrong breath. There was only the long, full, exquisite stretch of him pushing into me, thick and deliberate, inch by inch, my body giving way around him until he was seated as deep as he could go and we both went still, foreheads touching, breathing the same air.
The fullness of it bordered on too much and landed exactly right, and the groan he let out against my mouth told me he was holding himself together by a thread.
“There she is,” he said hoarsely. “There is my whole world.”
He began to move in me with a control that should have been illegal, drawing himself almost all the way out and then gliding slowly back to the hilt, every long stroke dragging against that oversensitive place inside me until I saw stars.
One arm stayed braced to keep his weight off me and the baby.
His other hand cradled the side of my face like I might break and like he would die before he let me.
I wrapped my legs around him and tilted my hips and took him deeper, and the slow burn of it built all over again, lower and heavier this time, somewhere the first one had not even reached.
“You are not playing fair,” I gasped.
“No,” he agreed, not changing his pace by a single degree. “I told you. Slow. Until you cannot remember a single reason you ever walked away from me.”
“Faster, then. Please.”
“Beg me properly.”
“I am begging,” I said, and I was, and the sound of it falling out of my own mouth was the last thing either of us could stand.
He gave me what I asked for, finally, his hips driving into me deeper and surer, the slow restraint cracking into something hungrier, though even then his hand stayed soft on my face and his weight stayed off the baby.
He reached between us and pressed his thumb exactly where I needed it, circling there with every deep thrust, and the heat coiled and coiled and wound unbearably tight until it snapped and took the both of us with it at once.
I came around him in deep pulses, gasping his name, and felt him bury himself to the root and follow me over, shuddering, his release spilling hot inside me and my own name pressed into my throat like a prayer he had finally given up being too proud to say.
For a while afterward neither of us moved at all. He held himself off me on one trembling arm until his breathing slowed, then he eased down and gathered me in, gentle even in the aftermath, tucking me into the warm circle of him with the ocean still going outside the open windows.
I lay there with my ear over his heart, listening to it come back down to earth, and felt something in me settle that had been off its hinge for a week and more.
He pulled the sheet up over us and ran his fingers in slow lines up and down my spine, and I traced one of the old scars on his chest with a lazy fingertip, the way I always do, knowing he will never tell me where it came from and not really needing him to.
“Thank you,” I said into his skin.
“For what?” I felt the rumble of it under my cheek.
“For making me this happy.” It came out smaller than I meant it to, and more honest. “I had almost talked myself into believing I was not allowed to be. Out here, hiding, with everything on fire back home. And then you got off that helicopter and ran across a field like a lunatic and ruined all my very mature plans to be miserable alone. Thank you for that. For all of it.”
His arm tightened around me. When he answered, the careful, fearsome man was nowhere in his voice. There was only the other one, the one I am fairly sure no one else on earth has ever been allowed to hear.
“You make me happy in ways I do not have the words for,” he said.
“And I have words for almost everything. I spent forty years certain a life like this belonged to other men. Softer men. Men the world had been kinder to. I had made my peace with the cold version, the one with the money and the fear and the empty rooms.” He pressed his lips to the top of my head and left them there a moment.
“Then a sharp-mouthed girl in a green dress walked into my life and made the cold version unlivable. You did not only make me happy, Zoe. You made me possible. There is a difference, and I feel it every time you breathe.”
I lifted my head to look at him, and I did not have a single clever thing to say, which for me is rare enough to be its own confession.
“See,” I managed finally, my voice not entirely steady. “That. Right there. That is the one nobody warned me about. I came for the grumpy oldie and somewhere along the way I got a poet.”
“Tell anyone and I will deny every word.”
“I would not dream of it. He is mine.” I settled back down against him, fitting myself into the place I had spent a week pretending I did not miss. “All three of us are staying right here for the rest of this week, by the way. You promised me peace. I am collecting.”
“Every last day of it,” he agreed, his hand coming to rest, warm and certain, low over my stomach where our future was quietly busy becoming itself. “No phones. No war. Just this.”
Outside, the sun was doing its long, slow fall into the water again, throwing gold across the ceiling, and I lay wrapped in the only safe thing I have ever fully trusted, and for the first time in longer than I could name, I let myself be exactly, simply, dangerously happy.