Chapter 23 #2
I cross the room and sit beside him on the bed, and the proximity is deliberate.
I have come to him before out of adrenaline, out of anger, out of the desperate collision of two people who spent a decade pretending the other one didn't matter.
This is different. This is the quiet after the storm, and I am choosing to be here knowing exactly what it means.
"I'm tired," I tell him. The confession is small and costs more than it should, because Victoria Cross does not admit to fatigue, to vulnerability, to the exhaustion that comes from carrying a decade of grief in a body that has forgotten how to set it down.
"I know." His voice drops into the register that lives below professional, below casual, in the space that belongs only to rooms with locked doors and lowered lights.
His hand comes up and his thumb traces the line of my jaw, and the tenderness of the gesture is so far from the man who pinned me against a briefing room wall that my throat tightens.
I let him see it. The grief and the tiredness and the loneliness that calcified into the armor I wear. I do not reconstruct the walls when his gaze reaches the cracks.
Roman leans forward and presses his mouth to my forehead, and the contact is soft and holds none of the urgency that has characterized every other time we have touched.
My eyes close. His lips move against my hairline, tracing the silver threading through the brown, and the patience of it undoes something I have been holding so long it had become structural, load-bearing, a part of the architecture I mistook for a part of myself.
"Come here," he says, and his hands guide my hips toward him with a gentleness that is new and deliberate, and he is choosing, for once, not to break what he's holding.
I go. I let him pull me close, and when his mouth traces the hinge of my jaw, the hollow beneath my ear, my breath stutters in a way I can't control.
His lips are unhurried against my throat, following the tendon, the pulse point, and the sound he makes against my skin is low and rough and involuntary, the sound of a man who has been holding himself in check and is letting the leash out one careful inch at a time.
My shirt goes first. His hands gather the hem and lift, and his knuckles drag along my ribs as the fabric rises, and the contact sends a flush of heat down my spine.
He pulls the shirt over my head and drops it and looks at me, and the way he looks is the thing that terrifies me, because Roman Frost has studied intelligence briefings with less focus than he is giving the exposed line of my collarbone.
His thumb traces the scar there, the raised tissue he always pauses over, moving with a slowness that turns damage into something worth mapping. Then his mouth follows, lips pressing against the scar, and the heat of his breath on that ruined skin makes my chest cavity contract.
I reach behind my back and unclasp my bra.
The straps slide down my arms and the cool air touches my breasts, and I watch his face change.
His jaw tightens. His breathing thins. His hands flex at his sides, fingers curling and releasing, and I can see the restraint in the tension along his forearms, a dominant man choosing gentleness like a language he is teaching himself to speak.
"Roman." I take his wrists and bring his hands to my body. "You don't have to be careful."
"Tonight I do." His palms close over my breasts, and the heat of his hands against my bare skin sends a shock through my nervous system that has nothing to do with temperature.
His thumbs brush my nipples, slow circles that tighten them to hard peaks, and the pressure is light enough to make me push into his palms for more.
He gives it. His thumbs press harder, rolling the stiff flesh between finger and thumb, and the sensation threads a line of heat from my breasts straight to my core.
I pull his shirt over his head and press my palms flat against his chest, feeling the heartbeat that spent a decade in the world without me.
The muscle beneath my hands is solid and alive, and the aliveness of him is what breaks through the last of it, the last wall, the last defense, the last piece of Victoria Cross the intelligence broker who does not need anyone.
His mouth drops to my breast. The first touch of his tongue against my nipple pulls a sound from somewhere low in my throat, urgent and half-formed, and his lips close around the peak and he sucks, slow and deep, and my fingers twist into his hair and hold him there.
The pull of his mouth sends wet heat flooding between my thighs. He switches to the other breast and his hand keeps working the one his mouth left, rolling the slick nipple, keeping it tight, and the dual sensation makes my hips rock forward against him, seeking friction I haven't asked for yet.
He eases me back against the pillows. His mouth leaves my breast and traces down my sternum, across the plane of my stomach, and his hands work the button of my trousers with a focus that makes me lift my hips to help.
He strips me with efficient care, trousers and underwear together, and the cool air touches the wet heat between my legs.
Every defense is removed. The vulnerability is so acute that my instinct is to close my thighs and rebuild every wall he just dismantled.
I don't. I watch him look at me, and what I see in his face is not possession. Not tonight. Tonight it is reverence carried in the hands of a man who does not traffic in reverence, and that is what keeps my knees apart.
He settles between my thighs and his mouth presses against the inside of my knee.
He kisses a path upward, his stubble scraping against skin that grows more sensitive with every inch he climbs.
The inside of my thigh. Higher. The crease where my leg meets my hip, and his breath is against the most intimate part of me, and I am shaking.
"Look at me," he says, and his voice has gone raw, stripped to something that sounds nothing like the man who gives clipped orders over comms.
I look. His eyes hold mine as his mouth closes over me, and the first stroke of his tongue is slow and devastatingly precise, parting me, finding the swollen bundle of nerves with an accuracy that makes my back arch off the bed.
My hand goes to his hair. My fingers grip, and I feel the vibration of his groan against my flesh, a low rumble that adds another layer of sensation.
He works me with his tongue in unhurried strokes, flat and wet, then circling the sensitive peak with the tip, then drawing it between his lips and sucking gently, and each variation sends a different current through my body, building the charge in increments that he is calibrating as precisely as any operation.
My thighs tremble against his shoulders. The sounds I am making are embarrassing, broken fragments of breath and his name and pleas I will never repeat, and Roman drinks them in.
His hands grip my hips, holding me still when I try to chase the pressure, and the gentle restraint is as maddening as anything he has done with force.
He slows when I get close, easing back to soft, feathering licks that keep me on the edge without letting me fall, and the denial is so precisely timed that I understand he is taking me apart with the same methodical patience he applies to everything.
"Roman, please." The words scrape out of my throat.
He gives me what I asked for. Two fingers slide inside me, curving forward to the place that makes my vision blur, and his mouth returns to my clit with renewed focus, sucking in rhythm with the thrust of his fingers, and the dual pressure is the thing that breaks me.
The orgasm rolls through me in deep, clenching waves, pulling his fingers deeper, and the sounds coming from my mouth are raw and loud and I can't stop them, and I feel him groan against me as my body tightens around his hand.
He stays with me through it, his tongue softening as the spasms ease, his fingers stilling inside me, and the aftershocks pulse through my muscles for long seconds while I remember how to breathe.
He presses his mouth against my inner thigh, and the kiss is gentle and his lips are wet with me, and the intimacy of that registers in a place beyond the physical.
I pull him up. My hands go to his belt, his zipper, and I push his trousers and boxers down together because I am done with patience. He kicks them off, and the hard length of his cock presses against my thigh, thick and hot, and I wrap my hand around him.
His hips jerk. A rough exhale leaves his chest, and the tension in his arms tells me he is fighting not to thrust into my grip.
I stroke him, base to tip, feeling the heat of him in my palm, and the slickness at the head tells me he has been holding himself in check for longer than his composure let on.
"Vix." My name comes out fractured. "If you keep doing that, this ends before I'm inside you."
I release him and pull him closer by the hips, guiding him between my thighs.
He braces himself above me on one forearm, and his free hand reaches between us, positions himself at my entrance, and pauses.
The head of his cock is pressing against me, barely inside, the stretch a promise of what comes next.
His eyes lock on mine, and the question in them is not about permission. It is about whether I am here. Present. Choosing.
I answer by lifting my hips and taking the first inch of him, and his groan is guttural, dragged from somewhere deep in his chest. He sinks into me slowly, watching my face the whole time, and this is the intimacy that exceeds the physical.