Chapter 1 #2
I don’t know which of us closed the remaining distance. Maybe it was simultaneous—two people making the same terrible, inevitable decision at exactly the same moment. His mouth found mine, and the cold night air disappeared.
He didn’t rush. That was the first thing I noticed—the deliberate, unhurried way he kissed me, like he had all the time in the world and had already decided exactly how he intended to use it.
Not frantic. Slow and searching, the kind of kiss that asks a question and waits for the answer.
His patience was more dangerous than urgency ever could be.
I gave it to him, my hands fisting in his jacket, pulling him closer until there was no cold air left between us.
One hand slid up my spine, cupping the back of my neck, his thumb tracing the line of my throat like he was reading something written there.
The touch was so deliberate—so unhurried—that I felt it everywhere.
He made a low sound against my mouth when I pressed into him — the sound of a man who had not planned on this.
“Still calculating?” I managed, breathless.
“Constantly.” His lips dragged down my jaw, my throat, teeth grazing the sensitive skin below my ear. “My numbers keep changing.”
His mouth found the curve of my neck and stayed there, warm and intent, while his hands began to move. One slid up my ribcage, thumb brushing the underside of my breast through the fabric of my dress, learning the weight of it before his palm closed over me fully. I exhaled sharply.
“You’re very sure of yourself,” I said, though my voice had lost some of its edge.
“Am I wrong to be?”
I didn’t answer. He took that as the answer it was.
He walked me gently back against the railing, one hand braced beside mine on the cold iron, his mouth still tracing patterns against my throat while his other hand slid down, gathering fabric at my thigh until his fingers found bare skin.
The city glittered below us — a hundred thousand lights indifferent to the fact that I was forty floors up and losing ground fast.
When his fingers slipped beneath the lace and found me, his exhale was slow and reverent.
“God,” he breathed. Just that. Like the word cost him something.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said faintly.
“Em.” My name in his mouth—rough and amused and something else underneath. “I can feel exactly how flattering it is.”
I made a sound that was absolutely not a laugh and absolutely not a moan, somewhere humiliatingly between the two.
He worked me with devastating focus—unhurried, attentive, two fingers curling deep while his thumb traced slow, knowing circles, learning what made me gasp and returning to it with the precision of a man who paid very close attention.
His lips moved against my temple, my cheekbone, the corner of my jaw.
His free hand palmed my breast again, fingers finding the peak through silk and rolling gently until I arched into him with a sharp inhale.
“Still want me to introduce myself?” he murmured.
“I want you to—” The thought dissolved. “Don’t stop.”
“That wasn’t an introduction.”
“I will push you off this balcony.”
He laughed—warm and quiet, pressed into my hair—even as his fingers coaxed me higher. When I came it built slowly then broke all at once, and I muffled the sound against the side of his neck, my nails pressing crescents into his shoulders through the wool of his jacket.
He held me through it. That surprised me—the steadiness of his hands, the way his lips pressed briefly to my temple like punctuation.
Then he was turning me gently, one hand splayed warm and firm against my stomach, and I felt him—the hard, insistent press of him against me, the barely-leashed restraint in the way he was breathing.
“Still thinking about pushing me off?” he said against my ear.
“Jury’s still out.”
His lips curved against my neck. Then: “Tell me to stop.”
I reached back and found him instead. Felt him shudder. Felt the restraint in him crack, just slightly, at the edges.
He entered me slowly—one hand still pressed flat and warm against my stomach, the other braced on the railing beside mine, his forehead dropping to rest between my shoulder blades. The stretch of him pulling a soft, fractured sound from my throat that the wind took before I could regret it.
Below us, Chicago glittered on—relentless and indifferent, a hundred thousand lives in motion. Up here there was only the cold iron under my hands, the heat of him at my back, and the devastating, disorienting feeling of being completely undone by a man whose name I didn’t even know.
He began to move.
Deep. Deliberate. Each thrust rolling through me like a tide, unhurried and consuming, his lips pressed to the curve of my neck like he was trying to memorize something he knew he wouldn’t be allowed to keep.
When I tipped my hips back to take him deeper, he groaned quietly into my hair—low and unguarded, nothing like the controlled voice he’d used all evening—and the sound of it did something to my chest I didn’t have words for yet.
“You feel—” He stopped. His hand tightened on my hip. “I can’t—”
“I know,” I breathed. Because I did. Because whatever this was—this reckless, nameless, spectacular mistake—I felt it too.
When I finally fractured, it was with his name on my lips—except I didn’t know his name, so it came out as nothing, just a breathless sound swallowed by the night.
He followed, one arm wrapping around me, pulling me back against him, his release quiet and undone, his mouth pressed into my hair like a secret.
For a long moment there was only our breathing and the city below.
His forehead rested between my shoulders. His lips brushed my skin—barely a touch, softer than anything else about the night. I turned my cheek against the cool railing and opened my mouth to ask—
The glass door behind us swung open.
Laughter spilled out first, bright and careless, followed by the sharp click of heels. “Oh god—sorry, I didn’t realize—” The voice cut off in embarrassed retreat, the door swinging shut behind her.
But the spell was broken.
I straightened, smoothing my dress with hands that weren’t entirely steady. When I turned, the balcony was empty.
He was gone.
And I never even got his name.
The ballroom hit me like a wall of perfume and privilege when I pushed back through the doors, the string quartet swelling into something triumphant and oblivious.
I grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing server and positioned myself near the back wall, notebook ready, trying to remember how to look like a person who hadn’t just done something spectacularly inadvisable on a forty-floor balcony.
Get it together, Rivera.
I’d been imagining Sebastian Laurent for months. I’d pictured a silver-haired power broker. Someone paunchy from too many charity galas, with the kind of entitled sneer that came from never being questioned.
The massive screen behind the podium flickered to life.
Dark hair. Storm-gray eyes. A jaw that could cut glass.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our host and the visionary behind the Lakefront Development Project—Sebastian Laurent.”
The man from the balcony stepped into the spotlight.
My champagne glass nearly slipped from my fingers.
The city lights. His hand warm against my stomach. My numbers keep changing.
Our eyes met across the crowded ballroom. His expression was unreadable—carefully, deliberately unreadable, which told me everything.
He’d known. The entire time, he’d known exactly who I was.
The corner of his mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite an apology.
The heat that had been pooling in my chest since the balcony curdled into something sharper. Something that felt a lot like fury—at him, at myself, at the spectacular stupidity of what I’d just done.
I set my champagne down with deliberate precision and pulled out my pen.
Game on.