Chapter 24 #2
Her fingers found the lapels of my jacket, curling into the fabric.
“But I missed you.” The words came out rough, stripped of everything except truth.
“God help me, Sebastian, I missed you so much it hurt to breathe. And watching you in that press room just now—” She stopped.
Shook her head. “You stood in the fire. You actually stood in it.”
I cupped her face in both hands, tilting it up to mine. “Tell me to stop. If this isn’t what you want—”
She kissed me before I could finish.
It wasn’t gentle — three weeks of separation and hurt and longing poured into the press of her lips against mine, her hands fisting in my jacket, pulling me closer.
I groaned and wrapped my arms around her, one hand in her hair, the other at the small of her back, and kissed her back with everything I had.
She tasted like coffee and determination. Like every conversation we’d had that had ended in a question neither of us knew how to answer yet. Like coming back to something I should never have let slip.
When we finally broke apart, both breathing hard, her forehead dropped to my shoulder.
“Is this right?” I murmured against her hair. “After everything—”
“Yes.” She pulled back enough to look at me, her eyes dark and certain. “Don’t overthink it. I spent three weeks thinking about it for both of us.”
I kissed her again — slower this time, one hand cradling her jaw, the other pressed flat against the railing behind her. She made a sound against my mouth that I felt in my spine.
“Here?” I said against her lips.
“Here.” Her hands worked at my belt, and I felt the slight tremor in her fingers — not uncertainty, I understood now. Emotion. The specific physical expression of something too large for the body to contain quietly. “Now. I need to feel alive. I need to feel you.”
I kissed down her neck, tasting salt and perfume, her pulse jumping under my lips. Her dress was the professional armor she wore to face the world — structured, precise, buttons down the front. I undid each one slowly, watching her skin appear in the amber glow of the city below us.
“You’re shaking,” she observed.
“I’ve wanted this.” I pressed my lips to her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder, the soft skin above her heart.
“Wanted you. Every night in that empty penthouse, thinking about how badly I’d failed us.
About what I should have done differently.
About the specific, devastating sound you make when you finally stop fighting what you feel. ”
“We failed each other.” She pulled my shirt free from my trousers, her palms spreading warm against my stomach. “Now we get to rebuild.”
I lifted her onto the wide stone railing, her legs wrapping around my waist, my hands steady at her hips.
The city wind caught her hair. The Chicago skyline stretched out behind her, all those lights that had witnessed everything — the gala, the investigation, the slow unraveling and the slower rebuilding — indifferent and vast and somehow appropriate.
I dropped to my knees.
“Bash—”
“Let me.” I pressed my lips to her inner thigh, felt her muscles jump beneath my mouth. “Let me show you what you mean to me.”
I took my time — learning her again after three weeks, returning to the specific things that undid her with the focused patience of a man who had been given something back that he’d thought he’d lost. She gripped my hair.
She said my name in the broken way she only did when she’d stopped being able to manage it into something quieter.
When she came apart the sound she made disappeared into the city noise below us, and I held her through every wave until she was pulling weakly at my shoulders.
I stood, and she reached for me immediately — warm and certain, her hand wrapping around me and drawing a sound from my throat that had nothing controlled about it.
“Tell me you want this,” I said.
“I want you.” Her voice was wrecked and beautiful. “I always wanted you. Even when I shouldn’t have.”
I pressed into her slowly — watching her face, giving her time, feeling the tight heat of her surround me with the specific devastating completeness of something that had been missing and was finally, exactly, back where it belonged.
“Look at me,” I said.
She opened her eyes. In them I saw everything she’d been carrying for three weeks — the hurt and the anger and beneath it all, the thing that had never gone away no matter how many times either of us had given it reason to.
Trust. Fragile, re-forming, genuinely earned.
“I see you,” she whispered. “All of you. The control freak and the protector and the boy who couldn’t save his mother. I see you, Sebastian.”
I started to move, and rational thought dissolved.
The city lights blurred. She met each movement with her whole body, her nails raking down my back, her legs locked around my waist, both of us building toward something that had nothing to do with strategy or control or the careful management of outcomes.
“Mine,” she gasped against my neck. “You’re mine too, you know. It goes both ways.”
The words hit me like a physical force. I buried my face in her shoulder and let go of every carefully constructed wall I’d ever built — let go of all of it, the whole architecture of a life designed never to need anyone — and followed her over the edge with her name in my mouth like the prayer it had always been.
Afterward, I held her against my chest, both of us breathing hard in the cold night air.
The city hummed below. Somewhere in its maze of light and glass, my empire was crumbling and reforming simultaneously — board members plotting, investors recalculating, the machinery of consequence grinding forward.
I had never felt more at peace.
“The board meeting is tomorrow,” she said eventually. “They’re going to try to force you out.”
“Probably.”
“Do you have a plan?”
I pressed a kiss to her hair. “Show up. Tell the truth. Let the chips fall.”
She pulled back to look at me, something like wonder in her expression. “Who are you and what have you done with Sebastian Laurent?”
“He’s still here.” I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear — the gesture that had become as natural as breathing. “Just learning. Slowly.”
My phone buzzed. The board meeting confirmation. Both of us required, per the notice.
Emilia saw the message over my shoulder. “They want me there too?”
“You’re part of this now.” I met her eyes. “Partner, not accessory. Equal standing, equal voice. If they want to discuss the implications of our relationship on Laurent Enterprises, then you should be in the room when they do.”
Something settled in her expression — not surprise, but recognition. The specific look of someone who had been promised something and was watching it actually happen.
“Then I guess we’d better get some sleep,” she said. “Big day tomorrow.”
“Stay with me tonight.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
“No.” I pulled her back against my chest, feeling the warm weight of her settle there like something returning to where it belonged. “It wasn’t.”
She kissed me once more — soft, unhurried, a promise that had nothing to do with tonight and everything to do with what came after it.
Then we gathered ourselves and made our way back inside, leaving the city lights to their indifferent business.
Tomorrow would bring the board and the consequences and a future neither of us could map completely.
But for the first time in three weeks, I wasn’t walking into it alone.
And for the first time in longer than I could remember, that felt exactly like it was supposed to feel.