Chapter 25 #2
The question hung between us — not really a question at all, but something that still needed to be said out loud.
Something that had been building since a rooftop in the cold November air, since a press conference that had cost him billions, since every choice he’d made in the past three months to put truth above control and partnership above protection.
Sebastian’s expression softened in the way that still, after everything, made my chest ache. “I’ll stay,” he said quietly. “Because you learned how to let me. And because I learned that staying doesn’t mean controlling.”
I kissed him then — slow and deep, tasting the promise underneath his words, feeling his hand slide into my hair with the unhurried certainty of someone who wasn’t going anywhere.
When I pulled back, his eyes were dark.
“We have two hours,” I murmured against his mouth.
“Less than that. Need to be there early.”
“Then we should probably stop kissing.”
His answer was to pull me into his lap, my dress riding up my thighs as I settled over him. “Should we?”
I traced the line of his jaw, feeling the tension beginning to coil in the muscles beneath my fingers. “Sebastian.”
“Emilia.” His voice had dropped to the low register that bypassed every rational thought I’d ever had. “We’ve been responsible for months. Communicating. Compromising. Being mature adults who talk through their problems.”
“That’s generally considered healthy.”
“It’s also exhausting.” He pressed his lips to my throat, and I felt his smile against my skin. “I want to be irresponsible for exactly—” he checked his watch over my shoulder “—thirty-seven minutes.”
I laughed, the sound dissolving into a gasp as his teeth grazed my pulse point. “Thirty-seven minutes is very specific.”
“I’m a detailed person.”
His hands worked at the zipper of my dress, drawing it down slowly, his lips following the path it revealed — the curve of my spine, the soft skin between my shoulder blades, each press of his mouth warm and deliberate.
The fabric slipped from my shoulders and his hands found my waist, then my hips, then wherever he decided, and I stopped keeping track.
“New?” he asked, tracing the edge of my bra with one finger.
“Maybe.”
“Definitely.” He leaned back to look at me properly, gray eyes darkening with the specific focused attention that still, after everything, made me feel like the only thing in the room worth looking at. “You’re trying to kill me.”
“If I were trying to kill you, I’d have worn the red set.”
“The red set is for special occasions.”
“And today isn’t special?”
His answer was to stand, lifting me with him in the easy fluid motion of a man who had learned exactly how to hold me.
I wrapped my legs around his waist as he carried me toward the bedroom, my dress falling away somewhere in the hallway.
His shirt joined it. His belt. A trail of discarded clothing marking our path like a map of where we’d been going since a service corridor in November.
He laid me on the bed and stood at the edge for a moment, just looking — the afternoon light falling across both of us, the room quiet around us, everything we’d built settling into the space.
“What?” I asked.
“Just making sure I remember this.” His voice was rough. “You, in our bed, looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you trust me.”
The words landed in my chest with the specific weight of everything they’d cost both of us to arrive at. I reached for him, pulling him down over me, feeling the solid warmth of him settle where he belonged.
“I do trust you,” I said against his mouth. “That’s what changed. That’s what all of it was for.”
He kissed me like the words meant everything — because they did, because they had cost us both something real to earn, because trust between two people who had started as adversaries and fought their way to this was not a small thing and we both understood that now.
His hands mapped familiar territory with the unhurried attention of someone who had learned a language and kept choosing to speak it — the curve of my hip, the soft skin below my navel, the place behind my knee that made me shiver. I arched into his touch, wanting more, wanting all of it.
“Sebastian.” His name came out breathless.
“Tell me what you want.”
“You. Just you.”
He groaned — something cracking in his carefully maintained composure, the way it always did when I said it simply and meant it completely.
His mouth traced down my neck, across my collarbone, and then further, his hands learning me the way they always did — like he had time, like he intended to use it, like this specific Tuesday afternoon in our bed was exactly as important as any of the extraordinary things that had brought us here.
“Stop being so damn controlled,” I said, my voice already unsteady.
“You love my control.”
“I love when you lose it.”
His fingers found me and I stopped being able to form coherent sentences entirely — warm and knowing and precise, learning me the way he’d learned everything about me, with the focused patience of a man who had decided this was worth getting exactly right every single time.
When I finally pulled him up to me, his eyes found mine in the afternoon light.
“I love you,” I said.
The words landed and he went still — not the controlled stillness of a man managing a situation, but the specific stillness of someone receiving something they had been waiting for without letting themselves know they were waiting.
“Say it again,” he said, his voice rough at the edges.
“I love you, Sebastian Laurent.” I framed his face in my hands, feeling the familiar scrape of his beard against my palms. “All of you. The control freak and the protector and the boy who couldn’t save his mother and the man who stood on a rooftop in November and let a stranger see him clearly. I love all of it.”
Something in his expression broke open — not dramatically, not the way walls collapse in films. Just quietly, the way light comes through when a door is finally left open.
“I love you,” he said. Simply. Completely. Like he’d been carrying the words for a long time and was grateful to finally put them down somewhere safe. “I have for longer than I knew what to do with it.”
He kissed me then with everything he had — no management, no calculation, no exit strategy — and I kissed him back exactly the same way.
What followed was slower than urgency and more honest than performance — his hands learning the lines of me with the unhurried attention of someone who understood that this was not a finite resource, that there would be mornings and evenings and ordinary Tuesdays and all the time in the world to do this again.
He moved inside me with a tenderness that had nothing to do with restraint and everything to do with care, and I held him and matched him and said his name in the specific broken way that meant I had stopped managing the feeling and was simply having it.
When we finally came apart it was together — unhurried and complete, his forehead pressed to mine, both of us breathing hard in the afternoon light of the home we’d built out of two very different lives and a considerable amount of conflict and the specific stubborn decision to keep choosing each other.
“Thirty-seven minutes?” I asked eventually, my voice muffled against his shoulder.
He checked his watch and laughed — warm and genuine, the laugh I’d been collecting since a service corridor. “Thirty-two. We have time for a shower.”
“Always with the schedules.”
“Someone has to maintain order.” He kissed my temple. “You certainly won’t.”
I smiled against his chest. “That’s why we work.”
Later, dressed and presentable, his hand in mine in the back of the town car, I watched Chicago slide past the windows and thought about how far we’d come from that first night.
The press conference was everything we’d planned and nothing like what I’d expected, which seemed appropriate.
Sebastian stood at the podium with his shoulders back and his voice steady, announcing the termination of NDA #LR-17 in terms so clear even the tabloid reporters couldn’t find room for misinterpretation.
“No exclusivity clauses,” he said, meeting the cameras with the specific directness of a man who had learned that the only way out was through. “No penalties for either party. No restrictions on Ms. Rivera’s reporting or professional independence.”
A reporter raised her hand. “Mr. Laurent, why end the NDA now?”
Sebastian’s eyes found mine in the crowd. They stayed there.
“Because real partnership doesn’t require contracts,” he said. “And because the woman I love deserves a relationship built on trust, not legal documentation.”
The questions came fast after that — they always did — but he handled them with the calm authority he brought to everything, and when it was over, when the cameras stopped flashing and the reporters dispersed into the Chicago afternoon, he crossed the room and pulled me into his arms without looking around to calculate who was watching.
“That’s done,” he murmured against my hair.
“Was that so hard?”
“Terrifying. As promised.” He pulled back to look at me, and I saw in his expression everything we’d been through to get here — the gala and the balcony, the investigation and the betrayal, the three weeks apart and the rooftop and the slow careful work of building something real out of the wreckage of something that should never have worked in the first place.
“Ready to go home?” he asked.
Home. Our townhouse with its mismatched aesthetics and my corkboard in his library and his investment files on my coffee table. The place we’d chosen together, on our terms, with the full understanding of exactly what we were getting.
“Ready,” I said.
And I meant every word of it.