30. Clara #2
I closed the last of the distance between us and put both hands flat on his chest. “Tonight I want you to remember that I’m your wife. Not a patient, not a project, not something you’re managing.” I started on his buttons. “Your wife. So take what’s yours.”
Something shifted behind his eyes. The careful control he’d been wearing since I came home cracked straight down the middle, and what showed through it was hungrier.
“You’re sure?”
“Quin.” I pulled his shirt free and shoved it off his shoulders. “If you ask me that one more time I’m throwing you overboard.”
He laughed, low and dark, and then his hands were in my hair and his mouth was on mine and there was nothing careful about any of it.
He kissed me like he’d been starving for months, which I suppose he had been, all those gentle touches and tentative nights building toward exactly this.
His hands found the clasp of the bra and dealt with it without looking, and then I was bare to the waist and he was cupping my breasts like they belonged to him, which they did, because I did, because I always had.
“Down,” he said against my mouth.
We went down into the cushions in a tangle, him still in his pants and me still in the scrap of lace that was pretending to be underwear, and neither of us was in any hurry to correct it.
He pinned my wrists above my head and kissed a slow path down my throat and my collarbone and the curve of my breast.
“I used to dream about this.” His mouth closed over my nipple and I arched up into him. “You spread out for me on this deck, the stars, the water, nobody for miles in any direction.”
“Then make it real.”
He let go of my wrists and moved lower, hooking his fingers into the lace at my hips and drawing it down my legs with agonizing patience. The night air was warm but I shivered anyway, anticipation crawling all the way up my spine.
“Look at you.” He settled between my thighs and spread me open with both hands. “All these years and you still take my breath away.”
“Less talking.”
He laughed against my skin. “Demanding.”
I started to tell him exactly how demanding I could be, and the sentence dissolved into a moan as his mouth found me.
He had always been good at this, patient and attentive, reading my body like a language he’d spent years learning.
But tonight there was an edge underneath it, something possessive, and he licked into me like he was writing his name over and over until I was shaking and gasping and pulling his hair hard enough to hurt.
“Quin. Please.”
“Please what?”
“I need you inside me. Now.”
He rose over me and shed the last of his clothes, and I reached for him immediately, finding him hard and hot and already slick at the tip, and he groaned when I stroked him.
“I’ve wanted this all day.” He settled against me but didn’t push in, just held there watching my face. “Every time you smiled at Katie. Every time you laughed at something I said. Every time you looked at me like I was yours and always had been.”
“You are mine.”
“Yes.” He drove home in one long stroke and I cried out, the sound swallowed whole by the ocean and the sky. “I am.”
There was nothing gentle about it after that.
He moved in me with a relentlessness that bordered on desperate and I met him for every stroke of it, wrapping my legs around his waist and pulling him deeper.
The cushions slid beneath us and the candles guttered wildly in their glasses, and somewhere in the middle of it someone was making sounds that might have been my name and might have been prayers, and I didn’t care, because nothing existed outside of this, outside of him, outside of the place where we were joined.
“I love you.” The words tore out of him on a groan. “God, Clara. I love you so much it frightens me.”
“Then show me.” I dug my nails into his back. “Don’t tell me. Show me.”
He flipped us without warning, pulling out and resettling me over him so fast that I gasped, and then his hands were on my hips guiding me down onto him and I was taking him deeper than before, deep enough to feel him everywhere at once.
“Move,” he said.
I moved, slowly at first while I found the rhythm, then faster as his hands urged me on, and his eyes never once left my face. Watching me, seeing me, exactly the way he’d promised he always would.
It built like a wave, swelling and swelling until there was nowhere left for it to go but over, and I broke apart around him with a cry that carried out across the water, my whole body clenching and pulsing, and he followed me a moment later with a sound that landed somewhere between my name and a prayer.
I collapsed onto his chest, and for a long while neither of us moved. His heart hammered under my cheek. The boat rocked gently beneath us. Somewhere off in the dark I could hear the waves breaking against the shore of our island.
“Still think it’s too much?” he asked eventually, his voice wrecked.
I laughed and pushed up on one elbow to look at him. His hair was a disaster, there were scratch marks on his shoulder I had no memory of making, and he looked thoroughly debauched and entirely happy.
“I think it’s exactly right.”
***
We stayed on the deck until the stars began to fade, wrapped in blankets and talking about nothing and everything.
The plans we were making for the foundation, the renovations we wanted at the ranch, whether Katie would want a pony or a full-sized horse when she was old enough to argue for one.
She would want the horse. She had strong opinions.
“I want to do this every year,” Quin said as the first flush of dawn touched the water. “Take a month and disappear. Just us.”
“The foundation won’t run itself.”
“No, but it can manage four weeks without me, and that’s what having good people is for.” He traced a line along my bare shoulder. “I missed too much already. I’m not going to miss any more of it.”
I believed him, and that was the real miracle of the last six months.
Not the grand gestures or the speeches, but the small consistent proof that he meant what he said.
Coming home for dinner. Showing up for the recital.
Putting his phone in a drawer when Katie wanted to play.
Being present, fully present, one ordinary day after another.
“Hey.” He tilted my chin up. “Where’d you go?”
“Just thinking about how far we’ve come.”
“And?”
“And how glad I am that I came back.”
He kissed me, soft and slow. “So am I.”
The sun crested the horizon and spilled gold across the water. In a few hours we’d go back to the island, where Melissa would have breakfast waiting and Katie would be bouncing off the walls with news about the crabs she’d befriended overnight, and life would resume its ordinary, beautiful chaos.
But for the moment there was only this. The two of us, the endless water, and a future that finally felt worth the fight it had taken to get here.