Chapter 21 #2
“Say something else,” he breathed. “Please. I need…” His throat worked. “Anything. Your voice. I need to feel it while I’m touching you.”
Something gave way inside me when he asked.
Not a tear, a release. The freedom of being asked for the exact thing I’d spent years hiding.
The most dangerous thing about me was handed back not as a weapon, not as a liability, but as something someone actually wanted.
Something he was starving for the same way I’d been starving and calling it discipline.
I took his face in both hands. Drew him down until our foreheads touched, until the peppercorn and the honey shared the same inch of air between our mouths.
“Bram,” I said. Low. The voice opened into its warmest register, the one that lived just above a whisper, the full weight of an Omega voice with nothing held back.
“I performed for millions of people for eleven years. This voice…” I let it drop lower, felt it travel from my throat through every place we touched, forehead and hands and the brush of his shirt against mine.
“…was never theirs. It was never an audience’s.
It was always waiting for someone who’d know what to do with it. ”
Whatever was left of his control, the last wall of a thing he’d been tearing down since dawn, came apart.
His mouth found mine.
Not Tuck’s desperate, freight-train urgency, not that long-overdue collision of two bodies kept apart too long.
This was different. This was Bram. And Bram, it turned out, kissed the way he built a story, one considered weight at a time.
One beat, then the next. His lips moved on mine with a slowness that was nearly worship, not tentative, just unhurried.
Like we had all the time that had ever existed and he meant to use every second of it.
His mouth was warm and precise, the angle shifting by tiny degrees, finding the exact configuration that made my breath catch and then holding it there, learning the response before he moved on to find another.
His lower lip dragged over mine and the sound I made was involuntary, a whine that melted down into something lower, a purr that hummed between our mouths.
He swallowed it. Drew back a fraction. Came back with the smallest increase in pressure, treating every increment like information, building the whole picture from the ground up because anything short of understanding it completely was unbearable to him.
The kiss deepened by degrees too small to see one at a time. His tongue traced the seam of my lips, surveying ground he meant to know better than anyone alive. When I opened for him, the sound he made went quieter, deeper.
His hands moved off my waist. Up along my ribs, his thumbs counting the bones under my shirt like he was reading braille.
Every rib noted. Every dip between them given its due.
When his palms found my shoulders, he broke the kiss and just looked at me with those dark gray-green eyes, breathing unsteady, his face holding something very close to awe.
“You’re real,” he said. Years of falling in love with a voice through speakers sat behind it. He was still catching up to the fact that the voice had a body, and the body was here, and it was warm and willing and reaching for him.
“Real,” I said. “Present. Staying.”
His hands slid to the collar of my blouse. His fingers found the top button. Paused.
The pause stretched. In it I watched Bram St. James make a decision. Not with the clean certainty he brought to logistics, but with the slow, shaking nerve of stepping off a ledge he’d stood on his whole life.
His fingers opened the button.
One. Then he waited. Checked. Not my willingness, I’d made that clear, but his own. His own readiness to cross a line with no way back over it.
Second button. His knuckle grazed my collarbone. The contact was nothing, light, the barest brush of skin, and it sent a visible shudder through him. The peppercorn surged and he breathed through it, taking the flood one slow inhale at a time.
Third button. He stopped with his hands on either side of the parted fabric and just looked at the skin underneath, pale, flushed warm where the scent gathered, the pulse visible under it.
“I need you to talk to me,” he said. His voice was almost gone, ragged, barely a breath. “I need the sound of you. While I do this. I need to hear you.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Anything.” His thumb pressed a slow line along my collarbone, and my breath snagged. “Everything. Whatever comes. I just need…” He pressed his thumb into the hollow at the base of my throat, where the scent pooled warmest, and his eyes closed. “I just need your voice.”
I let my hand find the back of his neck. Drew him down until his forehead rested on mine again, our faces close enough that every word would travel through his skin before it reached his ears.
“The first time you read my script back to me,” I said, low and warm, pitched for inches instead of audiences, “I forgot where I was. I forgot the booth. I forgot the camera. I forgot there were millions of people listening. There was just your voice turning my words into more than I wrote them to be.”
His fingers trembled on the fourth button.
“And I thought…” I nosed against his temple. Let my lips brush the silver-threaded hair there, softer than I’d expected. “I thought, this is the most dangerous man I’ve ever met. Because he makes me want to mean what I say.”
The button opened. The shirt slid off one shoulder. Bram caught the fabric before it dropped and held it, the way he’d guarded the gate between his control and what he wanted for years. Still negotiating terms with himself, even now.
“I couldn’t tell the difference,” he said, his eyes following the line of my bared shoulder, the skin going pink under his attention.
“Between wanting your voice and wanting you. For years. I thought they were two separate things. The professional admiration and the…” His hand let go of the fabric.
Let it slide. His fingertips traced the path of it, collarbone to shoulder to the top of my arm, every point of contact leaving heat behind.
“The wanting. I thought I could have one without the other.”
“You can’t.”
“No.” He breathed the word against my skin. He’d lowered his mouth to my shoulder without quite deciding to, following the trail his fingers had left, swapping touch for the warmth of his breath, then the brush of his lips. Hovering there, learning a new territory a fraction at a time.
“Because the voice is the body,” I said.
My own voice had dropped lower, not a performance, not a choice.
The biology answering the closeness, the peppercorn wrapping around me, the devotion of his mouth on every inch of bared skin.
“It always was. That’s what the industry never got.
That’s what I hid all those years. Not just the designation.
The fact that the voice they loved couldn’t be pulled out of the body that made it. ”
His lips found the curve where my neck met my shoulder. Pressed there. Stayed. The scent gland under that skin answered, a fresh wave of honey and milk I felt more than smelled, spreading out from the spot like ink dropped into warm water.
Bram inhaled. Deep. Drinking in something he’d been dying of thirst for.
“What I never said in the kitchen,” he said against my skin.
The low remains of the baritone vibrated against the gland and the feeling was so sharp, so exact, that my knees nearly went.
“Every single night. I’d lie in the dark and listen to you read other people’s love stories, and I’d think, I wish someone spoke to me like that. I wished…”
His arms wrapped around me. Pulled me flush against him.
The whole length of us pressed together for the first time with no coat, no distance, none of the careful discipline of not touching.
His chest on mine. His hips on mine. The warmth of him all down my body with nothing between us but the thin cotton of his shirt and what was left of mine.
“I wished the voice was talking to me,” he finished. “Not to an audience. Not to a recording. To me. Just me.”
“It is now.” I pulled back enough to see his face. Cupped his jaw in one hand, felt the fine grain of his skin, the sharp angle of bone underneath. “It’s yours now. Do you hear me? This voice is yours.”
The sound he made was broken. The last thread of his stoicism snapping under a weight it was never built to carry.
His mouth found mine again and this time the method cracked at the edges, still slow, still thorough, but shot through with something desperate that turned careful exploration into something closer to worship.
His hands moved with purpose now, drawing my shirt off my other shoulder, letting it fall, his palms following the fabric down my arms like he was filing each sensation away against some future loss.
I stood in front of him in the amber light, bare from the waist up, and watched him look at me.
Bram looked at me the way he looked at a scene he’d built right, with total, consuming attention, like some things only exist while they’re being watched and deserve nothing less than all of you.
His gaze moved from my collarbones to my breasts to the curve of my waist, unhurried, like he was reading a passage he meant to come back to many times.
No rush. Nothing that could override the need to see. To know.
His hand lifted. His fingers found the center of my chest, between my breasts, over the breastbone, in the exact place where the whine had started. Where the mate-call was born and the secret got loose.
“Here,” he said. “This is where it started. In the booth.”
“Yes.”
He spread his palm flat. His eyes closed. And he just felt. The beat of my heart. The warmth of my skin. The hum of a body built to call to his, finally given permission after years of silence.