Chapter 13
T he girls had been asleep for twenty minutes, maybe thirty, when Nikki found him on the back porch.
He'd poured two glasses of wine and left hers on the railing, and now she picked it up and stood beside him, her shoulder against his, both of them looking out at the mountains.
The lights of other cabins dotted the dark hillside across the lake — warm, scattered, each one a life being lived, a family tucked in for the night.
"It's beautiful," she said.
"Yes," he agreed, though he was looking at her.
She caught it and smiled, shaking her head. "You're very smooth, Mr. Stark."
"I prefer consistent," he said, and she laughed — low and easy, the laugh that belonged only to moments like this. No audience. No occasion. Just the two of them and the dark and the sound of the lake below.
He'd been thinking, standing out here before she came, about the week.
About how it had looked from the outside versus how it had felt from the inside.
From the outside, it probably looked a little rough.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing that would make the list of the hardest things they'd survived together — and that list was not short. But still rough.
From the inside, though, it had felt different.
Because what Nikki had been navigating wasn't a threat or a crisis in the usual sense — no external enemy, no legal battle, nothing that his money or his power or his contacts could fix.
Instead, it was something quieter and harder.
The gap between the life she'd wanted and the life she was living.
And the problem of how to straddle that chasm.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked.
"You," he said. "The week."
She leaned into him, her head against his shoulder, her wine glass held loosely in both hands. “Thanks for putting up with me.”
He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. "Ah, but Ms. Fairchild, don’t you know? I'd take a hard week with you over an easy one without you. Every time. Without hesitation.”
She was quiet for a moment. “That might be the most romantic thing you've ever said to me."
"Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation."
She laughed again and turned into him, tilting her face up. He kissed her then — soft at first, the kind of kiss that was less about heat and more about simply being.
Then she set her glass on the railing and slid her hands up his chest, and the kiss shifted to something wild and raw and desperate with need.
He walked her backward through the porch door, through the living room, down the hall — stopping twice to kiss her again because he could, because there was no one to interrupt and nowhere to be and the night was entirely theirs.
She was laughing by the time they reached the bedroom, a breathless, happy sound that he felt in the center of his chest.
"Finally," she said.
"Finally," he agreed.
He took his time. That had always been his preference with her — not because the other way wasn't its own particular pleasure, but because when he took his time he got to watch her.
He got to see the moment the tension left her body and something looser and more open took its place.
He got to map the geography of her responses — this touch here, that kiss there — with the focused attention of a man who considered knowing her thoroughly to be among the most worthwhile things he'd ever done.
He kissed the C-section scar. He always did. She always exhaled as she always did — a long, slow breath, like something intense releasing.
"You and that scar," she said softly.
"Me and that scar," he agreed, and moved lower.
He took her apart carefully, methodically, with his hands and his mouth, bringing her to the edge twice before she grabbed his hair and said his name in a tone that left no room for further argument.
Then he moved up her body and looked at her — flushed and open and entirely his — and slid inside her with a slowness that made her gasp.
"Look at me," he said.
She did. She always did.
They moved together in the dark, the sounds of the lake drifting in through the window he'd left cracked, and it was slow and deep and exactly what the week had needed — not wild, not desperate, but thorough.
Present. The particular intimacy of two people who knew each other completely and chose each other anyway, again and again, without reservation.
When she came, she cried out his name and clung to him, and he followed, his body coming apart like a wild, beautiful explosion that shook him all the way to his soul.
After, they lay tangled together, her head on his chest, his hand tracing slow patterns on her back. The lights across the lake still dotted the hillside.
"Thank you," she said.
"You brought us here."
"You needed it." She paused. "We needed it."
He held her tighter. "Yes."
She was nearly asleep when she murmured, "I have everything I want, you know."
He thought about that — about the week, about the business decision, about Lara in the sandbox and Anne in the sling and Nikki with her face turned up to the sun. About all the hard things and all the beautiful things and the way they were so often, in this life, the same thing.
"So do I," he said.
As her breathing slowed, he looked up at the ceiling. At the amber light from the lamp on the nightstand. At the shadows the mountains made against the window.
He'd built an empire. He'd fought for it and protected it and grown it beyond anything most people thought possible. He was Damien Fucking Stark, and he was very good at what he did, and he had never once doubted that the work was worth doing.
But this — this woman asleep on his chest with their daughters dreaming down the hall— this was the thing he would burn the empire down to keep.
No hesitation.
Not even close.
Nikki. His. Forever.