Chapter 13 #2
“I know you said you don’t date. I know three years might be too long.” His fingers drifted to cup her cheek, and his thumb traced her cheekbone. “But if I could kiss you right now, you’d know how I—“
Claire’s fingers curled in his tuxedo jacket as she pressed her lips to his.
Tai cupped the back of her head in one hand and with the other cradled her back along his arm.
She’d known she was hungry for his kiss, but in an instant she learned something else about him: Tai had wanted her too.
All this time. Claire toed off her pumps and climbed onto his lap.
She pushed her fingers through his black hair, and it was unexpectedly soft.
Their kiss wasn’t soft. Their kiss didn’t build.
It was rough, wild, greedy from the moment it began, and it lasted that way, and Claire had never been kissed by someone who could match her like this.
She pressed him harder, raked her fingers across his scalp, and Tai met her in every way, gasping out a laugh that pushed both of them closer to an edge they weren’t ready for tonight.
At last they drew apart. Tai’s low, relaxed chuckle curled her bare toes against the couch cushion. She stayed where she was, legs draped over his, half-slouched against the sole throw pillow.
“You,” he said. “I never thought.”
“Trouble with sentences at the moment?” She pushed her finger into his left dimple as he smirked. “You too, by the way. And I never thought either. Or that is—when I did think it, I told myself I was imagining what I wanted to be real.”
“Mmm,” he hummed in affirmation, then grew serious as he brushed her hair back from her face. “Maybe I am imagining it. Still.”
“If I promise you’re not, will you believe me?”
“I want to. It’s just been with me…a long time. I might need some time.”
“What’s been with you, Tai?”
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. A slow breath filled his chest, then seeped out of him even more slowly. “Fear, I think. Fear for anyone to know. And total certainty that anyone who does know…”
“Kicks you out?” she said softly.
He flinched. “Yeah. That. But you…”
“Instead of kicking you out, we made out.”
The laugh that burst out of him made her heart lift like a helium balloon. “Did we ever.”
She longed to know the rest of his story, the reason he flinched so hard at the sound of those words. But they had time, and despite claiming he was only “a little” tired, Tai was clearly exhausted, so instead she flicked a finger at his torn jacket.
“I think this tux is more totaled than the cars we moved tonight.”
“About that, if your dress doesn’t make it through dry-cleaning, let me know.”
“Um…why?”
He angled a patient look down at her. “Because you really shouldn’t date me if you ruined your dress on our first date and I don’t have the courtesy to replace it. Also, less importantly, I don’t have to budget for it.”
Of course. Somehow she still managed for hours at a time to forget that Tai was more wealthy than she could fathom.
Ryker had once alluded to an inheritance of some kind, but she knew no details; and seeing Tai in a tuxedo, Claire didn’t think of money.
She thought of how comfortably he wore it, how effortlessly he looked like himself everywhere he went, regardless of his wardrobe. How he drew people into…
…his web. It was how she’d thought of him only days ago. Effortless magnetism, detached arrogance.
“Tai, do you…?”
No. She hadn’t earned the right to ask for more of his vulnerable places. Not yet. She had some earning to do. Some amends to make.
Tai didn’t lift his head, but his hand found hers, and he gave a gentle squeeze. “Do I what?”
“No, I—I’m doing it again. Tonight’s already been too much.”
“It’s okay, Claire. It’s just us here, and…and you’ve seen it. I haven’t been…” He shut his eyes tightly for a moment, then opened them to angle his gaze down at her again. “I haven’t been that bad in a long time, and you got me through it. You can ask.”
You’re so good with people, and you chose to work for an organization that helps people, but who helps you? Do you withhold the deepest parts of yourself from everyone, even Ryker?
Maybe she really could ask, but it didn’t feel right, at least not tonight. “I’m putting a pin in it. Tonight you get to keep your secrets.”
“Not all of them.” He clearly tried for snark, but instead the words were laced with melancholy.
Claire squeezed his hand. He was quiet a long time.
At last he whispered, “Do you have no secrets, Claire?”
She shut her eyes against the familiar image she created in the mirror every other Saturday night.
Maybe by rights she owed him a secret in exchange for the one that had been hauled into the light tonight against his will.
Maybe it wasn’t fair that she needed time to open up while Tai hadn’t been allowed any.
But she did need time. “Tonight is about you. How are you feeling now?”
“A thousand years ago, if a group of us found out they had a bloodfiend in their midst, the offending vampire was executed.”
With such a non-sequitur, he was trying to tell her something. She gentled her voice. “Well, thank goodness it’s ancient history and no one’s doing that anymore.”
She lay quietly for a minute, mulling, wondering, wanting to prove herself somehow. Prove he was safe here and pull his thoughts away from something so dark.
“It’s like I can hear your mind working,” he said with a faint laugh.
How had they meandered back into this tension? She had to steer them away from it. “If my gown is wrecked, I’ll let you know.”
“Ah. Good.”
“The tux isn’t negotiable, though. Definitely totaled.”
He shrugged without lifting his head. “It’s not the only one I own.”
“You own multiple tuxedos?”
“Three. Well, two now. As often as I have to wear one, they’re a wardrobe investment.”
“Seems reasonable.”
“Good to know.”
Claire reached for his hand and drew one finger across his palm, and Tai opened his eyes to watch her weave her fingers between his. “You know what’s unreasonable? The way you do a tuxedo such total, unrelenting justice.”
“Unrelenting, huh? Have you come to any platonic conclusions as to why?”
“No,” she said. “I was never considering the matter platonically in the first place.”
He didn’t move; he truly was wiped out. But his mouth lifted in a slow smirk that sent a flutter through her middle.
“I have a non-platonic conclusion, though, if you’re interested.”
“Riveted,” he said.
“It’s not the tux. It’s the man inside the tux.”
She pushed herself up from her slouch, and Tai took her in his arms and took her mouth with his.
They started slower this time, but in a moment the wild hunger was between them again, and Claire couldn’t get enough of him, of his taste, his lips insistent on hers, his strong shoulders under her palms.
“It’s not your tailor,” she said between kissing his mouth, his roughly shadowed jaw. “Just so you know.”
“Okay,” he said, then crashed his lips into hers again.
“It’s you, Tai. It was always just you.”
“Me?”
“In a tux or in swimming trunks behind a waterfall. I haven’t dated for years, and it’s made me so mad, because we were never even together back then. But since you, there’s no one else I want.”
“Claire.”
“Obvious solution: I saved up to buy you out,” she said.
“To get over me.”
His smirk was back, and Claire forced herself not to cover it with her lips, to lose herself in his taste all over again. This man. What he did to her, what he’d done for the last three years.
He sobered as he studied her. “You weren’t the only one trying to get over the…the ghost of the thing between us. I never knew what it was either, just that it wouldn’t let me go.”
After words like that, she had no choice but to kiss him again, and in his response she might have tasted relief.
By the time this kiss ended, she no longer hated the truth.
It was Tai for her. Or it was nobody. She’d lived happily single.
She could do it for centuries, if this didn’t last. But she couldn’t be with a man who wasn’t Tai.
When they drew apart again, he ran his thumb over the inside of her bicep, over the small tattoo. “Why a feather?”
“I didn’t want a whole bird.”
He huffed a quiet laugh. “Why bird-related then?”
This, she could tell him. Verena the Vigilant didn’t belong tonight, but her tattoo was an easy topic after all these years.
“Feathers are super strong, stronger than they should be for their light weight. They lift and carry and last against storms. I didn’t want a phoenix; I haven’t been through real fire, you know?
But an eagle or a hawk, something that soars in solitude, makes its own way from up high. Strong and free. I wanted that.”
He was quiet a long time. At last he said, “Anything to do with being single?”
“That’s how I’ve liked to think of it the last few years. But when I got it at twenty-one, it was more about being okay on my own, an independent adult.”
“I like that the meaning evolved along with you.”
Claire lay back and let herself feel that she was truly tired. Tai reached for her bare feet and began to rub them, and she gave a happy little hum and let herself rest.
Then, voice hushed and content, he said, “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Horses have 205 bones in their body.”
The foot massage stalled. “Why do you know that?”
“I was big into horses as a kid. I still enjoy riding when I get the chance.”
“Okay, that counts then.” He continued rubbing her left foot, moving down to her heel, and somehow having his hands on her felt delightfully intimate, never mind that it was only her foot. Weren’t feet considered scandalous in Jane Austen’s time? “I meant something about you, not horse anatomy.”
“Well, I told you both. Your turn.”
He was quiet a moment, then said, “I started playing piano when I was three. I got a few big books from my father’s study, stacked them on the bench, climbed up and started poking the keys.”
“And within a week you were playing ‘Fur Elise’ by ear.”
There was the low chuckle again. Claire smiled up at the ceiling to be the cause of it.
“Not ‘Fur Elise,’” he said after a moment. “’Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’”
She sat all the way up, and the motion drew her knees up and hid her feet under her gown. “At three years old.”
“Yeah.”
“Just that song? Or like, every little-kid song you knew?”
Tai passed a hand over his mouth, but he wasn’t really trying to hide his smile.
“You annoying genius!” She threw the pillow at him. “Every song you knew!”
“Music has always been my knack. Everybody has a knack, Claire.”
“When I was three years old, I was not winning dressage championships.”
Tai threw his head back as a deep laugh shook his chest. “And I wasn’t performing ‘Fur Elise,’ so don’t get mad at me if you’re going to compare apples and oranges.”
She shoved his arm, and he laughed again. She flopped back down to the couch and thrust her feet onto his lap.
“Other foot?” He grinned.
His teeth gleamed in the dimness of the room, and she hummed happily when he took her right foot between his hands. Gosh, they’d been sitting here for hours. They’d turned her well-worn break room couch into a make-out spot. Tai showed no inclination to leave, and Claire didn’t want him to.
“Do you have a favorite color?” she said.
“Sandstone and royal purple.”
Claire blinked. “Wow, that was decisive.”
“I like them best. You?”
She’d planned to keep it simple with green, but if he could get specific, so could she. “Cool greens. Not lime or avocado. I like jade, shamrock, shades of a forest. Oh! I know one. What’s your middle name?”
Tai gave a sigh of longsuffering that rivaled the drama of a sleepy toddler.
“What?” Claire nudged her toes into his palm. “Is it awful?”
“It’s Aksel.”
She spluttered a laugh, and he gave an even more dramatic reprise of the sigh. “You mean like Axl Rose? Are you serious, Tai?”
“Not like Axl Rose. A-K-S-E-L.”
“Oh my gosh. Tai Aksel Kristiansen. The most Scandinavian name in the history of the world.”
“My father is very Danish and very proud.”
“No kidding.” She couldn’t keep the grin off her face. She loved his name, and she loved his endurance of it, and she’d never tell him, but Aksel spelled the Danish way was kind of sexy. “You don’t look overly Scandinavian, though, with the black hair.”
His pause lasted a second too long. “I take after my mom.”
Claire squashed her curiosity hard and fast. No more stressful topics. Not tonight. “My turn. I’m about one tenth as Dutch as you are Danish, and my middle name is Elisabeth.”
“With an s or a z?“ he said.
“An s.”
“Good.” As if he’d made a bet on the answer. Then he said almost to himself, “Claire Elisabeth Vanderlaan.”
Claire’s heart gave a hard beat of pleasure at the music of her name, wrought by his rich voice.
And he must have noticed, because he leaned over her and kissed her.
Long and slow this time, and Claire reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck, lifting herself to meet the kiss, to show him she could be slow too, gentle and careful and safe.
When he made a little sound against her mouth, she pushed her fingers into the hair at his nape and delighted in the way his mouth hardened in response.
When they ended the kiss, she whispered close to his ear, “Do you believe it now?”
“I’m getting there,” he said, and it wasn’t a tease. It was more honesty.
Claire brushed a kiss along the side of his jaw. “Take all the time you need.”