14. Solenn
— ? —
Solenn
He turns up with groceries.
Not one of the predictable things a man carries when he’s trying. Three paper sacks of ingredients I don’t recognize and a look on his face like he’s been waiting all week to see mine.
“A cooking competition.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our first real date.” He’s already past me and into my kitchen. “I considered restaurants. Then I remembered chapter fifteen.”
“Chapter fifteen.”
“The hero cooks for her. She finds it devastating.” He starts unpacking onto my counter. “I’m improvising.”
“You can’t cook.”
“I can absolutely cook.”
“You set off the smoke alarm boiling water. I was standing there.”
Out come vegetables, pasta, a wedge of expensive cheese. “We’re each making a dish. Loser pays a forfeit.”
“I don’t remember agreeing to this.”
“And yet.” He gestures at my kitchen like a man presenting a stadium. “Your move, Alston.”
I roll up my sleeves.
“You’re going to lose.”
“I’m going to let you win.”
“What’s the forfeit?”
He stops unpacking.
“Winner’s choice,” he says. “Anything. No refusals.”
The kitchen gets about four degrees warmer.
“Anything.”
“Anything.”
I should negotiate. Set terms or do one single sensible thing.
“Deal.”
***
He is spectacularly bad at this.
I’m working through an onion with the efficiency of a woman who has fed herself on a budget since she was nineteen, knife moving clean and quick. Beside me he is attacking his like it insulted his family.
“That’s not how you chop an onion.”
“It’s how I chop an onion.”
“You’re going to lose a finger.”
“Worth it.” He doesn’t look up. “For the company.”
Something turns over in my stomach. I ignore it on principle.
“The pieces have to be the same size or they won’t cook evenly.”
“I’m going for rustic.”
“You’re going for a fatality.”
He finally gets through it and holds up the results with enormous pride. “Chopped.”
“That’s not chopped. I don’t even know what shape you’re going for.”
“It will lose its shape when cooked anyway.”
I turn back to my board so he can’t see my face. My sauce is coming together. His pan looks like evidence.
The smoke alarm goes off.
I spin. There’s smoke coming off his stove in a column, something bubbling over that may once have been food.
“That’s supposed to happen,” he says, not moving.
“Nothing is supposed to set off the smoke alarm!”
“Clearly you’ve never experienced my signature dish.”
I’m flapping a tea towel at the ceiling. “What is your signature dish?”
“Spicy foods.”
And I laugh.
It comes out of me bright and completely real, the kind that starts somewhere under the ribs and takes the whole body with it, and I am still laughing when I notice he has gone absolutely still in the middle of my kitchen with a wooden spoon in his hand.
“What?” I’m wiping my eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” His voice has gone strange. “Just. You laughed.”
“You murdered dinner. It was funny.”
“I know.” He’s looking at me like I handed him something. “I’ve heard you laugh at Tessa. At Miranda. At a woman on the phone about a printer.” He puts the spoon down. “Never once at me. Not since the beginning.”
The laughing stops.
We stand there in a kitchen full of smoke with his disaster smoking and my dish sitting perfect and ignored on the counter.
“Taste this,” I say, because I can’t hold his eyes any longer. “Before the smoke gets into it.”
I load a spoon and hold it up.
He leans in and takes it off the spoon, and his eyes don’t leave mine while he does it, and I feel that in a place that has no business being connected to a spoon.
“Good?”
“Perfect.” He isn’t looking at the food. “Try mine.”
“Yours is a biohazard.”
“The part that isn’t.”
He scrapes something off the cool edge of the pan and holds it up, and I lean in with his hand under my chin to catch it, and it is genuinely one of the worst things I have ever put in my mouth.
I swallow it anyway.
“Well?”
“I’ve had worse.”
“That’s a lie and it’s generous.”
“I’m being generous because you’re pretty.”
His whole face changes. “Pretty.”
“Don’t get above yourself.”
“Too late.”
The spoon goes into the sink.
His hand comes down over mine on the knife I’d forgotten I was holding, and the knife goes down too, and somewhere in there my back finds the counter without any input from me at all.
He doesn’t crowd me. He puts one hand flat on the counter by my hip and leaves the rest of the space empty, which is so much worse, because now the closing of it is entirely my decision and he has made absolutely sure I know it.
“Liam.”
“Still here.”
The noise drops out of the world.
There’s flour on his forearm and smoke in my kitchen and his mouth is close enough that I can feel him breathing, and every single thought I have ever had about self-respect has left the building.
I could stop this. I know exactly how. I made a word final in a courtroom in front of a judge and I meant every syllable of it.
“I won,” I say.
His eyes come up.
“You did.”
“You said winner’s choice.” My voice does something I don’t authorize. “Anything. No refusals.”
“I did say that.”
“You also said something else.” I get one hand into the front of his shirt, and I don’t pull, and I don’t have to. “Last week. You told me to ask you on a night when there was nothing on my floor.”
Everything in him goes tight.
“There is nothing on my floor, Liam.”
“No,” he says. “There isn’t.”
“So I’m cashing it.”
“Say what you’re cashing it on.”
“Don’t make me-”
“I’m not making you.” He hasn’t moved an inch.
His voice has gone to pieces. “I’m asking you to have it be a thing you said out loud in a lit room with nothing on the floor, so that neither of us ever gets to wonder about it.
Say it and it’s yours. I have no refusals left in me anyway. I haven’t had one since the closet.”
So I say it.
“You. Tonight. Upstairs. Now.”
“Tell me to stop,” he says, and it comes out ruined.
I don’t.
He kisses me like there’s nowhere either of us has to be.
Slow at first. His mouth brushing mine and waiting, and when I get a fistful of his shirt and pull, the sound he makes goes through me from the sternum down.
My brain helpfully supplies every filthy highlight from before I left. Him over me. Him inside me. Him groaning about his seed already taking and how he couldn’t wait to make me his wife so we could do this every night. Heat floods south so fast I get dizzy.
“Slow,” he says against my mouth. “We’re doing this slow.”
“I don’t need slow.”
“You do.” He pulls back far enough to look at me properly, eyes dark and focused. “And I’m not rushing one single thing with you ever again. Not when I finally get to have you like this. Solenn, you have no idea how long I’ve wanted to get my mouth on you again.”
His mouth goes to my jaw. Down my throat, stops over the place where he can feel exactly what my heart is doing about it. My pulse is embarrassing. Everything south of my navel is already aching, that deep pregnant ache that turns every touch filthy in my head.
“I’ve thought about this,” he says into my skin, voice rough.
“Thought about what.”
“The noise you make when I get it right.” His lips move lower, open and hot. “Whether you’d let me. Whether you’d still taste the same. How goddamn sweet you’re going to feel on my tongue.”
He walks me backward out of the kitchen, hands at my hips, steering and never pushing. I keep staring at his mouth. That mouth is about to ruin me and my traitorous pregnant brain is already writing thank-you notes.
“I’m enormous,” I warn him, because the bump is undeniable now, very present.
“You’re incredible.” His thumbs stroke the sides of it through my dress like he’s greeting her too. “Sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. My baby in you. Makes me hard just looking.”
“I have stretch marks now.”
“I’d like to put my mouth on every one of them. Trace them with my tongue. Say thank you for every single mark.”
My knees genuinely go. He catches me with a soft laugh that is pure smug affection.
The bedroom is dark except for what comes in from the kitchen.
He gets me down onto the bed with a hand behind my back the whole way, taking my weight until the pillows have it.
Careful, reverent, hot as hell. I watch the flex of his forearms, the way his shoulders fill out that shirt, and think extremely unholy thoughts about biting them.
“All right?”
“Yes.”
“You tell me if anything’s wrong. You tell me if you want to stop.”
“Liam.”
“I mean it.” He’s braced over me on his forearms, and there it is again, the exact sight that has lived rent free in my head for eight days. “This is yours. Whatever you want, however you want it. I’m just the lucky bastard who gets to finally call you mine and take care of you.”
“What I want is for you to stop checking and start doing.”
His laugh comes out rough. “Demanding.”
“You like it.”
“I’ve never liked anything more in my life. Bossy pregnant girl who lets me worship her. Dream come true.”
He starts at my feet.
I’m not ready for that. I’m braced for him to work down from my mouth like every hero in every book on my shelf. Instead he takes my socks off and puts his lips against my instep, and I make a noise into my own ceiling that is frankly indecent.
“What are you-”
“Shh. Let me. I’ve been dying to take my time with every inch.”
His mouth goes up my calf. The inside of my knee. Slow open kisses that feel like promises. He stops at the hem of my dress and looks up with a question in his face, lips already a little shiny.
I lift my hips, no pride left. Zero.
He gets me out of it slowly, and every inch of me that arrives gets his mouth before it gets anything else. Collarbone. The swell of my breasts, heavier now, nipples so sensitive I hiss when he licks one through the bra then tugs the fabric down to suck properly.
Belly. He pauses there longest, both hands cradling the curve, pressing soft kisses all over it while he murmurs things that melt me and turn me on at the exact same time.
“Hi, baby. Your mom is the most beautiful woman alive.”