Chapter Twenty-Nine
Marius
I don’t follow her.
That is the first decision I make after she steps back, after the space between us reappears on her terms instead of mine, after the doorframe and the firelight and the taste of her on my mouth turn the entire room into something narrower and more dangerous than it was a minute ago.
I don’t follow her.
I almost do.
That is the problem.
My body moves before the decision fully settles.
One step. Maybe less. Just enough that I feel the impulse in my legs, in my chest, in the part of me that had already adjusted to the idea of going after her the second she turned.
I stop myself hard enough that the correction feels violent.
The study goes still around it. The air feels wrong.
Too warm where she stood. Too empty where she isn’t.
The door is still open.
I keep looking at it.
I should close it.
I don’t.
My jaw tightens. My hand drags once across the back of my neck and does nothing to settle what is happening under my skin.
It is not nerves. Not uncertainty. Something worse.
My body is still keyed too high for stillness.
My palm still remembers the line of her jaw.
My mouth still remembers hers. The imprint of the moment has not even begun to fade, and already I know that the worst part is not the kiss itself.
It is that I wanted more before it ended.
Not abstractly. Not vaguely. Not like a man lost in hunger and fog.
Specifically.
I wanted her pinned between me and the door.
I wanted my hand tighter at her waist. I wanted to keep her there until the careful distance she carried around herself broke open into something that answered me cleanly.
I wanted her breath gone ragged for reasons that had nothing to do with fear.
I wanted to take the moment fully in hand and make her feel exactly how complete my control over it could be.
The thought lands in me hot and ugly.
Not because desire is new to me. Desire is easy. I know what to do with want. I know what to do with women who understand the shape of my hands, my mouth, my voice, and want exactly what I do when I stop pretending I am less than I am.
With Leona, none of that is clean.
That is what makes it dangerous.
I turn away from the door and cross to the desk because movement gives me somewhere to put what the room no longer can.
The papers are still there. Maps. Reports.
The tail end of a conversation that mattered ten minutes ago and now looks like nonsense spread across polished wood.
I brace both hands against it and force myself to look down.
Routes.
Perimeter changes.
Three names needing confirmation.
Daan’s report, half useful and twice as irritating because it exists at all.
I read the same line twice and take in none of it.
My focus slides. Not away. Back. To the study door.
To the pressure of her body in the space I cut her off in.
To the sound of her breath catching the first moment I touched her.
To the way she said no and yes differently, how clearly her body held the line when she meant it, how unmistakably she stayed when she could have stopped me.
That is what I cannot reduce.
Not the kiss.
Her choice.
I straighten and turn away from the desk before I tear the nearest page in half.
The fire has burned lower. The room is darker now, more shadow than light, and for one unreasonable second I can still see the outline of her where she stood, like the moment left a mark behind.
I hate that. I hate how much of her the room still carries.
I hate that my first instinct is not to erase it but to stand in it longer.
I move back toward the chair, pick up the glass I poured earlier, and stop before it reaches my mouth.
I do not want whiskey.
I want the opposite of dulling.
I want the sharpness of her still in my head. The exact tone of her voice when she said she was not leaving. The way her fingers tightened in my shirt. The way she looked at me afterward, not broken, not swept under, but shaken enough that I knew I had reached her somewhere real.
I set the glass back down untouched.
The book I had been reading lies where I left it, open-faced and forgotten.
I pick it up, stare at the page, and understand immediately that it is hopeless.
The words are there. Men dying under the weight of another man’s ambition.
Ordinarily that kind of thing settles me.
History makes appetite easier to sort from consequence.
Tonight I reach the end of a paragraph and realize I have not absorbed a single word.
I close the book too hard.
The sound cracks through the study and dies.
The kiss had not been accidental. It had not been a lapse.
It had not been poorly timed in the way men use when they want to excuse something by calling it emotion.
It had been a choice. Mine. Deliberate from the second I went after her at the door, even if I told myself it was restraint because I gave her room to stop me.
That is where the fracture sits.
Not in regret.
I do not regret it.
That would be simpler.
I regret how much I wanted the next minute.
I move to the window and stare out into the dark grounds, the perimeter lights cut clean against the trees, the shape of the estate held inside the kind of order men mistake for safety.
It should help. It should remind me of scale.
Movement. Threat. All the things that actually matter.
Instead I catch myself thinking how easily I could have taken two more steps and had her back against the door again, and my hand tightens on the window latch hard enough to make the metal bite.
I let go immediately.
That is the part that should concern me.
Not that I wanted her.
That wanting her still takes the shape it always does.
Command.
Pressure.
Possession sharpened into structure.
I know exactly how to dominate a moment without chaos ever touching it.
How to use stillness instead of force. Voice instead of speed.
How to make a woman feel the boundaries of my control so completely that the line holds not because it is fragile, but because it is understood.
There is nothing clumsy in that part of me. Nothing uncertain.
With Leona, that certainty turns ugly too fast.
Because I do not have the right to assume anything from her body after what was done to it.
Because every instinct I possess has to pass through the narrowest possible gate now, not whether she wants me, but whether she is choosing me free of everything else wrapped around us.
That distinction is the only thing keeping this from becoming contaminated.
I know it.
I knew it when I followed her.
I knew it when I touched her.
I knew it when I kissed her and still nearly let myself forget the room, the door, the fact that another man had put his hands on her without permission and left damage I can still see if I let my mind go there long enough.
That thought changes the heat in me instantly.
It hardens.
Darkens.
I push off the window and pace once across the room because standing still with that in my head feels impossible.
My body has not settled at all. If anything, the act of restraint has sharpened it.
Every nerve in me feels too close to the surface.
I can still feel the way she leaned in, barely, but enough.
I can still feel how careful I had to be not to turn one kiss into something that would have left neither of us with any pretenses intact.
I wanted her mouth again the second I broke away from it.
That is the simplest truth in the room.
I also wanted my hand lower on her waist, more decisive. I wanted her pressed where I left her, breathless for reasons I controlled completely. I wanted to hear what sound she made if I stopped being careful and started being honest. That honesty is exactly what I cannot allow yet.
Not with her.
Not now.
The room resents me for not finishing what I started.
So do I.
I stop at the desk again and force myself back to the practical.
Daan. Nora. Everything happening now, whether named or not.
The shifting perimeter. The fact that Leona is no longer only near the problem but threaded through it in ways I should have prevented before they ever formed.
I pick up one report, read half a line, put it back down.
My mind splits the way it rarely does, one half trying to hold the system in place while the other keeps replaying the angle of her face in my hand.
Useless.
Infuriating.
I have dealt with lust before. I have dealt with attachment in other men. I have watched both undo people who should have known better. I do not fear want. I fear what it makes men justify. I fear what it does when it aligns too neatly with instincts that already bend toward control.
That is what sits under my ribs now.
Not that I kissed her.
That I did not stop wanting to the second it was over.
I shut my eyes for one moment and see it again, too clearly.
Her lips parted, not with panic, but with shock and choice and the beginning of response.
Her hand in my shirt. The point where her body stopped holding itself away from me and started giving back just enough to make the moment impossible to dismiss as my own projection.
All of it was her.
I meant that when I said it.
That is what makes this worse.
If she had folded under it, if she had mistaken shock for desire, if she had let the moment take her somewhere absent or blurry, I could have cut this down to something easier to despise.
I would have had to. Instead she stayed maddeningly present.
Present enough that every choice mattered.
Present enough that I know exactly why I stopped when I did.
Because another second and I would have stopped being content with a kiss.