CHAPTER 18 #2
"You'll regret that."
"Try me."
I took him in my mouth, and the controlled man came apart in increments.
First his breath, ragged through his teeth.
Then his hand, which came up to my hair and didn't grip, didn't direct, just rested there, trembling, like he needed to be touching me to believe the room was real.
I worked him slow, then less slow, my tongue along the underside of him, my hand at the base, and every sound I pulled out of him was a brick coming out of a wall he'd spent three decades building.
"Sloane. " My name, not darling, my actual name, which he almost never used.
"Darling, I'm going to. If you. You should.
" A man who spoke in balanced periodic sentences, reduced to fragments, and I felt the cold satisfaction of it the way I felt a good clause snap shut.
But I didn't want it like this, not the first time, so I drew back, slow, and he made a sound that was nearly a plea.
"Not yet," I said. "I read the whole contract, Cross. There's another section."
"You're going to kill me."
"On the record, I want it noted you consented to that."
He laughed, shocked out of him, half a breath, and then I climbed into his lap in the good chair, my knees against the leather either side of his hips, and the laugh died into something else.
He got his hands on my thighs, my hips, careful, always careful, the strength of him held back the way they all held it back.
"Color," he said. The check-in, his version, low and certain, his thumb moving on my hip. "I need to hear it. Where are you."
"Green," I said. "All the way green. You with me?"
"I have never been more with anyone in my life.
" His forehead dropped to my collarbone, against the old surgical scar there, and he breathed me in, bergamot and the warm dark of him rising between us, and his voice came out unguarded in a way I'd bet the firm he'd never let anyone hear.
"Tell me yes. Tell me there's nothing owed and you're sure. "
"Yes. Nothing owed. I'm sure. " I reached between us and lined him up and sank down onto him, slow, the stretch of it stealing my breath, and he held still, every muscle locked, letting me set the pace, letting me run it, the man who ran everything.
"That's it," he said, barely a sound. "That's. You. However you want. I'm not going anywhere. Take whatever you. God. Sloane."
I moved. I set the rhythm and he met it, his hips rising into me, his hands spread on my back, on my hips, mapping me like he was committing me to a memory he intended to keep without a receipt.
The chair creaked. The cold light lay across the desk and the watch lay in it, ticking, and I had the strange clear thought, even then, he didn't reach for it, he didn't reach for the watch.
"Tell me," I said, riding him, my hands fisted in his shirt. "The thing you priced everything to avoid saying."
His eyes came open, pale and absolutely undefended.
"I want you," he said, "and it costs nothing, and that is the most frightening thing that has ever happened to me, and I am not going to flinch from it.
There. It's said. I want this with nothing owed.
I want you with nothing owed. " His hand came up and cradled my jaw, his thumb at the corner of my mouth, almost unbearably gentle for a man falling apart.
"Now come for me, darling. Run it all the way to the end. I want to watch the most controlled woman I've ever met lose the wheel on purpose, in my chair, with the door you locked."
And I did. He got a hand between us, found my clit with that surgical precision turned to something holy, and worked me in tight circles while I moved on him, and the whole locked bright box of the office narrowed down to his hands and his voice and the slick heat of him inside me, and I came with my face in his throat and his name in my mouth and his arms going hard around me like he'd finally found something he refused to let the bank take.
"There," he breathed, "there you are, that's mine, that's ours," and then his own control went, the last brick, and he made that broken syllable again as he came, holding me to him, shaking, a low sound rolling through his chest and into my sternum below hearing, the wolf in him settling, recognizing, staying.
For a while neither of us moved. His heart slowed under my ear.
The light stayed exactly where it had been, that kind of morning, clean and cold and merciless and somehow, in here, kind.
He pressed his mouth to my hair, my temple, the scar at my collarbone, soft small things, no precision left in him at all.
Then he reached for the desk drawer, and I tensed, expecting the watch, expecting him to put himself back together one ritual at a time.
Instead he came up with a clean handkerchief, of course he did, of course Julian Cross kept pressed linen in his gun-desk, and he cleaned me up with a tenderness that made my throat tight, and got a bottle of water from the same drawer and made me drink half before he'd take a sip himself, and pulled his fallen coat up off the floor and wrapped it around my shoulders against the chill the dead generator had left in the steel building.
"Aftercare," he said, dry, recovering himself a degree. "I'm told it's mandatory. I find I don't mind the regulation."
"You're billing the firm for that water, aren't you."
"I'm absorbing the cost. " He huffed something that might have grown up to be a laugh, and tucked the coat closer around me, and I sat in his lap in the good chair, wrapped in bergamot and old leather, in the cold clean light, and felt the thing I'd spent my whole life refusing to feel, which was the simple weight of being held while the ledger between us stayed exactly level, owing nothing and owed nothing in return.
It was the first contract I'd ever signed that didn't have a way for someone to ruin me hidden in the back.
That's when I noticed.
The watch was still on the desk. Face up. Ticking. Where he'd set it before I came in.
He hadn't wound it.
I knew what it was. I'd watched him do it every morning since the road, three soft clicks, deliberate as a metronome, his father's watch, the only thing the bank didn't take, the ritual a man performs to keep faith with a dead man and a debt.
He wound it the way he priced things. It was the same gesture.
I'd filed it the first night, the way I file everything.
"You didn't wind it," I said.
He went very still in that other way again, the document-that-shouldn't-exist way. He looked at the watch like it had betrayed him by keeping time without his permission, ticking along on yesterday's winding, running down on its own toward a stop he hadn't authorized.
"No," he said. "I forgot. " Something moved through his face, slow, like a man reading a clause he'd skipped his whole life and finding it said the opposite of what he'd feared.
"I have never once forgotten. Thirty years.
I wound it through the worst of being held, through the day my father died, through the morning I buried him with nothing in the ground but a name.
" His arms tightened around me, and the watch ticked, unwound, winding down. "What have you done to me, darling."