Chapter 26 #2
My hand cups her jaw. My thumb finds her cheekbone. My other hand finds her waist and anchors her into me.
Her breath catches. Her eyes go wide. Her lips part.
This is a lie. She doesn’t know who she’s kissing.
My mouth finds hers and it’s like setting a match to gasoline.
There is nothing gentle about this. I’m not capable of gentle right now. I’m kissing her like a man who’s been starving and just found bread. My lips crash into hers and the contact is electric, obliterating, the kind of collision that rewrites the chemistry of both people involved.
She tastes like cold air and the red wine she had earlier and something underneath both that’s just her — dark and clean and addictive. I’m going to become an addict after this. I’m going to need this the way I need oxygen and I’m never going to recover.
Her hands find my shirt. She grips the fabric and pulls me closer and the sound she makes —
Jesus Christ, the sound.
Something between a moan and a gasp and relief, like she’s been holding her breath for twenty-two years and just remembered how to exhale. It’s the most devastating thing I’ve ever heard. It’s going to live inside me until I’m dead.
My hand on her jaw tilts her head back, deepening the angle, and she opens for me instantly. My tongue finds hers and the taste multiplies — wine and warmth and the vibration of another small sound she makes against my mouth that sends a bolt of heat straight down my spine and into my cock.
I’m hard. Instantly, painfully hard. There’s no hiding it and I don’t try. She’s pressed against me and she can feel exactly what she’s doing to me and the fact that she doesn’t pull away — the fact that she presses closer — is going to be the end of me.
This is a confession. An apology. A claim. Every lie I’ve told her is in this kiss and every truth I can’t say and I’m pouring both into her mouth because it’s the only honest thing I know how to do right now.
Her hands move. Into my hair, gripping, pulling. Across my shoulders, nails finding purchase. She’s not passive, not tentative — she’s kissing me back with the same hunger, the same desperation, like she’s been starving too and didn’t know it until she tasted food.
My teeth catch her bottom lip making her gasp.
My tongue soothes where my teeth were and her whole body shudders against mine.
The vibration travels through my chest and settles in my groin and I grip her waist harder because if I don’t anchor myself to something I’m going to lose the last thread of control I have left.
Her fingers trace my scar. The one on my jaw. Her thumb following the silver line from the corner of my mouth to the hinge of my jaw and a groan rips out of me that’s vulgar and raw and I can’t take it back. She heard it. Her response is to wrap her legs around my waist.
I catch her. Hands under her thighs, her weight against me, her body wrapped around mine.
Her back meets the cold window and she arches into my chest and I can feel everything — her heartbeat, her heat, the way her thighs tighten around my hips, the small desperate roll of her pelvis against me that tells me she can feel how hard I am and she’s not running.
She’s grinding.
Barely. A micro-movement that might be involuntary.
But her hips shift against mine and the friction through our clothes is enough to make my vision white-out for a half-second.
I press her harder against the window and kiss her deeper and the moan she makes into my mouth is the single filthiest, most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
Somehow, we’re on the couch. I don’t remember moving.
She’s under me, her hair fanned across the cushion, her lips swollen and red, her eyes black — the gray completely eaten by her pupils.
I’m between her legs and my weight is on my forearms and we’re both breathing so hard the room sounds like the aftermath of a fight.
My hands are barely staying above her clothes. My thumbs find the hem of her shirt and brush the bare skin at her hips and the goosebumps that erupt under my touch are visible, spreading up her stomach. She arches into my hands. A request without words.
I want her. The want is so total it’s rearranging my internal organs. I want to take this shirt off her. I want to put my mouth on the skin I just touched. I want to feel her come apart underneath me and know I’m the person who ever made her feel this.
But somewhere underneath the want, the lie is still there. Quiet now, drowned by her taste, but present. A hairline fracture in the foundation of everything I’m building with my mouth on hers.
She shifts beneath me. Her thigh presses against my cock through my jeans and my breath catches so loud it echoes.
And then she does something I don’t expect.
She puts her hand on my chest. Gentle. Not pushing. Holding.
“Killian.” Her voice is wrecked. Rough and breathless and the sound of my name in that voice almost breaks my resolve to listen.
“Ivy.”
“If we don’t stop…” She swallows. Her eyes search mine. “I want to. God, I want to. But I need this to be a choice. Not a haze.”
The words land in my chest like something sacred.
She’s stopping. She’s choosing to stop. Not because she doesn’t want me — I can feel exactly how much she wants me, her body is trembling with it, her pupils are blown, her hips are still pressed against mine.
She’s stopping because she wants this to matter.
Because for the first time in her life, she’s the one deciding what happens to her body.
I press my forehead against hers. Our breaths mingle. I close my eyes.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Like she expected me to fight it.
“Ivy. When you’re ready. Not before.” I open my eyes. She’s right there. Our noses touch. “You decide. Always.”
Her eyes fill. She blinks them clear.
We drift toward her room. Our hands refuse to let go — fingers laced, then her palm on my forearm, then my hand on the small of her back. The contact adjusts but doesn’t break.
I pull her down onto the bed beside me. She curls into my side like she’s been doing it her entire life. Her head on my chest, her arm across my stomach, her legs tangled with mine.
We lie there in the dark. My hand traces slow shapes on her bare hip where her shirt has ridden up. Her fingers map the scars on my chest through the fabric.
The tension is still there. A soft whisper instead of a scream. My body hasn’t calmed down and hers hasn’t either — I can feel her pulse hammering where her wrist rests against my ribs.
She shifts. Her thigh presses across mine and she feels me — still hard, still aching, the evidence of everything I’m holding back pressed against her leg through denim.
Her breath catches.
“Killian.”
“I know.”
Her thighs clench against my leg. I can feel the tension in her muscles, the deliberate contraction, and I know what she’s feeling because I’m feeling the mirror of it.
She presses closer. Her head settles deeper into my chest. My arm tightens around her.
This. Two people in the dark, breathing together, choosing to stay. Not because of a crisis or a mission or a threat. Because they want to. Because the alternative — separate rooms, separate beds, the silence of sleeping alone — is no longer something either of us can survive.
Her breathing evens. Her body softens. She’s falling asleep on my chest with her thigh across mine and her fingers curled into my shirt and my cock aching against her leg and I have never been this uncomfortable or this at peace in my entire life.
I don’t sleep.
I lie in the dark with her weight on my chest and I think about what I’ve done.
I kissed her. I kissed her knowing she doesn’t know who I am.
Not fully. Not honestly. She thinks she kissed Killian.
She did. But she also kissed Ghost and she doesn’t know that.
She kissed the man who watched her sleep through infrared scopes and called her Smoke and rode with her at midnight and told her the road waits.
She kissed all of me without knowing all of me.
The kiss was real. The want was real. The sound she made against my mouth and the way she said come back and the way her body fit against mine like a key turning — all of it was real.
And it was built on a lie.
She stopped us tonight. She put her hand on my chest and said she wanted it to be a choice, not a haze. She chose. For the first time in her life, she decided what happened to her body. And I should be honored by that. I am honored by that.
But she made the choice without full information. She chose Killian without knowing Killian is Ghost. And when she finds out — not if, when — will she still choose me? Or will the lie poison everything that came before it?
I press my lips against her hair. She stirs but doesn’t wake.
The world is about to change for both of us and I’m lying here in the dark with the taste of her on my lips and the weight of her on my chest and the knowledge that I’m running out of time to tell her the truth.
But tonight matters. Tonight she said come back and I came. She kissed me like I was the only real thing in her world. She wrapped herself around me and chose to stop and chose to stay and chose me.
Even if she didn’t have all the pieces. Even if the man she chose is carrying a secret that could destroy them both. She’s breathing against my chest. She’s asleep in the arms of a liar who would burn down the world to keep her safe.
I hold her tighter, and I pray — to the same god I don’t believe in — that when the truth comes, she’ll remember this. The way I held her. The way she fit. The way she said come back and I did.
I came back.
I’ll always come back to her.