Chapter 7 #2
My hands slow in her hair. "The Vaughn Industries expansion strategy."
"You've read my work."
"Grayson forwarded it to me six weeks ago and told me to hire you, and I told him we didn't need outside help and I've been kicking myself ever since.
" Her eyes open at that. I keep working through her hair.
"It's brilliant. The regional pivot alone would pull us fix three markets where we're bleeding.
Your demographic breakdown made me feel physically stupid, and I've been in this industry for twelve years. "
She is quiet long enough for the water pressure to shift and settle. "You were going to bring it to Liam and Grayson," she says.
"I am going to bring it to Liam and Grayson.
With you." I rinse the shampoo through, watching it run in white rivulets down her nutmeg back, tracing over the rises and falls, and my fingers don't resist following the soft lines to her round bottom.
"You'd present it. It's yours. I'd be there as — " I consider.
"Logistical support. And because you shouldn't have to walk into a room with all three of them without someone in your corner. "
"I've walked into harder rooms alone."
"I know. You don't have to anymore." I tip her chin back to rinse the last of it.
Her face tilts up toward the showerhead and her eyes close again, and she's so — she's so entirely herself, even here, even this unguarded, that it does something permanent to my understanding of what I want my life to look like.
"We'd be partners," I say. "In the real sense.
Your strategy, my client relationships. You know the data, I know the rooms. Between us we'd improve things they currently think they're already good at. "
"They're not going to like being told that." But her mouth has gone soft.
"Grayson will grumble and then restructure within thirty days. Hunter will want everything in writing. Liam will make a spreadsheet." A pause. "They'll all do exactly what you recommend because you'll be right."
She opens her eyes at that. Looks at me through the water, the steam, the small cramped reality of this bathroom.
"Partners," she says.
"Mates," I correct her. Quiet. Firm. "Partners is what we are professionally. Mates is what we are, Sharma. That's the one that matters."
Her expression shifts and she stares at me through her long wet lashes. She reaches up, slow, deliberate, and traces one finger along my jaw — from the hinge to the chin, reading my face like she's deciding to memorize it .
"You understand this isn't going to be easy," she says. "You have spent years being the one who makes it look effortless, and I am constitutionally incapable of letting anything stay effortless."
"I'm counting on it."
"I will challenge every weak idea you bring to me, and I will not soften it because we're sleeping together."
"I would be offended if you did."
"And you don't get to use the mate bond as a negotiating tactic in professional disagreements. The bond is the bond. The work is the work."
"Agreed." I turn off the water. Reach past her for a towel and wrap it around her shoulders, and she lets me do that too.
"Sharma." She looks up. "I know I've got ground to recover.
I know this week is barely the beginning of what it's going to take to actually deserve you.
I'm not asking you to forget what I was at nineteen or pretend it didn't shape things.
" The towel is warm between my hands and her shoulders.
"I'm asking you to let me be accountable to who I am now.
Every day. For as long as we've got." My throat is tighter than I'd like.
"You took everything I handed you when you were a little girl with the roundest cheeks and the brightest eyes I'd ever seen, and you made yourself into something so formidable that the first night I looked at you properly I felt it in my back teeth.
I want to live up to what you've become.
" A beat. "I think that might take the rest of my life. "
Her eyes are bright. Not wet — she's not going to cry, she's too stubborn for that right now — but bright with something that has been locked behind glass for a very long time.
"That," she says, "was almost worth waiting for."
A laugh breaks out of me, real and undefended, and she tips forward into my chest, her forehead against my collarbone, and her shoulders are shaking very slightly in a way I'm choosing to believe is also a laugh.
I get my arms around her and hold on. The bond pulses between us, warm and irrevocable and no longer frightening.
"Almost?" I say into her hair.
"Mostly." She pulls back just enough to look up at me, and the warmth in her eyes is not soft — it's fierce and alive and entirely her. "Don't push it, Vaughn."
I take her face in both hands and kiss her, careful and deliberate and with every intention of spending the rest of this week alone on this island learning exactly the kind of work she means.
Her hands come up to my chest. They stay there. She doesn't push me away.
The bungalow is quiet around us. The water outside moves in its slow, endless way, and through the open shutter I can hear the distant noise of the wedding festivities — music, a burst of laughter, Viv's high clear voice carrying on the wind — and none of it touches us in here.
We exist slightly outside of all of it, in the specific pocket of time that belongs only to this.
I am not afraid.
That's the thing I will remember later, when I think back on this moment.
Not the heat or the bond or even her face — though I will remember all of those things with a specificity that borders on embarrassing.
What I will remember is the absence of fear.
The way the armor that I have worn since I was nineteen years old and standing in a hospital hallway not understanding why the world was still turning — the way it simply came off.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just quietly, in a small bungalow on an island in the middle of the sea, because the woman in my arms looked at me like she fully intended to hold me to every word.
She will. I know that with the same certainty I know my own heartbeat. I'll hold her to every word back.
"Roan," she says.
"Yeah."
"Don't make me regret this."
My hands tighten at her waist. "Not a chance in hell."