Chapter Ten #2
Every one of those facts was true, and every one of them was a reason to plant a hand on Leo’s chest, step back, and say goodnight in the flat voice she’d been using on him for two days.
Anja did none of it.
She fisted her hand tighter in his T-shirt instead, and when he started to pull back, maybe to give her the out or to check that she meant it, she didn’t let him.
She’d spent months telling herself that one night had been an answer to a question.
That’s all it was. She was abruptly, completely done pretending the question had ever resolved.
“Inside,” she got out against his lips. “Not the hallway.”
“Anja—”
“My room. Now.” She found the doorframe behind her by feel and tugged him through it.
The room was the larger of the upstairs suites, because of course it was.
BeBe had clearly decided from four hundred miles away which of them needed the space to spread out a weapons kit and which of them could make do.
It featured a king bed, a sitting area with a fireplace, and a luxurious bathroom.
She’d registered all of it on arrival, and she’d thought about exactly none of it as anything other than tactical until this precise moment.
Anja kicked the door shut behind them.
“Tell me to stop,” he murmured, “and I’ll—”
“If you ask me one more time whether I’m sure,” she countered, getting her hands under his tee and feeling him jump at the cold of her fingers, “I’m going to lose my nerve, and I have spent months being very careful not to do this. Do me the courtesy of not making it easy to stop.”
He laughed against her throat, a low, rough sound she felt more than heard. “Noted.”
“I mean it. I don’t do anything I’m not sure about.
” She yanked the shirt up and over his head and dropped it behind her.
Then her palms were flat against the bare heat of him, the solid plane of his chest, the give of muscle under her hands.
“I told you that the first night I walked back into your life. I meant it then too.”
Whatever he might have answered got lost because she stopped giving him room to talk.
His hands found the hem of her shirt and then the skin beneath, sliding up her ribs slow enough that she felt every inch of their contact.
Anja heard the sound she made before she could edit it.
He stripped the shirt off, then took time to look at her.
His focused attention undid her more than speed ever could.
She, who had never once in her life felt exposed standing in front of anyone, did now.
“You’re staring,” she managed.
“I spent months trying to remember this.” His thumb traced the line of her collarbone, then drifted lower over the swell of her breast, and her eyes closed. “Memory doesn’t do it justice. Not even close.”
Then his mouth was on her again, her lips, cheeks, the curve of her throat, the spot beneath her ear that she hadn’t known was a weakness until he found it.
Her knees gave just the slightest fraction.
He caught her against his full, warm length and walked her backward toward the bed until the backs of her legs met the mattress.
Anja had filed what had happened in Bloomington under one amazing night and locked it in a drawer.
That lie had cost her every single hour she’d spent pretending otherwise.
This was not that. This was the drawer wrenched off its track and emptied onto the floor.
She’d half-convinced herself, over the long separation, that her memory had inflated it, that no single night could have been what she remembered.
Her memory, it turned out, had been generous to no one. The reality of him outpaced it on every count.
Their remaining clothes disappeared, and she pulled him down to her.
The rest of the world disappeared as he filled her in one hard thrust, stretching her until the initial invasion became pleasure unlike any she’d known.
After that, she lost the ordered version of herself and didn’t go looking for it.
There was no checklist for this. There was only his weight settling over her, the slow drag of his hands learning her again, the heat of his lips tracking down her body, and the intimate murmur of her name against her skin.
She arched into every touch. Gave back as good as she got, her own hands greedy and sure, until the last of his restraint frayed and the slow unraveling caught fire between them.
The specific gravity of what she’d been resisting was finally given over to in a strange house where, for once, nobody needed her to be the strong one.
He was not quiet. Neither, to her faint, distant surprise, was she. She gripped him as if he were the only fixed point left in a tilting world and let herself be as loud and undone as she needed to be.
At some point she registered, with the functioning corner of her brain that never fully switched off, that the suite was mercifully far from the stairs and that the old mansion had thankfully been built with thick walls.
It was, by any measure she had, the kind of night you didn’t recover from. There would be no filing this one in a drawer, no margin of denial to retreat behind in the morning.
She knew that even as it was happening.
She found she didn’t care at all.