Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Cleo
Eddie doesn’t wait for more. He tugs me into the hall without a backward glance, tossing over his shoulder, “They’re all yours, B.”
“You’re leaving him with them?” I ask, a little worried about our guy—my brothers can be major assholes.
“Sure. He was late. He can deal with whatever Roderick has to bitch about.”
He doesn’t let go of my hand. He leads me up the stairs toward the main room where the ocean lives on the other side of the glass. My palm fits his like it remembers how. We hit the landing. The doors ease shut behind us with a soft latch.
Outside, the sea heaves in long, dark swells. Inside, the room waits.
Eddie turns to face me without dropping my hand. Dress shirt, sleeves rolled, collar open—like he got halfway to comfortable and forgot. That executive calm he wears has slipped. What’s left is a man who looks a fraction younger and a lot more unguarded.
“Did you mean it?” he asks, voice low. “When you said you love me.”
My name isn’t in the question, but I hear it anyway. I smile—because I just told my brothers I loved him and Barret for the first time. Not ideal but it’s a good first step. I guess that happens when you have to stop a stupid fistfight before it starts. “Yes.”
His gaze searches mine like he’s checking for seams. “Say it again.”
“I love you,” I tell him. It lands in the room and doesn’t walk anything back. “I love you.”
Something loosens in his mouth, the smallest curve, like a rope letting go. He doesn’t whoop or drag me under. He doesn’t turn it into a speech. He just tips his forehead to mine for a breath and exhales a laugh that’s barely there. It brushes my lips and tastes like coffee and relief.
“Say it once more,” he murmurs—almost apologizing for asking and asking anyway.
“I love you, Edgar Reznor.”
This time he closes his eyes. When he opens them, they’re bright and a little ruined, like I just handed him a future he didn’t dare to name out loud.
He lifts our interlaced hands and presses his mouth to my knuckles, slow.
Heat blooms under his kiss. Cool air slips through the seam of the doors.
I don’t pull away. I don’t count the risks.
I let the words sit between us and build a place to stand.
“I needed to hear it,” he says, quiet. “Not because you owe me—because I keep forgetting good things can happen.”
“I forget, too,” I admit. It scrapes coming out, but I let it. “Then you touch me like this and it feels . . . like air after a long dive.”
He breathes out through his nose, like it costs him to keep the rest inside. “Cleo . . .”
“I need you to hear all of it.” The words tug at something old in me. “I love Barret, too. It’s the only thing that made sense when nothing else did. It was the first time the noise turned down enough for me to think.”
He nods once. “I know.”
“I didn’t believe either of you at first,” I say. “I have a lifetime of thinking love is a door you get through with a pass you never earned.” I swallow. “I’m so fucking scared of being wrong.”
“Be scared,” he says. “Just don’t lie and call it protection.”
A laugh slips out, thin at the edges. “That’s fair.”
“When you left,” he says, eyes on mine, “I told myself it was right to let you go. That if it was real, you’d come back.”
“Same,” I say. “I tried to convince myself that wanting you both made me selfish—more when you loved each other. Like I was taking too much air.”
“Breathe,” he says. “Take more—take everything.”
Wind slips through the cracked door and lifts a strand of my hair. The tide moves against the rocks below, a slow hush and pull. I tighten my grip on the rail and keep going.
“When I said I loved you in there,” I say, “I meant every part of it. The nights you sat outside the bathroom because Dorian’s voice found its way under my skin.
The way you learned my tells and never used them against me.
How you counted to sixty with me when I couldn’t slow down.
How you left water on the sink and a note under the glass—like a promise.
How you never asked for more than I could give—and still stayed when I gave you nothing. ”
He swallows. “I learned you. So what?”
“So I’m learning you back all over again,” I say. “How you go quiet when you’re hurting. How you apologize with your hands, not your mouth. How you’re standing there in the light so I can step forward on my own.”
His mouth tilts, the smallest move. “You noticed.”
“I notice everything about you,” I say. “Including the way you’re waiting for me to close the distance.”
“I am,” he says softly. “I’ll wait as long as you need. I want you—not a version of you that makes this easier for me.”
“My truth isn’t pretty,” I warn. “It’s patched together. It has holes. Sometimes it burns. Sometimes it freezes. But it’s mine, and I’m done sanding it down so no one gets cut.” I hold his gaze. “I love you.”
He lifts our joined hands, his thumb tracing the beat at my wrist like he’s reading something there.
I tip my chin. He leans in and stops, close enough that our breaths find each other.
The ocean hushes on the other side of the glass.
He grazes my nose with his, a question. I answer by rising onto my toes.
His free hand cups my jaw—gentle, patient, not dragging me anywhere. Heat rolls through me; the room narrows to him and the inches left between us.
“Please,” I whisper.
He comes in slow, like a promise. The first brush of his mouth is barely contact, a pass that tests the air.
The second lingers. The third steals my breath.
He tastes like coffee and relief and something I don’t have a name for yet.
He pauses—gives me space to say no—and I give him more instead, parting for him, finding his rhythm, learning it as if it’s a language we invented.
He breaks away just enough to breathe, his forehead resting against mine, our noses still touching. “Cleo,” he murmurs, and my name in his voice loosens something old and knotted.
I slide my hand up his chest and curl my fingers at the base of his throat, feeling the pulse there answer mine. “I’m here,” I say, and then I kiss him back—slow, sure.
His mouth meets mine like a promise kept late.
The first pass is soft heat; the second lingers, coaxing more.
I open for him and he follows with a low sound that trembles through his chest and into my palm.
His hand finds my jaw, thumb sweeping along the hinge; the other settles at my waist and draws me closer until the glass is cool at my shoulder and he’s all I can taste—coffee, salt that isn’t the ocean, something warm that makes my knees threaten to go.
He pauses a breath from me—checking, always—and I answer by chasing him, catching his lower lip, taking a little more.
He smiles against my mouth, and the curve of it undoes me.
The kiss deepens building in slow waves that keep finding shore.
I thread my fingers into his hair. He exhales into me, and the sound makes heat uncurl low in my belly.
“Again,” I whisper, and he does, angling me, learning what I ask for without words. The world tilts to the beat of his pulse under my hand. I taste relief. I taste us. Every yes I’ve been hoarding slides out between our mouths.
When we finally part, we’re close enough to share the same breath. His eyes are bright, glazed at the edges. Mine sting. I press my forehead to his, unwilling to lose contact even by an inch.
“Love you, princess,” he mumbles into my mouth.
“I love you,” I say into his mouth, and I feel him take the words like air.