Chapter Six #2
He carried her to the bedroom down the narrow hallway with a gentleness that felt at complete odds with the danger still sitting in his shoulders, laying her back against sheets that smelled faintly of cedar and disuse, a room built for exactly this kind of night and never once used for it until now.
His hands were careful with the clasps of her dress, unhurried despite the tension humming through both of them, pausing every so often to press his mouth to newly bared skin like he was reading a language he'd waited years to be fluent in again.
"Tell me if you want me to stop," he murmured against her collarbone, and she felt the words more than heard them, low and rough and entirely unlike the composed man from the study. "I mean that. Any point. I will stop."
"I don't want you to stop." Her hands found the buttons of his shirt, working them loose with fingers that weren't quite steady, and when the fabric finally parted she saw the rest of what the collar had only hinted at — dark ink spreading across his chest and down one arm, geometric lines giving way to something that looked almost like wings at the shoulder, old scarring visible beneath the newer artwork where the fire had clearly left more than the mask alone accounted for.
She traced her fingers over the marked skin slowly, feeling him go still beneath her touch the same way he had in the kitchen, some old vulnerability surfacing that had nothing to do with strength or danger at all.
"You're allowed to look," he said quietly, watching her study him. "I've spent twelve years assuming no one would want to. I find I'm curious what you make of it."
"I think you're beautiful," she said, and meant it entirely, watching something in his expression crack open at the plainness of the admission. "All of it. The scars. The ink. Even the parts you keep hidden."
He didn't answer with words. He answered by pulling her against him fully, skin against skin, every careful restraint he'd worn like armor for over a decade finally, completely surrendered to the fact of her hands on him.
He walked her backward until her knees met the edge of the bed, and the last of her dress slid to the floor between them in a whisper of green silk, leaving her in nothing but the low lamplight and the weight of a stare that felt like it was memorizing every inch it landed on.
"Twelve years," he said again, rough, almost disbelieving, his hand tracing a slow line from her collarbone down over the curve of her hip, unhurried in a way that made her ache for him to stop being unhurried.
"Twelve years I told myself I didn't have room for wanting anything this badly.
You've undone that in under a month, Sienna, and I find I have very little interest in getting it back. "
"Then stop being careful," she said, breathless, her fingers curling into his shoulders.
Something dark and pleased moved through his expression at that, the last of his restraint finally, deliberately, letting go.
He laid her back against the sheets and followed her down, his mouth finding her throat, her collarbone, the soft skin below her ear where his voice dropped to something low and wrecked, murmuring exactly what he intended to do to her in words that made heat pool low in her stomach and her hips rise to meet him before he'd so much as touched her where she wanted him most.
He took his time anyway, maddeningly, deliberately — learning her with his hands and his mouth until she was shaking beneath him, until his name broke out of her in a voice she barely recognized as her own, until every careful, composed inch of the man from the study had dissolved into something raw and hungry and entirely hers.
When he finally settled over her, when he finally pushed inside her with a low groan that sounded like relief and reverence both at once, she felt the twelve years he'd spent guarding himself give way completely, felt it in the way his hands shook where they framed her face, in the way he whispered her name like a vow between kisses, in the way he moved slow and deep and utterly unhurried, like a man who intended to make this last precisely because he'd waited so long to have it at all.
"Look at me," he murmured, rough, when her eyes fluttered shut against the building pressure low in her belly. "I want to watch you. I've imagined this too many times to close my eyes now."
She held his gaze through it, through every slow, deliberate thrust that had her nails dragging down his back and his name spilling from her mouth in broken fragments, through the moment his composure finally cracked entirely and his rhythm turned rougher, more urgent, chasing something twelve years in the making.
When she finally came apart beneath him, back arching, his name torn from her throat like something sacred, he followed her over the edge a moment later with her name pressed hot against her skin, low and shattered, like the last wall he'd spent a decade building had finally, completely come down.
Afterward, she lay curled against his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow beneath her ear, his hand tracing idle, unhurried patterns along her spine.
"I've imagined this," he admitted quietly, into the dark. "More times than I'm entirely comfortable telling you. I told myself it was simply loneliness talking. I'm increasingly certain it wasn't only that."
"How long?"
"Since the second week." His mouth curved against her hair, something wry and helpless in it.
"You corrected an error in a contract I'd have signed without noticing, and I remember standing in the study afterward thinking that I was in considerably more trouble than I'd anticipated when I hired you. "
She laughed, soft and warm against his chest, and felt him go still beneath the sound the way he always did, like a man cataloguing something he intended to keep.
The screens in the other room still glowed faintly through the doorway, the empty drive and quiet tree line displayed in patient black and white, and for a while neither of them mentioned Julian, or the car that had followed them, or the twelve years of careful, guarded silence that had finally, tonight, given way to something neither of them seemed inclined to take back.
It was near three in the morning when the motion light outside flared on again.
Damian was up and across the room before Sienna had even finished processing the light through the window, pulling on trousers with the same swift, economical movement she'd watched him use to guide her away from Julian at the gala, already crossing to the bank of screens with an alertness that made the warm, unhurried hour before feel like it belonged to an entirely different night.
"What is it?"
"Probably nothing," he said, though his voice had gone flat and careful in a way that told her he didn't believe that at all.
"A deer. The wind." He studied the feed a long moment, jaw tight, and then reached for something in the drawer beneath the screens that Sienna recognized, with a lurch of her stomach, as a handgun, checked and steadied with the same unhurried competence he brought to everything else.
"Stay here. Lock the door behind me. If anyone comes through that door who isn't me, you go out the bedroom window and you run for the tree line, and you don't stop until you reach the main road. "
"Damian—"
"I need you to trust me right now," he said, low, urgent, already moving toward the hallway. "I've done this before, Sienna. I know exactly what I'm doing. I need you safe while I do it."