CHAPTER 13 — THE PLACE WHERE HE STOPS PRETENDING #3
I wasn't escaping. Not this time. I was choosing to stay after seeing his most difficult room, after reading his dead wife's name, after eating the simple eggs he'd made with hands capable of operating on fetuses and trembling for a woman in the middle of the kitchen.
The desire came less from rupture and more from permanence. That scared me more.
Cael lifted me from the stool carefully, but the care wasn't fragile—it was attention.
My hand found the back of his neck, fingers sliding into his hair, and I felt his breathing change when our bodies aligned.
The kiss grew deeper, hotter, less guarded.
I felt his hardness against my stomach and closed my eyes for a second, not to deny it, but to take in the clarity of how much I still wanted him even after everything the night had revealed.
“Bedroom?” He pressed his forehead to mine, the single word heavy with everything unspoken: do you want to keep going, do you want to stop, do you want something else, do you want to run.
“Bedroom.” I held his face before he could move. “And don’t treat this as consolation. I’m not broken in the middle of your kitchen, Cael. I’m scared, I’m tired, I’m furious, I’m pregnant, and I still want you. All of that fits in the same body, even if Whitlock has trouble with complex forms.”
His gaze darkened, not just with desire.
There was an emotion there he didn’t name, maybe because he knew naming it too soon would burden me.
So he just kissed me again and led me down the hallway, leaving the kitchen light on behind us—quiet proof that we weren’t fleeing into darkness, just choosing another room.
In the bedroom, the rain seemed closer. The windows reflected fragments of us both: my hand on his shirt, his face tilted toward me, his tall body bending without losing strength.
Cael turned on just a low lamp, and I didn’t protest because I could see his face.
I needed to see. I needed to be certain that if Celia’s shadow, guilt, Bram, or fear crossed his eyes, I’d recognize it before his touch convinced me to look away.
He undressed me slowly, piece by piece, without the urgency of the closet, without the desperate hunger of the night before.
When my blouse fell, he kissed my shoulder.
When he undid my pants, he paused to look at my face.
When he slid his hand over my belly, he didn’t treat the gesture as paternal right or ceremony.
He touched it briefly, with restrained reverence, then moved to my waist as if he understood that future wasn’t yet ready to become a symbol.
I pulled off his shirt with less delicacy, because I needed his body real, warm, present—not the surgeon talking about risk in the kitchen.
I touched the thin scar near his ribs, the same one I’d seen the night before, and this time he didn’t hide his reaction.
The muscles contracted under my palm, and his gaze dropped to my hand with a vulnerability so fleeting someone else might have missed it.
“Old accident?” The question slipped out quietly, without demand, my mouth near his skin, my fingers still tracing the mark as if touch could ask for an answer without turning the scar into an interrogation.
“Old shift. Disoriented patient, scalpel where it shouldn’t have been, too green a resident to think I needed help.” His hand covered mine over the scar for an instant. “I survived. My pride took longer to heal than the skin.”
“Good to know even your pride heals slowly.” I kissed the scar, not to heal it, but to mark that I had seen and stayed. The sound that escaped him was low, caught in his throat, and hit me between the legs with an almost unfair intensity.
Cael laid me down as if there were time.
Maybe there was. Maybe that was the difference.
He kissed my breasts slowly, my nipples hardening under his mouth and fingers while my breathing fell apart.
His hand slid carefully between my thighs, found me already wet and sensitive, and the way he closed his eyes when he felt it gave me a wave of power so intimate I had to pull him up and kiss him before some unnecessary phrase ruined it.
“You like to confirm everything with your hands, doctor?” My voice broke at the end when his fingers moved again, slow, precise, drawing from me a sound no Whitlock wall could archive.
“With you, I like to make sure I’m not confusing courage with haste.” He kissed my jaw, the corner of my mouth, my throat, and his fingers kept working me until my legs opened wider for him without any negotiation from pride. “And I like hearing when your body stops arguing with me.”
“My body isn’t a reliable source in matters involving you.” I gripped his shoulders, the response dissolving as his mouth moved down my chest and his fingers pressed harder. “It’s clearly compromised.”
“Then I’ll treat it as a hostile but useful witness.” He spoke against my skin, and the absurd phrase made me laugh for a second before I moaned, because he used the distraction to touch me exactly the way my body wanted and my head hadn’t authorized in words.
The pleasure built more slowly that time, less explosive, deeper.
I didn’t try to control it. I let Cael learn my rhythm without hurry, let his mouth dismantle me into parts I didn’t need to defend.
When I came, it was with my face in his neck, my hands on his broad back, my whole body undulating against his hand while he held me as if pleasure could also be a safe place when it wasn’t paired with demand.
Afterward, when he pulled away to get protection, I caught his wrist before distance became another form of excessive care. “I want to feel you looking at me, not treating me like I’ll disappear if you breathe too hard.”
He came back with something in his gaze that almost looked like pain.
He readied himself, positioned himself between my legs, and slid in slowly, his eyes locked on mine with such intensity that for an instant, it felt less like an invasion of the body and more like being let into a room where I allowed almost no one to stay.
The sensation filled me with air and weight at the same time.
He stopped when he was fully inside me, and the pause made my body clench around him by reflex, drawing a low sound from him.