10. Ursula
— ? —
Ursula
I’ve been kissed before. I’ve been married for thirteen years. But nothing, nothing in my entire life, has felt like this. Like coming home and jumping off a cliff at the same time. Like drowning and being saved in the same breath.
“Thank God.” He breathes the words against my lips. “I’ve wanted to do that for longer than you would believe.”
“You hated me for thirteen years.”
“Same thing.”
He’s not wrong. Every barbed exchange across a dinner table. Every cold smile at a gala. Every time I caught him watching me from across a room and pretended I didn’t notice, pretended my heart didn’t stutter, pretended the ice queen didn’t feel anything at all.
The longest foreplay of my life.
His hands are in my hair now, tilting my head back, and he’s kissing me like he’s trying to memorize me, slow and thorough, a kiss that makes me forget my own name.
“We should stop.” I say it against his mouth, not meaning it, not wanting to mean it. “This is probably a bad idea.”
“Probably.”
“I’m still technically married.”
“Separated. Filed for divorce.” He kisses my jaw, my neck, the hollow of my throat. “And I don’t care.”
“People will talk.”
“Let them.”
“Bennett will...”
“I don’t want to talk about Bennett.” He pulls back, just enough to look at me, and his eyes are dark and serious.
“I don’t want to think about Bennett. I want to think about you.
Just you. For one night, can we just be us?
Not enemies, not allies, not whatever complicated arrangement we’ve been dancing around. Just Matteo and Ursula. Just this.”
I should say no. I should be sensible and careful and all the things I’ve been for thirty-seven years.
But the fire is warm on my skin and the storm is raging outside and I’m so tired of being sensible.
“Just this,” I whisper. “Just us.”
He kisses me again, deeper this time, and I feel it everywhere. My fingers find the buttons of his shirt, clumsy with wine and want, and he laughs against my mouth.
“Let me.”
He sits up, pulls his shirt over his head, and I forget how to breathe. I’ve seen him in a wet undershirt. I’ve imagined what was underneath. But imagination has nothing on reality, the broad shoulders, the dark hair on his chest, the pale old scar low on his ribs.
“Your turn.”
My hands are shaking as I reach for my own buttons. He catches them, stills them, brings them to his lips.
“Let me,” he says again. “Please.”
The please undoes me. Just like it did at the spa.
He takes his time. Button by button. His eyes on mine the whole way, watching my face, watching my reactions. When my shirt falls open, he makes a sound, low and rough.
“You’re so beautiful.” His voice is barely a whisper. “You’re so goddamn beautiful.”
“Matteo...”
“I mean it. Every dinner party, every gala, every miserable industry event, I’d watch you across the room and think, ‘She’s the most beautiful woman here, and she has no idea.’ Your husband certainly didn’t tell you. He should have told you every day.”
“He didn’t.”
“His loss.” He leans down, presses a kiss to my collarbone, my shoulder, the swell of my chest above my bra. “My gain.”
I stop thinking.
His mouth is everywhere, hot and hungry, and his hands slide the shirt off my shoulders, unhook my bra, drop it somewhere I’ll never find it.
When my breasts are bare he goes still for a second, just looking, his throat working around a swallow, and then his mouth closes over one nipple and I make a sound I have never made in my life.
He groans against my skin like it hurts him.
He rolls the other between his fingers until I arch off the rug, and every time I move his eyes flick up to watch my face, cataloging me, learning which touch makes me lose the thread of who I’m supposed to be.
“Tell me to stop,” he murmurs against my throat. “Tell me you want this.”
“I want this.”
“Tell me you want me.”
“I want you.” The words come out broken, desperate. “I’ve wanted you for longer than I’m willing to admit.”
“Good.” His hand slides down my stomach, over my hip bone, and pushes between my thighs, and when he finds how wet I am he curses low and filthy. “Christ. You’re soaked. This all for me?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“For you. It’s for you. It’s been for you for weeks and I hated it and now I don’t care.”
He drags one finger through me, then two, slow and deliberate, watching what it does to my face.
My hips chase his hand without my permission.
He gives me exactly nothing, just that maddening glide, until I’m gripping his forearm, until I can feel the muscle flexing under my fingers with every stroke.
“Matteo. Please.”
“There it is.” He pushes his fingers into me and I clench around them, and he makes a wrecked sound. “There’s my ice queen, begging on my floor. You have any idea how long I’ve wanted to hear that?”
I would tell him to be quiet if I could remember how words work.
His thumb finds the spot that matters and circles it while his fingers work me open, and it builds fast and mean, my thighs shaking, my heels digging into the rug, and when he curls his fingers just so and says “come on, let go, I’ve got you,” I break apart on his hand with his name in my mouth.
I’m still shaking when he settles between my legs. He kicks the last of his clothes off and I finally see all of him, the cut of his hips, the line of hair, his cock hard and heavy against his stomach, and my mouth goes dry for an entirely new reason.
“Ursula.” He braces one forearm beside my head, the muscle standing out, a vein running down it, and lines himself up with his other hand. “Look at me.”
I open my eyes, find his, hold them.
“I need you to know,” he says, and his voice is shaking, “this isn’t just tonight. For me. This isn’t revenge or alliance or any of the other words we’ve been using. This is real. You’re real. And I...”
“Stop talking.” I hook my leg over his hip and pull. “Please stop talking and get inside me.”
He stops talking.
He pushes in slow, watching my face the whole way, and the stretch of him steals the air out of my lungs. He’s big enough that I feel every inch, that my body has to give to take him, and when he’s finally seated all the way we both go still, foreheads pressed together, breathing each other’s air.
“Feel that?” His voice is barely there. “That’s thirteen years.”
Then he moves.
The first drag of him nearly finishes me on its own.
He sets a rhythm that’s slow and deep and devastating, his hips snapping against mine, and I get my hands on his back and hold on.
I can feel the muscles of his ass flex under my heel with every thrust. I can feel his throat vibrate when he groans.
I dig my nails in and he hisses and drives in harder, and the fire pops and the storm screams and none of it exists, none of it, only the place where our bodies meet.
“You feel,” he grits out, “like you were made for this. For me. Say you feel it too.”
“I feel it.” I’m crying and I don’t know when I started. “God, Matteo, I feel it, don’t stop, don’t you dare stop.”
“Never.” He gets a hand between us, thumb finding me again, and it’s too much, it’s exactly enough. “Give it to me. Come on my cock, let me feel it, I want all of it.”
The crude and the tender land in the same breath and that’s what does it.
I shatter around him, clenching so hard he chokes on my name, and he follows me over with his face buried in my neck, hips stuttering, saying something that sounds like it starts with love and dies against my skin before he can finish it.
We stay like that for a long time. Him still inside me. My legs still wrapped around him. The fire warm on one side and his weight warm on the other, and when he finally lifts his head to look at me, wrecked and open and unguarded, I feel something I haven’t felt in thirteen years.
Complete.
He carries me to the bed after, both of us boneless and laughing at how badly we’re walking, and it’s slower the second time.
Reverent. He takes me apart with his mouth first, spends an obscene amount of time between my thighs like he has nowhere to be for the rest of his life, until I’m tugging his hair and demanding he come back up.
When he slides into me again it’s face to face, unhurried, his hand laced through mine and pressed into the mattress, and this time when I come it’s quiet, a long slow unspooling, and he watches every second of it like it’s the only thing worth watching in the world.
We lie tangled together afterward, the fire burning low, the storm finally quieting. His hand traces lazy patterns on my back, and I listen to his heartbeat slow beneath my ear.
“Stay,” he murmurs. “Stay the night.”
“The storm trapped me here anyway.”
“Stay because you want to. Not because you have to.”
I lift my head, look at him, this man who has been my enemy and my ally and now something else entirely. His dark hair is mussed, his eyes soft in the firelight, and he looks younger somehow. Unguarded.
“I want to stay.”
His smile is slow and devastating. “Good.”
He pulls me close, wraps around me, and I fall asleep to the sound of his breathing and the last distant rumbles of thunder.
***
I wake to gray light and a fire burned to embers.
For a moment, I don’t remember where I am. The bed is unfamiliar, the sheets smell different, and there’s a warm weight across my waist that definitely isn’t mine.
Then I remember.
The lighthouse, the storm, the kiss that became so much more.
Matteo is still asleep, his face relaxed, one arm thrown across my stomach. He looks peaceful. Content. The sharp edges that define him when he’s awake are softened in sleep, and I have the sudden urge to trace them, to memorize the planes of his face while he can’t catch me looking.
I slip out of bed carefully, not wanting to wake him. The lighthouse is cold in the early morning, and I grab the first thing I see: his shirt from last night, still crumpled on the floor where we left it.
I button it halfway and pad to the window. The storm has passed. The causeway is still wet but no longer flooded, the water retreating with the tide. We could leave now, if we wanted. Go back to the real world, to Manhattan and divorce papers and the complicated mess of our lives.
But I’m not ready for the real world yet.
On the bedside table, I find my underwear. I pick them up, look at them, look at the man still sleeping in the bed.
A smile spreads across my face.
I walk to his side of the bed and place my underwear on his pillow. Carefully, deliberately, where he’ll see them the moment he wakes up.
Then I move toward the door, taking care to make just enough noise to stir him.
“Ursula?” His voice is rough with sleep. Confused.
“I’m just stepping outside.” I glance back over my shoulder, let him see me in his shirt, let him see the smile I’m not trying to hide. “The view must be beautiful after the storm.”
His eyes find the pillow. Find what I left there. Find my face again.
I watch the confusion turn to understanding. Watch the understanding turn to heat.
I walk out the door, and I leave him wanting.