17. Chapter 17 #2
He would notice. He would be disappointed. He might be angry.
I kept driving anyway.
The fog thinned by degrees as dawn gathered itself somewhere beyond the hills, but the road still looked long and uncertain ahead of me.
I followed it with my whole attention, heart unsteady, body tired, mind fixed on a vampire prince an hour away and the need to put my eyes on him with such force it had become the only honest thing in me.
By the time I tore through the front door of the estate, dawn had only just begun silvering the high glass of the foyer.
I had barely gotten the door shut behind me when a dark shape crossed hard from the inner hall, coat still on, movements too fast and sharp for calm.
Then he came fully into view, and the look on Nikolay’s face stopped me where I stood.
Relief.
Not polite surprise. Not aristocratic control. Relief so naked it stripped him of every polished defense I had ever hated in him. He looked like a man who had been holding his breath for hours and had only just now discovered air still existed.
“Maddie—”
I crossed the foyer before he could say anything else and walked straight into his arms.
He caught me with a sound low in his throat that might have been my name or prayer or both.
One arm banded around my back hard enough to tell me exactly how frightened he had been.
The other came up behind my head. For one second I pressed my face into his coat and breathed him in—cold air, city night, some dark, clean cologne already half overtaken by the scent of him underneath—and all the wild, frantic edges in me broke at once.
He pulled back fast, too fast for tenderness to have much dignity in it, and gripped my shoulders.
“Did they do something to you?” His eyes raked over my face, my throat, the line of my jacket, as if he expected damage to reveal itself if he looked hard enough. “Are you hurt?”
I shook my head, but the motion caught on a sob I had not authorized. “No.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“I am.” My voice came out rough and thin. “No. They didn’t—” I swallowed hard. “I’m not hurt.”
His hands tightened once, then eased as though he had remembered I was flesh and not some fragile thing fear entitled him to bruise. His gaze kept moving anyway, searching me.
“I just had to see you,” I said.
That got him to still.
The foyer seemed too large suddenly. Too bright in the first rise of morning. The old house held itself around us in pale stone and carved wood and expensive quiet, and none of it mattered a bit compared to the fact that Nikolay stood in front of me looking half-wild.
“I had to know,” I said.
His expression changed minutely, wariness and hope colliding so hard they nearly looked like pain. “Know what?”
I laughed once, but there was no humor in it. Only nerves stretched thin enough to sing.
“You know what.”
“Maddie.”
“No.” I took one breath because if I did not do this now, I never would. “I know you’re my mate.”
He went utterly still.
I did not let myself stop.
“And if you’re going to reject me,” I said, each word hurting on the way out, “you need to do it now. Not with another sneer. Not with some cold little comment meant to shove me back where I belong. Just do it. Straight. Because I can’t keep carrying it around and pretending it isn’t carving me up. ”
His face did something terrible then—not cruelty, not distance. The opposite. As if every hard thing he had ever said to me had reached back through time and struck him all at once.
“Maddie,” he said again, but this time my name sounded wrecked.
I lifted my chin because pride was all I had left if he said no. “I mean it.”
He looked at me for one long suspended second, amber eyes dark with things I could not sort quickly enough.
Then his hands rose.
He took my face between both palms with such care it almost undid me before he ever touched his mouth to mine.
His fingers spread lightly behind my ears.
The whole hold of him said precious in a way I had never once allowed myself to imagine from this man because imagining it had felt too dangerous to survive.
When he kissed me, the world narrowed so completely I forgot there had ever been a foyer.
His mouth was warm and firm and heartbreakingly gentle on the first contact, as though he were asking something and apologizing for the asking at the same time.
I made a small, helpless sound and leaned into him on instinct older than caution.
The kiss deepened by degrees, not rushed, not greedy, only certain.
His lower lip moved against mine, then his upper, then the slightest angle of his head changed everything.
I felt the restraint in him. Felt how tightly he held it.
That made the tenderness worse. Better. Ruinous.
I clutched at the front of his coat.
He drew back just enough for breath, forehead nearly touching mine, eyes open on my face like he still couldn’t quite believe I was there.
“I would never reject you,” he said.
The words hit somewhere too deep for immediate reaction. I could only stare.
Something almost like anguish crossed his expression. Then he bent and lifted me clean off my feet.
“Nikolay—”
“I have wasted enough time.”
I should have laughed. Instead, I hooked my arms around his neck because being carried by him felt absurdly right, and because my whole body had gone weak in the aftermath of that first kiss.
He moved through the house with long, urgent strides, up the staircase, down the corridor I knew too well by now.
The estate blurred around us in dark wood and old carpet and morning shadow.
When he shouldered open my bedroom door and carried me inside, I had just enough breath left to think mine at the sight of him bringing me there.
He set me down carefully beside the bed, but did not let go at once. His hands remained at my waist. His gaze searched my face with unnerving seriousness.
“I owe you more than this,” he said. “More than any of this.”
I opened my mouth.
He shook his head once. “No. Let me say it.”
So I stood there, heart pounding, while the vampire prince I had wanted against my better judgment and resented against my will looked at me as if truth had become his only remaining luxury.
“I am sorry,” he said. “For every cold word. Every dismissive look. Every time I made my confusion into your wound because it was easier than facing what I felt.” His jaw tightened.
“I am sorry for my disdain, and sorrier still because so much of it was theater for a weakness I was too proud to name. If I could go back, I would never have treated you that way. Not once.”
My throat burned.
He lifted one hand and brushed his knuckles lightly over my cheek. “You deserved honesty from me, and kindness, and I gave you neither when it mattered most.”
“Nikolay—”
“I fell in love with you anyway,” he said, and his mouth almost twisted at himself. “Or perhaps not, anyway. Perhaps because there has never been anyone remotely like you, and fate decided I deserved the lesson.”
I kissed him before he could finish whatever came next.
If the first kiss had been tender, this one was hungry in a way that made my knees soften.
He caught me against him at once, hands sliding from my waist to the small of my back, holding me close while my mouth opened under his.
I tasted the sharp trace of coffee, the deeper warmth of him, and all the old ache I had been carrying for weeks seemed to liquefy at once.
He backed me up one careful step until the backs of my knees met the mattress.
“Tell me to stop,” he murmured against my mouth.
I shook my head.
“Maddie.”
“Don’t you dare.”
That got the first real ghost of a smile from him, brief and wrecking.
Then his hands went to the buttons of my shirt.
He undid them slowly, eyes on mine for the first two, then dropping to watch his own fingers work. I could have died from that look alone. Not because it was crude. Because it wasn’t. He handled me the way a devout man might unwrap something sacred and long denied him.
When he opened the shirt and pushed it from my shoulders, cool air touched the skin he bared. His gaze moved over my bra, my stomach, the rise and fall of my breathing.
“Beautiful,” he said so quietly I almost thought I had imagined it.
I reached for his coat, impatient suddenly, and he let me drag it off him in graceless haste.
It hit the floor. Then his tie. His shirt.
Every new inch of skin made me greedier.
Pale golden light from the curtained windows found the hard planes of his chest and stomach, the narrow line of dark hair leading down beneath his waistband.
I put both hands on him because not touching him had become impossible.
He inhaled sharply when my palms spread over his chest.
“That,” he said, voice gone rough, “you may do again whenever you please.”
I almost laughed, but it came out as a shiver when his hands slid behind me and unclasped my bra. The straps fell from my shoulders. My breasts spilled free under his gaze, and instead of shame I felt only a strange, fierce pride at the way he looked at me—awed enough to make me bolder.
His palms closed over me, broad and warm.
I arched into his touch at once.
“Goddess,” he whispered.
His thumbs moved over my nipples until they tightened under him.
The pleasure of it ran low and molten through me.
He bent and took one breast in his mouth through the sound I made, sucking gently, then harder, while his hand kneaded the other with devastating patience.
I threaded my fingers into his hair and held on.
My head tipped back. The room had already gone distant around the edges.
He kissed his way downward after that.