28. Quinn #2
“He has had a long day.”
“We all have, but I haven’t claimed anyone’s family furniture.”
Rafe’s mouth curved. “There’s still time.”
Max rested his chin on the edge and sighed.
Aoi’s eyes shone. “He looks very grand there.”
“He does,” Rafael said.
Rafe looked at Max, then at me. The whole room seemed to understand something before I did, which was unfair because I had recently suffered head-adjacent trauma and emotional kissing.
“I can wake him,” I said, but even I didn’t believe myself.
Rafe’s mouth curved faintly. “That would be cruel.”
“Tragic, really.”
“Unthinkable.”
“Are we using my elderly dog as an excuse not to leave?”
“Yes,” he said.
Rafael stood, much too gracefully for a man who had absolutely noticed everything. “Aoi, darling, shall we give Max his dignity?”
Aoi stood and kissed my cheek before she left. “Sleep well, sunshine.”
I didn’t cry.
Rafe took me upstairs.
His rooms were not rooms so much as a private apartment tucked into one wing of the estate.
A sitting area with low bookshelves and deep chairs.
A bedroom visible through open double doors.
A fireplace already lit. A desk with neat stacks of work that made me want to knock one pile slightly crooked just to see if he loved me enough to survive it.
Loved.
The word landed before I could stop it.
I stood in the middle of his sitting room, borrowed sweater too soft against my skin, hair still smelling faintly of smoke, and realized I was tired of pretending I didn’t know where this had gone.
Rafe closed the door behind us.
He stood there for a moment, giving me space, giving me choice, being so careful it hurt.
“Quinn,” he said.
I turned.
His face was calmer than mine felt, but his eyes were not. His restraint was there, because it was part of him, because wanting didn’t make him careless. But it was no longer a wall.
It was a hand held open.
“You can sleep here,” he said. “Alone, if you want. I can take the sitting room. Or another room entirely.”
“Rafe.”
“And if tonight was too much?—”
“It was.”
He stopped.
I walked toward him. “It was too much. All of it. The robbery, the fire, Luke, watching you get hurt, kissing you in a gallery while property values suffered.”
His mouth twitched.
I kept going because if I stopped, I would lose my nerve. “But this part doesn’t feel like too much.”
His gaze dropped to my mouth.
My whole body noticed.
“What does it feel like?” he asked.
I reached for him. My hands settled against his chest. His heart was steady under my palms. Mine was not.
“Like I’m done pretending I’m not in love with you.”
The words came out soft and plain.
His breath changed, and he didn’t move for a beat. Then his hands found my waist, careful even now, even with the whole room tilting.
“Say that again,” he said.
I swallowed. “I’m in love with you.”
The emotion that moved across his face nearly broke me. It wasn’t surprise. Rafe had known. Some part of him had known for longer than either of us had been brave enough to admit.
It was fear.
And wonder.
“I love you,” he said, low and certain. “I love you in the way that means I want the hard parts. Your apartment and your ambition. Max’s food containers in my refrigerator.
Your thrift-store scarves in my entryway.
Your family, if they’ll have me. Your work, your stubbornness, your terrible habit of risking your life when a better plan is available. ”
A laugh caught in my throat, dangerously close to a sob.
His hands tightened at my waist. “I don’t want to make room for you as if you are an interruption. I want my life to fit you. I want to build it that way, if you’ll let me.”
I rose on my toes and kissed him.
This kiss wasn’t like the one in Dimitris’s gallery. That had been relief and terror, two people grabbing for proof of life while the room fell apart around them. This was slower. Worse. Better.
His hands settled at my waist, firm enough to make my pulse trip, then gentled as if he had to remind himself I was real and tired and recently injured. I slid my arms around his neck, and he made a low sound that seemed to come from somewhere dragon and man met inside him.
Then his hands tightened again.
He paused there, forehead against mine, giving me one breath to understand what he wanted.
I nodded.
He lifted me like I weighed nothing.
My legs wrapped around his waist on instinct, and the sound he made this time wasn’t restrained at all. He kissed me harder, one arm locked beneath me, the other braced along my back, holding me so securely that for once my body didn’t have to do anything but want him.
“Tell me to stop,” he said against my mouth.
“No.”
“Tell me if anything hurts.”
I drew back enough to look at him. “I want you. I trust you. And if you keep checking in every six seconds, I’m going to start feeling like a municipal project.”
His eyes warmed. “You are more complicated than most municipalities.”
“That wasn’t sexy, but I respect the accuracy.”
He kissed me again, and this time I felt him smile.
We made it to the bedroom slowly because neither of us seemed willing to stop touching long enough to move efficiently.
He set me on the bed, fingers sliding beneath the hem of my borrowed sweater, then pausing at my ribs.
I covered his hands with mine and kissed him again before either of us moved farther.
My hands moved and settled against his shirtfront, careful over the injury beneath it. I kissed the edge of the bandage.
His hand came up to the back of my head. “Quinn.”
“I’m okay.”
“I know.”
“You’re allowed to be cared for too.”
He went still.
Then his forehead lowered to mine.
The room seemed to draw in around us: firelight moving over the walls, clean sheets turned down at the edge of the bed, the hush of a house large enough to hold grief and history and still somehow make space for this.
For us.
Rafe lowered me to the mattress carefully, one knee pressing into the bed beside my hip, his hands still at my waist as if he could not quite convince himself to let go.
His gaze moved over me, not hurried, not casual.
He looked at my face first, then the bandage near my collarbone, then lower, his attention darkening in a way that made my skin feel too sensitive for the room.
“You’re staring,” I whispered.
“Yes.”
That should not have made me smile, but it did.
He bent and kissed the smile from my mouth.
This time, his control thinned. I felt it in the pressure of his hands when they slid from my waist to my ribs, in the way his thumbs traced the line beneath my breasts and stopped there, waiting.
Always waiting, even when his breathing had gone rough and his body had settled over mine with enough heat to make the sheets beneath me feel cool by comparison.
I arched into his touch because I wanted to answer before he could ask.
His mouth left mine and moved to my jaw, then lower, finding the place below my ear that made my whole body go loose and bright.
He kissed me there, then again, slower, as if he had felt the change in me and meant to learn exactly what caused it.
My hands slid over his shoulders, careful near the bandage, then down the hard plane of his back.
He was warm everywhere, solid everywhere, and when my nails grazed his skin, his breath caught against my throat.
That tiny break in him did terrible things to me.
I dragged my nails lightly down his back.
Rafe made a sound low enough to feel rather than hear, and the last careful inch between us disappeared. His hips pressed into mine, letting me feel what wanting had done to him. My breath left me in a rush.
“Oh,” I said, because apparently law school hadn’t prepared me for vocabulary under pressure.
His mouth curved against my collarbone. “Is that an objection?”
“No. More of a formal acknowledgment.”
“Noted.”
His hands slid under me, lifting me enough to ease the borrowed sweater up my body.
He peeled the fabric away slowly, watching my face as cool air touched my stomach, my ribs, the bare skin above my bra.
When I raised my arms, he pulled it over my head and dropped it somewhere behind him without looking away from me.
The firelight warmed one side of his face. The other was shadowed. He looked severe and hungry and so careful I wanted to shake him.
Or kiss him until he stopped thinking.
I reached for his shirt instead. The buttons gave beneath my fingers, one by one, less neatly than I would have liked. My hands were shaking. I blamed the explosion, which felt reasonable and also deeply unconvincing. When I pushed the fabric from his shoulders, I had to stop for a second.
He was beautiful in a way that felt almost unfair up close. Real. A dressing on one shoulder. A bruise spreading near his ribs. Scars I hadn’t seen before, thin and pale against warm skin. Strength everywhere, but not the careless kind. Built, carried, earned.
I kissed the scar near his ribs before I could talk myself out of it.
Rafe went still.
I looked up. “Okay?”
His hand came to the back of my head, fingers sliding into my hair. “Yes.”
The word sounded scraped raw.
So I kissed him there again.
His control slipped another fraction.
He lowered over me, bracing one arm beside my head, the other hand moving along my side to my hip, then down my thigh. He followed the path with his mouth: shoulder, sternum, the upper curve of my breast. When he reached the clasp of my bra, he paused and frowned.
I laughed, breathless. “It’s front-hook.”
“I see that.”
“Do you?”
He lifted his eyes to mine, unimpressed, and opened it perfectly on the first try.
“Of course you do,” I muttered.
His mouth found my breast, and the rest of the joke dissolved.