6. Torrance #2
"If we backlight this slab at the intensity my design requires," she says, "thermal cycling from the lobby's HVAC system will expand and contract that inclusion. Eighteen months, maybe twenty-four, and the slab cracks. Right down a twelve-million-dollar installation."
The quarry goes quiet around us. Even the diamond wire saws seem to pause.
Enzo pulls out his own loupe. Examines the spot. His face goes gray.
"Madonna," he whispers.
I hand the loupe back to Celebrity. Our fingers brush.
She's looking at Enzo, already discussing extraction alternatives, asking about the adjacent block in the quarry face, whether the vein continues without the inclusion.
Her mind has moved on to solutions. She spotted a catastrophic flaw that Enzo's own quality team and three independent stone assessors had missed, and she's already solving the next problem.
My blood is on fire.
I wait until Enzo disappears around the staging area's far wall, already barking rapid Italian into his phone at the extraction foreman about the adjacent block. His words echo off the quarry walls, bouncing between the cut shelves of mountain, growing fainter.
Celebrity is still at the third slab, making notes on her tablet. Stylus moving in quick, precise strokes. Cataloging the flaw, documenting the grain deviation, building an evidence file with the same surgical thoroughness she brings to everything.
I close the distance between us in four strides.
"Put that down."
Her stylus pauses. She doesn't look up. "I need to finish the?—"
"You need to put that down and come with me."
Now she looks up. Those copper-flecked eyes lock onto mine, and the shift happens in real time—the clinical architect receding, the woman underneath surfacing. She reads my face. Reads the set of my jaw and the way my hand has already closed around her wrist. Not tight. Not yet.
She sets the tablet on the A-frame. Face down.
Good.
I pull her away from the staging area, past a row of chalked extraction blocks, toward the quarry's eastern face where the mountain steps down in rough-cut ledges.
There's a channel here—a narrow corridor between two quarried walls where an old extraction path dead-ends into raw, uncut stone.
Fifteen feet deep. Eight feet wide. Hidden from the staging floor and the access road by a ninety-degree turn in the rock.
The marble walls rise forty feet above us, blocking the sun. The air drops ten degrees. Shadow fills the space like water in a well. The only light is a thin ribbon of Tuscan sky straight overhead, painting a single bright line down the stone floor.
I push her backward until her shoulder blades hit the quarry wall.
The stone is cool. Freshly cut. So smooth it's almost wet to the touch.
Her breath catches—the cold against her bare arms, the sudden shift from professional to cornered—and her chin lifts in that stubborn half-inch of defiance that makes my hands itch.
"You spotted a flaw," I say, "that fourteen people before you missed."
Her throat works. "The raking angle was?—"
"I'm not asking how." My palm finds the wall beside her head. I lean in until my mouth hovers above the junction of her neck and jaw. She smells like marble dust and shea butter and the ghost of rosemary. "I'm telling you what you are."
Silence. Her breathing goes shallow. Fast.
"You are the most brilliant mind I have ever employed." I let the words land close to her skin, not quite touching. "And I promised you something for perfection."
Her fingers curl against the stone behind her. Nails scratching smooth Calacatta.
"Torrance—"
"Hands on the wall. Both of them. Don't move them."
She lays her hands down in an instant compliance. The sight of it—this ferociously intelligent woman, who just dismantled a quarry master's quality assurance with a jeweler's loupe, pinning her own hands to the stone because I told her to—sends something dark and possessive through my bloodstream.
I drag my thumb along her jawline. Tilt her face up. Her eyes are blown wide, the copper almost swallowed by black.
"You found that fracture line in under three minutes." My other hand finds her hip. Grips. Pulls her lower body flush against mine. Her back arches off the marble. "You saved me twelve million dollars and eighteen months of remediation."
A sound escapes her. Low. Involuntary.
"So here's what's going to happen." I slide my hand from her hip to the waistband of her trousers. Pop the button with my thumb. "You're going to stand exactly like this. Palms on the wall. Eyes on me. And you're going to take what I give you without moving your hands. Understood?"
"Yes."
"Yes what?"
The muscle in her throat jumps. "Yes, sir."
My hand slips past fabric. She's already wet—soaked, actually—and the groan that tears out of me is not something I planned.
She's been like this since the car. Maybe since the plane.
The thought of her sitting across from me for seven hours in this state, solving problems, reviewing geological surveys, all while her body was burning?—
I shove two fingers against her and her whole frame jolts.
"Still," I say. "Hands on the wall."
Her palms grind into the marble. Her head tips back, baring the long line of her throat, and I see the flush darken her skin from collarbone to jaw. Rich bronze turning warm, blood-flushed amber under the thin strip of sky light.
I work her slowly. Precisely. The same systematic attention she gave those slabs. I find the angle that makes her breathing fracture. Hold it. Pull back when she pushes forward.
"Don't chase it." My mouth finds her ear. "I decide when."
A strangled sound. Her fingers twitch against the stone.
"Tell me what you are."
She can barely form words. "I'm?—"
"Tell me."
"Brilliant." The word comes out wrecked. Broken in the middle.
"Again."
"I'm brilliant." Her hips buck against my hand. I move harder and she keens, the sound bouncing off quarry walls, swallowed by forty feet of stone.
"Good girl. Now come for me."
She shatters. Silent except for one sharp inhale that echoes through the channel like a crack in marble.
Her knees buckle. I catch her weight with my arm around her waist, hold her upright against the wall while aftershocks roll through her body in visible waves—stomach muscles contracting, thighs trembling, fingers still against the stone because I told her not to move them and she didn't. She didn't.
I lean my forehead to hers. Both of us breathing hard. The strip of Italian sky overhead, impossibly blue.
"Button your pants," I murmur against her mouth. "Enzo will be back in three minutes."
She fumbles. I help her, steadying her hands, refastening the button myself when her fingers won't cooperate. I smooth her tank top where it's ridden up. Check her hair—the silk scarf hasn't shifted, the faux locs still secured. Small mercy.
We walk back into the staging area side by side. Professional distance. Measured steps. My hands in my pockets. Her tablet retrieved from the A-frame, stylus already moving.
But her flush won't quit. The warm amber undertone of her skin has gone luminous, lit from within. Her bottom lip is bitten raw. And every few seconds, when she thinks I'm not looking, her hand moves to her stomach like she's trying to hold herself together from the inside.
Enzo rounds the corner, phone still at his ear, and stops mid-sentence.
"Ah, you look at the stone more? The color in your face—the quarry sun, it is very strong, yes?"
"Very strong," Celebrity agrees.
She doesn't look at me. I don't look at her. But when her stylus resumes its precise strokes across the tablet, I notice her other hand—the one hanging at her side—is still trembling.