23. Kira
Kira
The villa was quiet the way expensive places are, like the silence came along with the marble. We'd come straight from the gala, me on his shoulder the whole drive, and now there was only the pool and the low hum of its filter and a sky washed pale by the city under it.
I should have been thinking about the deal. One city left after this one, and my head was built to run the analysis at exactly this kind of moment, when everyone else had gone soft on champagne and I could get a clean read on where we stood going into Singapore.
That was my job. That had always been my job.
Instead, I stood at the edge of the water in a dress that cost a fortune and watched Evan take off his jacket and had nowhere he needed to be.
My right hand found my left before I caught it.
I stopped it short of the old count. I didn't have anything to brace for, and that was the part I kept checking to see if it had changed.
"You're doing the arithmetic," he said.
He'd caught it from across the deck, the way he seemed to catch everything now.
"I'm not."
"You are." He crossed to me, shirt half open. "Dubai's behind us. You told me yourself it went well."
"Going well and winning are different things."
"They are." He stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to tip my head up to hold his eyes. "And there's nothing left for you to do to either of them before Singapore. So, leave it for now. Just till morning."
"That isn't something I know how to do."
"I know." A flicker crossed his mouth. "I'm asking you to be bad at something for once. For me."
The old me had a dozen answers for that. Deflect, redirect, put a joke down or a foot of distance between us. I used none of them.
He reached up and took the pins out of my hair, one at a time, setting them on the low table with a care that made me feel more than it should. He'd learned that about me somewhere in the last two months, that I could hold myself against wanting but not against patience.
"Turn around," he said.
He found the zipper at my back and drew it down slowly, his knuckles tracing my spine as the dress opened. I felt the warm night on my skin and the deal left my mind completely.
The dress pooled at my feet. I stepped out of it and everything under it, and then I was standing in the open air with the whole lit city as a witness, and I made myself not cover anything.
"You're staring," I said.
"I am. I'm going to keep doing it," he said plainly, like a fact he'd checked. "You spent all day being the smartest person in every room and you have no idea what you look like when you stop working. Someone should tell you."
"Is that your job now?"
"I'm applying for it."
I didn't have a joke for that and it was becoming a pattern.
"You first," I said instead because I needed a second and I wanted to watch.
He stripped without ceremony, walked down the wide submerged steps into the pool, and held out a hand. I took it and went in after him. The pool was warm and came up to my waist on the shelf where he stood. He drew me in. I brought my arms up around his neck and felt all of him against me.
For a moment we only held on, breathing, in no hurry to move. His heart was going hard and so was mine.
"I keep waiting for you to turn into a mistake," I said into his shoulder. I hadn't planned to say it. "You keep not doing it."
"Give it time." His mouth was in my hair. "I'll disappoint you eventually. I'm deeply committed to it."
"Don't joke."
"I'm not, entirely." He pulled back enough to look at me, and the humor went out of his face. "I'm going to get something wrong with you, Kira. Probably something that matters. I'd rather promise you I'll come back from it than promise you I won't. The first one I can keep."
It was the most touching thing anyone had said to me in a swimming pool at two in the morning, and I felt it somewhere the deal could never reach.
"That's a terrible thing to say to a woman who's naked and can't run," I said.
"I timed it carefully."
I laughed, which told us both more than the words had.
He kissed me then, and it was nothing like the times before. No hurry, no argument. He kissed me like everything else could wait until morning, and he meant to use every minute of it. I let the wanting build instead of fighting it, and it built slowly and completely, until it took over everything.
His hands moved down my back under the surface and pulled me harder against him. I felt exactly how much he wanted this, and the part of me that had stood guard for as long as I could, quietly let go.
He walked us back until I met the tiled edge, then lifted me up onto it, out of the pool, so I sat on the warm stone with him standing between my knees.
Evan kissed down my throat and my chest and closed his mouth over one nipple until I made a sound I didn't bother to muffle.
There was no one anywhere near, that was the point of a place like this.
His fingers slid up the inside of my thigh and touched me, finding me wet and circling my clit, slow, reading every breath and giving me more of the things he found that made me shake. I braced my palms behind me on the tile and let my head drop back. I looked up at the sky.
He came up and kissed me, his fingers still working me, and against my mouth he said, "Tell me what you want."
"You. Just you."
He went still for half a second, and he understood what I'd said, and I meant it. We'd used something every time before. This was me opening the last locked door in the place.
"You're sure." Not a line, a real question, with weight to it.
"I'm on the pill, I'm clean, and I trust you." I got a hand into his wet hair and made him hold my eyes. "I have never once said that last part to another person and meant it the way I do with you. Don't make me say it again to be sure."
I watched his face change. He lifted me off the edge and back into his arms, and I wrapped my legs around him, and he slid into me slowly, all of it, until he was as deep as he could go and we both went still at the fullness of it.
"There," he breathed, forehead to mine.
We moved together in the warm water, slowly. The pool made us take it slow and 'fast' was the last thing either of us wanted.
He held me up under my thighs, I held his face, and I watched him watch me. It was more naked than the nakedness. He had all of me.
It got clumsy in places. My foot slipped and he caught me and we knocked foreheads and laughed, out of breath. Then went quiet again. It wasn't smooth. It wasn't a scene out of a movie. It was only us, getting it a little wrong and not minding.
When it built past holding it back, I worked my fingers down between us and found myself against the slow rhythm of him, chasing the peak, and I came with my face pressed into Evan's neck, my body clenching around him.
He lost the rest of his control a few strokes after, arms crushing me in, moaning deeply as he let go deep inside me.
For a while, we stayed joined, his back to the pool wall and me wound around him, our breathing coming down slowly, together.
Later he wrapped me in a towel the size of a bedsheet and we stretched out on the wide double lounger under the open sky, my head on his chest, his fingers moving slowly through my drying hair. I could hear his heart beat, even and quiet.
"Can I tell you something that isn't about business?" I asked.
"Always."
"I don't want to close this out in Singapore and fly home and go back to separate lives." I felt him go still, listening. "I've always been very careful never to want anything I couldn't get on my own. And I want this. I want the version of this where there's an after."
He was quiet long enough that I wasn't sure what he was thinking.
"Then there's an after," he said. "That part was never a question for me. I was waiting for you to catch up."
"You could have said."
"You'd have run." His hand found the back of my neck, warm. "I've watched you leave places you were winning because staying felt like a risk. I wasn't going to be a place you left."
He was right, and it should have annoyed me. Instead, it took the last of the weight off my chest.
I did the math of us out of old habit, the cost of this against everything it could take from me. For the first time it came out on the side of staying. I'd always come out with the opposite answer. An hour ago, I'd have said that answer was the only thing keeping me safe.
I was nearly asleep when I let all that fully sink in.
I might be done running. Not for tonight, not for this deal, but done, the way I'd let go of other things I'd outgrown and not looked back.
It should have frightened me more than it did.
It frightened me enough, and I stayed, with him against me and the city light around us.
I closed my eyes and I had no plan for leaving.