Chapter Twelve #2
He stopped on the other side of the island.
Close enough that the cedar-and-scotch smell of him cut through the kitchen air.
Close enough that I caught the warmer note underneath it, the one that had been wrecking my manuscript for seventy-two straight hours.
His hands rested on the counter’s edge. Mine were doing something useless with the stylus.
“I’m not done editing,” I said.
“You weren’t editing.”
“I was thinking about editing.”
“Jai.”
One word. Flat. Certain. My name in his mouth did something to my chest that I was not prepared to examine with any kind of intellectual honesty.
It pulled tight and released all at once, like a wire snapping, and the feeling traveled down my spine and settled somewhere below my belt with the particular weight of something I had no intention of ignoring.
I set the stylus down. Looked up. Held his eyes.
“I’m still not letting you bite me,” I said, quietly, with full awareness of what I was saying and what it cost me to say it.
He didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t do anything except look at me with those gold eyes and say, “I know.”
Same as the first time. No argument. No push.
Just the certainty that it was still true and still not the whole story, and the patience in it made my throat tight in a way that had nothing to do with want and everything to do with the fact that Braham Wolfe was a man who kept his word even when it cost him, and I was starting to understand exactly how much this one was costing.
“Okay,” I said. Like it was small. It wasn’t small. It was the largest thing I’d said to anyone in years.
I reached out. Got a fistful of his shirt—crisp cotton, probably cost more than my monthly grocery budget—and pulled.
He came. This enormous man, six-foot-three of pure alpha muscle, let himself be pulled around the island without resistance, without hesitation, like being directed by someone half his size was the most natural thing in the world.
My back hit the counter’s edge. His hands found my waist, palms warm through the thin cotton of my shirt, fingers pressing into the dip above my hip bones with a grip that was firm and certain and exactly what I wanted.
The kiss was nothing like controlled. It was three days of replaying and not saying and pretending to edit, compressed into a single point of contact that felt like a door blowing open.
Braham’s mouth was warm, slightly chapped, and he made that sound again—low and rough, like something giving way—and I felt it against my lips, against my chest, everywhere.
My free hand came up to his jaw, palm against the stubble, fingers pressing into the hard line of it, and the way his beard scraped against my skin sent a current straight down to my toes.
The counter’s edge dug into my lower back. I welcomed it. His hands were large enough to span most of my waist, thumbs tracing the ridges of my hip bones through the fabric, and the heat of his palms registered as a physical fact against my skin.
He kissed me like he’d been thinking about it—thorough, deliberate, the kind of kiss that made it very clear he had not been pretending to work for the last three days. He had been counting. Same as me.
My fingers twisted tighter in his shirt.
His jaw moved under my palm, and the roughness of it, the sheer physical fact of Braham Wolfe letting me hold his face in my hand, did something to my chest that I was going to have to write an entire novel about someday, probably under a pseudonym, because Petra would read it and know immediately.
From the guest suite, Grace woke up.
Not the gentle stirring. Not the soft, questioning mewl. The full-volume, lung-clearing, catastrophic wail of a week-old infant who had decided that this specific moment was the optimal time to express her profound dissatisfaction with the state of the universe.
It cut through the quiet like a fire alarm. Sharp. Escalating. Relentless.
I pulled back. Braham’s jaw was tight, his breath coming hard, and the look on his face—raw want layered over something dangerously close to amusement—was going in the archive, right next to the almost-smile and the sound he made when I pulled him closer.
“Don’t move,” I said, and pointed at him for emphasis.
I went to get her. The guest suite was dark, the bassinet still rocking slightly from whatever movement had woken her, and Grace was already at full volume, face red, fists balled, the particular outrage of a creature who had been asleep and was now awake and found this state of affairs personally offensive.
I scooped her up one-handed, tucked her against my chest, and walked back to the kitchen.
Braham was exactly where I’d left him. One hand braced on the counter, the other at his side, breathing steadier now but the set of his shoulders still carrying the tension of a man who had been thoroughly interrupted. He hadn’t moved. Not an inch.
That registered somewhere in my chest as its own kind of answer, and I filed it under things I would examine later, with alcohol, when the baby was asleep, and I had the luxury of falling apart in private.
Grace saw Braham and immediately reached for him. Grabby hands. Zero patience. The kind of focused demand that suggested she had identified a problem—not being held by Braham—and intended to solve it immediately through the application of volume and insistence.
Braham took her. One hand supporting her back, the other cradling her head, the move so practiced it looked like he’d been doing it for years instead of days.
She grabbed his lapel with one tiny fist, held on with the grip of someone making a point, and went quiet.
Just like that. Volume off. Problem solved.
I looked at the two of them. This man in a custom Armani suit, gold lapel pin catching the afternoon light, holding a two-week-old infant in a penthouse forty floors above Portland, and the expression on his face—soft in a way I’d only seen a handful of times—made something in my throat do something complicated.
“She has terrible timing,” I said.
Braham looked down at Grace, then at me. “She’s like a week old.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
Grace made a noise. A soft, wet, completely indifferent sound that suggested she had heard my complaint, considered it thoroughly, and decided it was beneath her notice.
She tucked her face against Braham’s chest and made a contented gurgle that should not have been possible from a creature with lungs that small.
Braham’s mouth did the thing. The almost-smile. The one that lived in the space between amusement and something warmer, and I filed it in the dedicated archive I’d been building for three days, right next to the sound and the look and the way his hands felt on my waist.
I leaned against the counter, arms crossed, and watched them.
The word turned over in my head. Yet.
I’m still not letting you bite me yet.
What it cost to mean it. What it meant that I was standing in a kitchen I hadn’t chosen, watching a man I hadn’t asked for hold a baby I hadn’t planned to keep, and the feeling in my chest wasn’t panic. It was something quieter.
Something that had been building since the moment I walked into his office and decided, against every instinct for self-preservation I possessed, to stay.
The coffee in the logical location was probably fine. I’d reassess after dinner. I was a romance novelist, for fuck’s sake. I knew exactly how this ended. Boy meets boy. Boy argues with boy. Boy falls stupidly, irrevocably in love with boy despite every defense he’s ever built.
The formula was not complicated.
I was going to make Braham work for it a little longer. Because the look on his face when I’d pulled him by the shirt—surprised, wanting, completely fucking undone—had been worth every second of three days of pretending to edit.
Worth considerably more than that, if I was being honest with myself.
Which I was trying very hard not to be.
Grace blew a raspberry against Braham’s shirt. He didn’t flinch. Just adjusted his grip, thumb tracing a circle between her shoulder blades, and went back to whatever he’d been looking at on his phone before I’d pulled him across a kitchen island and kissed him like I meant it.
I picked up my stylus. The page was still unread. The manuscript was still due in five weeks. Petra was still going to reduce me to ash when she read chapter nine.
None of that seemed particularly urgent.
I leaned against the counter and watched the afternoon light catch the edge of Braham’s jaw, and decided that for once, for this one perfect stretch of quiet, I could afford to let the work wait.