Chapter Twenty-Nine
Max
Cal stops me in the elevator on the way back up to the penthouse after dinner.
Not dramatically. Just—his hand finds mine, and he keeps it. When the elevator stops at our floor, the doors open. Neither of us moves for a moment.
“Thank you,” he says with reverence, cupping my cheek with his hand as he turns me towards him. “For tonight.”
“You’re thanking me for letting you take me to dinner?”
“For putting up with—” he starts.
“Cal.” I pull away from his hand and move myself between the elevator doors, slowly backing into the penthouse. “Stop apologizing for what your life is. You told me on the plane what I was walking into; you told me you were a morally grey book daddy, Calogero Renzetti—”
He wears a mock-serious expression and points a finger at me. “I did no such thing.”
I beam as he takes a step towards me and I take another back.
“This is me. This is what I’m offering. I’m not putting up with anything,” I say pointedly, trying to aim the words wherever he might believe them the most. “I’m choosing it. Choosing you.”
Cal’s expression darkens and before I can blink, he takes two large strides backing me up against the foyer wall before I can move.
He leans his forearms on either side of my head, and gazes down into my eyes, close enough that I can smell leather and cedar and that metallic, burnt salt scent that always hangs around him.
“I’ve loved you,” he replies, and his voice is different—not the courtroom voice, not the boss voice, not even the careful private voice he uses when it’s just us.
Something underneath all of those. Something that sounds like the library at midnight and snow falling outside and years of a story finally arriving at its own beginning.
“For a very long time, Max. I didn’t say it before because the timing was never—” He stops; starts again, “I’m saying it now.
Right here, because I refuse to wait for the right moment.
I’ll never wait again to take a chance on you, with you. I’m done waiting for the right moment.”
The city is thirty-one floors below us and the river is out there somewhere. I can hear my own heartbeat. Heat floods my veins, and I think this feels like a high I might be chasing for the rest of forever.
“I love you, too,” I whisper, my eyes flicking down to his lips briefly. “I think I always have, but I just needed to catch up.”
One hand finds my jaw, and he caresses me there with his thumb. My eyes flutter shut, and I lean my head into his hand.
His other hand trails down one arm finding both of my hands that are pressed side by side into his chest.
He wraps his rough fingers around both of my hands, one of his dwarfing both of mine.
Slowly—because I open my eyes to watch it happen in slow motion, tracking his hand—he lifts both of my hands above my head, pinning them there. Electricity zings from my toes into my cheeks that are already flushed.
Then he kisses me—not the careful, deliberate kisses he’s been giving me in the mornings; not the first kiss on the balcony with the city sprawled below us; not even the searing kisses on the desk. This is something different. Something that feels like relief and arrival simultaneously.
Like a door finally opening from both sides at once.
Somewhere behind him, the elevator dings. The doors close. But he keeps me there.
I melt into his kiss and he deepens it, his tongue sliding across my lips. His hips press into mine and my face flushes because he’s already hard and I know if he reached under this dress, he’d find me wet, too.
But he doesn’t lift my dress. He holds my hands above my head gently as he says everything with his mouth. On my lips. Against my neck. His teeth grazing the shell of my ear. His tongue burning a path down the exposed skin near my collarbone.
I have apparently become the kind of woman who hears a man say he loves her and immediately forgets how knees work, because mine wobble.
And Cal notices—because of course he does—and both of his hands find my thighs.
Then, I’m in the air. I twirl my fingers in his silky curls and hold on.
His mouth is still pressing kisses into my clavicle as he carries me like I weigh nothing, like the entire world has narrowed down to the places our bodies touch and this moment.
The bedroom is behind him. I know it is as we walk through the hallway and I see the edge of the bed as he walks us inside, every step sure. The dark sheets are turned down, the city is glowing through the window beyond it.
But he stops.
His forehead drops to my shoulder, and his breathing is rough against my skin.
“Cal?”
He shakes his head once.
He lifts his face, and whatever I thought I saw there before—heat, want, possession—it’s still there.
God, it’s still absolutely there. But something else is threaded through it.
Something softer and deeper and terrifying in a way beautiful things can be terrifying when you might actually lose them.
“I’m taking my time with you this time.”
Oh.
“Is that so?”
My hands loosen in his hair and he carries me past the bed.
“If I don’t slow down, I’m going to lose my mind.”
“That sounds like a you problem.”
A laugh moves through his chest as he walks us into the expansive bathroom. “It is very much a me problem, Sims.”
The bathroom is all marble and low lights and glass.
He sets me in the middle of the double vanity like I’m fragile and precious and his.
His hands bracket my hips. Not my waist. My hips.
The full curve of me, the part of my body that takes up space and always has.
And his eyes trace every line like he’s memorizing the shape of me in front of him.
Reverent.
That’s the word my brain finds as his thumbs move over the outside of my thighs, slow and worshipful.
“I love you,” he says again, quieter this time.
“I love you, too,” I whisper.
His eyes close for half a second, like he needs to survive hearing it.
“Don’t move.”
I listen to this order like it’s one of the many rules he’s begged me to follow since arriving.
He steps into the glass shower that is probably as big as my entire bathroom back home to turn on the water. It starts soft at first, then two waterfall showerheads on the ceiling let the water fall heavy.
He lifts his sweater over his head with one hand, throwing it aside.
The water steams against the glass and as he makes his way back over to me, the room begins to blur around the edges.
He comes back to me slowly, before his fingers find the zipper at the back of my dress and pause there.
“Tell me yes.”
I swallow. “Yes.”
His knuckles brush the back of my spine as the zipper lowers inch by achingly slow inch. The dress loosens around me, and I stop breathing.
He presses his mouth to one shoulder.
The silky fabric falls, feeling more intimate than if he had ripped it from my body.
His hands follow the dress down, over my ribs, my waist, taking his time. Like there’s no family empire, no danger, no history pressing in around us. Just me and him and all the years we spent almost being this.
I run my hands along his strong chest and unbutton his jeans, groaning when the zipper sticks.
“You’re very impatient for someone who agreed to slow down two minutes ago.”
“I agreed under duress.”
“That so?”
“Yes.”
I slide off the counter and push his jeans over his hips. His skin against mine.
My eyes find his as our bodies press against each other, warm skin, hard muscle. The steady, violent beat of his heart.
I slide the very small thread of fabric left on my body down my own thighs and step out of the lace.
He follows my lead, casting his black briefs aside. Nothing left between us but the full truth of him.
I reach for him, wanting the weight of him in both of my hands, wanting proof that he’s as undone as I am.
But he takes my hands in his instead, leading me to the open shower door and beneath the water. My entire body feels like it’s been waiting for this.
The water is hot enough to make me gasp as he steps behind me.
There’s no space left.
His chest presses to my back, one arm curving around my middle, his mouth at the side of my neck. His hand falls between my legs, his fingers caressing the inside of my thighs, just barely brushing where I need him the most.
My hands lift on a sigh, palms landing against the fogged glass above my head.
He puts his other hand above mine and for a second, I just stare. His hand is bigger, rougher. Strong. Strong enough to do damage and careful enough to make me feel like nothing in this world could touch me unless he allowed it.
Then his mouth moves to my shoulder and my eyes flutter shut.
Behind me, his body is hard and hot and everywhere. But he doesn’t rush.
He’s slow and possessive. Tender enough to ruin me.
The water runs over both of us, but his skin still burns behind me. When his mouth finds the place where my shoulder meets my neck, he sucks lightly, just enough to make my knees forget how to work, again.
My palms audibly squeak as they slip against the glass.
But he notices before my body falls an inch.
Because of course he does.
His arm comes up beneath my breasts, holding me back against his chest. His hand climbs higher, just below the base of my throat. Not pressing, just there. Anchoring me. Keeping me upright while his other hand continues its slow circles between my thighs, threatening to make me dissolve.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs near my ear as he slips a finger inside of me and I gasp.
“I know,” I groan.
And I do.
That’s the part that nearly breaks me after a single thrust of his finger inside of me and his thumb against my clit.
I know.
He has me in every way.
His thumb swirls and a shock runs through me so sharp my breath catches on a sound I don’t recognize as mine.
He stills, but he doesn’t move his hands.
“You okay?”
I nod too quickly. “Very okay.”
His mouth curves against my neck and he licks. “Don’t get smug.”
“I’m not.”
He hums against my skin and I feel it through my whole body.
His fingers move again and whatever argument I might have evaporates in the steam around us.
My breaths become heavy as his fingers press, and rub circles, sliding up and then down with the precision of someone who knows my body better than I do.
I press my forehead into the glass, my body quivering against him, and I feel his dick pulse against my lower back. I’m so close to shattering and he isn’t even inside me.
He hasn’t even tried.
He is just touching me like loving me and giving me what I need is enough. No, not just enough—like it’s sacred and exactly what he needs, too.
But I need him. I deeply need him.
“Cal,” I whisper.
His whole body stills again, but his fingers continue.
“I need you.”
His breath leaves him hard, and then I’m moving.
He turns me carefully, kisses me once under the water, and then lifts me again, one arm under my thighs, the other around my back, carrying me out of the shower like a man who has decided the rest of his patience can go directly to hell.
“Wait!” I laugh against his mouth, breathless and dizzy at the change of temperature. “We’re wet!”
He keeps walking.
“Cal! The bed—”
He lowers me onto the sheets and follows me down, water dripping from his hair as he travels up my body slowly, covering me with his own.
His smile is wicked and beautiful.
“Sims.” His hand cups the side of my face. “If water from your body gets on our bed, I’ll consider it a blessing.”
That should not work on me.
It works on me.
I laugh, but it breaks apart when he kisses down my throat, between my breasts, over the soft curve of my stomach like he heard every terrible thing I’ve ever thought about my body and decided to answer each one with his mouth.
And his tongue slides between my thighs. Slow circles at first, and then he sucks, long and hard. He slips a finger inside of me, another hand holding my hips, and the feeling of him all around me makes me moan.
He licks and a groan against my core from his lips makes my whole body tighten as I come undone.
By the time he comes back to my lips, I’m shaking.
Not from the cold.
From wanting. And from loving. From being loved in a way that leaves no room for doubt. He reaches over to the table beside the bed, ripping foil between us.
He settles between my thighs, and for one second, neither of us moves.
His forehead presses to mine.
“Look at me,” he says.
So I do.
I look at him as he enters me, slow and careful and devastating.
And it’s not fire this time.
It’s warmth. It’s exactly where I belong and as he presses into me again and again, I shatter all over again.