Chapter 17
Laurel
We’re in bed again, and Sin is holding me.
The past two days have been… wonderful. That’s the only word I have for it, which feels stupidly small considering everything that has happened.
Wonderful sounds like a nice brunch or a good parking spot.
Not a weekend spent tangled in hotel sheets with a man I have no business loving. And yet. Wonderful.
Now reality is starting to settle in.
We fly back to Chicago tomorrow. After that, it’s going to be go-mode for the launch of the Sins line. Meetings. Production timelines. Retailer follow-ups. Marketing pushes. The kind of chaos I normally thrive in. Except now I’m worried we won’t have time to see each other.
I should be worried about a lot of other things first.
“What has you frowning?” Sin asks.
I look up to find him watching me. His hair is messy from my hands. His chest is warm against my cheek. His arm is wrapped around me like he has no intention of letting go, and his left hand strokes slowly over my arm.
I noticed right away his ring was missing. I notice everything about that hand now. The way it looks on my waist. In my hair. Curled around mine in the dark. The pale line where his wedding ring usually sits, a mark that is somehow louder than the ring itself. I didn’t say anything.
What’s there to say?
I’m already a terrible person because I’ve been sleeping with a married man for over a month.
Worse, I think I’m falling in love with him.
“Just dreading going back to reality,” I say.
His hand moves up and down my arm, slow and soothing. “We can stay another day.”
I laugh softly. “That’ll make everyone talk.”
His sigh is deep. “I know.”
For a few minutes, neither of us says anything. Rain taps against the hotel window. Seattle glows beyond the glass, gray and wet and far away from everyone who knows us.
Then Sin surprises me by asking, “Do you want kids?”
I lift my head. “What made you think of that? All the unprotected sex we’ve been having?”
His mouth twitches.
I let out a small laugh. “We’re good. I have an IUD.”
Because God knows I could be pregnant otherwise.
“I was asking because you’re young.”
“I’m thirty.”
He smiles faintly. “Like I said. Young.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re forty-five, not ninety.”
“People my age are still having kids.”
“People your age also complain about their knees and use the phrase back in my day.” I smile and answer his question. “No. I don’t want kids.”
He watches me carefully
I stare at the wall across from the bed, trying to find the right words. “I know that’s the dream for some people. It’s just not mine.”
“That’s enough of a reason.”
It should be. But somehow, with him, I want to give more.
“My parents were great when they were great,” I say quietly. “But they should have never had me. It was always a struggle growing up. Money. Food. Stability. Sometimes they were there. Sometimes they weren’t. And eventually, drugs mattered more than I did.”
His arm tightens around me.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Me too.” I try to smile, but it doesn’t work. “It’s pretty shitty being an orphan by the time you graduate high school.”
I rarely share this bit of information, but with Sin it feels easy.
That might be the most dangerous thing of all.
The sex is one thing. The way my body wants him is one thing.
But this? Telling him truths I usually keep buried?
Letting him see the soft, ugly parts of me?
That feels far more reckless than taking off my clothes.
“What about you?” I ask. “Do you want kids?”
His gaze shifts to the ceiling.
For a second, I think he won’t answer.
Then he says, “I got a vasectomy when I was nineteen.” His eyes come back to mine. “A month before I married Jenna.”
My stomach twists.
“I’m surprised she was okay with that,” I say.
“She didn’t know. Not for about ten years,” he adds. “When she wanted to see a specialist because she couldn’t get pregnant.”
I sit up a little. “Sin.”
“I know.”
“What happened?”
“She was understandably angry.” His mouth tightens. “I thought our marriage was over then.”
“Why didn’t you tell her?”
He exhales slowly. “Because I didn’t think she’d understand. My father was an asshole. Violent. Cruel. The kind of man who could make a whole house go quiet just by walking into it.” His throat moves. “Part of me was scared that I’d do the same thing to Jenna that he did to my mom.”
My chest aches.
“That’s reasonable,” I say softly.
“It was cowardly.”
“You were nineteen. Give yourself some grace.”
He looks at me then, and something in his expression almost breaks me.
“The crazy part is, I only knew of two of my brothers by then.”
I blink. “Two?”
He nods. “I found out about the others later. One by one. Different women. Different lives. Same father leaving damage everywhere he went.”
I don’t know what to say. So I touch him instead. My fingers slide over his chest, over the scar near his ribs, over the steady beat of his heart.
“You thought if you made sure you couldn’t have children, you couldn’t become him,” I say.
His eyes close. For a second, he looks younger. Exhausted. Human in a way that hurts to look at.
“Yes.”
I lean forward and kiss his shoulder. He draws in a breath like that small touch costs him something.
“You’re not him,” I whisper.
“You don’t know the worst of me.”
I look at his bare left hand. Then back at his face.
“I know enough.”
His eyes follow mine to his hand and the absence we’ve both been pretending not to see.
His voice is quiet when he says, “I left it at home.”
“I noticed.”
“I couldn’t bring it here.”
My throat tightens.
“Does that make this better?” I ask.
“No.”
At least he doesn’t lie.
“But I couldn’t keep taking it off in front of you.” His fingers curl slightly against my arm. “Like you were something I had to make room for by removing evidence of my life.”
That hits harder than I expect because that is exactly what it felt like sometimes. Like I was waiting for him to clear a space for me.
He looks at me. “I know that doesn’t fix anything.”
“No,” I whisper. “It doesn’t.”
“I know.”
“But it matters.”
His face tightens. I don’t know which of us moves first. His hand slides into my hair, and mine curves around the back of his neck. The kiss is soft at first. The kind of kiss that makes my heart hurt more than my body ache.
I’ve had Sin desperate.
I’ve had him rough.
I’ve had him in offices and hotel rooms and places where we were both half-wrecked by guilt and need.
This is different.
He kisses me like he has all night and wants to learn me without a clock, without a locked door, without shame making everything sharper.
I pull back enough to look at him.
“What?” he asks.
I almost say I think I’m falling in love with you. The words rise up, terrifying and true.
I swallow them down.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
I smile, but it hurts. “Maybe.”
His thumb brushes my cheek. “Tell me.”
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
Something changes in his face. He understands. Maybe not the words. But the weight.
He rolls me beneath him slowly, covering my body with his. No rush. No frantic hands. No tearing at clothes because there are none left to tear. Just skin. His against mine. His bare hand sliding over my waist. No cold ring against my hip.
Only him.
Only us.
For one unbearable second, that feels like enough.
Then his mouth lowers to mine again, and the ache inside me opens.
This time, when he touches me, he doesn’t do it like he’s trying to make me come apart as fast as possible.
He takes his time. His mouth moves over my jaw, my throat, my shoulder.
Down the soft curve of my chest. Across my stomach.
Over every place I have ever tried to make smaller, every inch of me I have ever worried was too much.
He kisses me like none of it is too much.
My hands slide into his hair.
“Sin,” I whisper.
He kisses me once. Then again. Then he settles between my thighs and enters me slowly. So slowly my breath catches halfway out of my body. There is no frantic edge this time.
Just fullness.
Heat.
The impossible intimacy of his eyes on mine while he sinks into me inch by inch, like this is not something we are doing but somewhere we are going together.
When he is fully inside me, he stops. The room is quiet except for rain, breath, and the soft broken sound I make when he kisses the corner of my mouth.
“Laurel.” It sounds like something he is afraid to lose.
I wrap my arms around him and hold on. Then he starts to move. Every stroke feels different because he’s different. Because I am. Because there is no performance in this, no rush to prove how badly we want each other. We already know that. This is worse.
This is tenderness.
This is his hand lacing with mine against the pillow.
This is my mouth pressed to his shoulder when the pleasure gets too deep to hold.
This is him whispering, “Look at me,” not because he wants control, but because he wants to be there when I fall.
So I look and let him see everything. The want. The fear. The feeling I’m not ready to name.
His rhythm breaks when he sees it. Then his mouth is on mine, and the kiss is almost desperate in its softness.
I come quietly, with tears in my eyes and his name against my lips because for one moment, it feels like being loved. Sin follows after, holding himself deep inside me, his body shuddering over mine, his face buried in the curve of my neck.
He doesn’t move away when it’s over.
He stays.
Heavy and warm and breathing hard, his bare hand still wrapped around mine. For a long time, neither of us speaks. Then he lifts his head.
“Are you okay?”
No.
Yes.
I don’t know.
I touch his face. “That wasn’t like before.”
His throat moves.
“No.”
Neither of us says what it was because it was something that will hurt so much more when it ends.
He rolls onto his side and pulls me against him. I go willingly, tucking my head beneath his chin while his arm folds around me.
“I don’t want to go back tomorrow,” I whisper.
His hold tightens.
“I know.”
“I don’t want to pretend nothing changed.”
His lips press to my hair. “Neither do I.”
“But we will.”
Silence.
Then, quietly, “Yes.”
The word breaks something small and fragile inside me. Still, I stay in his arms. Because tomorrow is coming whether I want it to or not and eventually, Sin will have to become Mason Sinclair again, and I will have to become Laurel Cross, lead designer, professional, composed, untouchable.
But tonight, in Seattle, with his ring left behind and his body wrapped around mine, I let myself pretend we are only two people in love.
Even if neither of us is brave enough to say it.
The flight home is quiet and tender. He sits across from me on the jet with his laptop open, but I don’t think he reads a single email.
I pretend to review launch notes, but the words blur every time I remember his mouth at my temple that morning.
The way he held me before we left the hotel.
The way he looked at me like boarding the plane physically hurt.
We don’t touch. Not where anyone can see. But when the flight attendant disappears behind the partition, Sin reaches across the small table and hooks his pinky around mine. It’s the smallest touch we’ve shared in weeks and nearly undoes me.
When we land in Chicago, the sky is gray and hard. Reality has terrible lighting. His truck is waiting. He loads my bag. Opens my door. Drives me home through traffic while we talk about work because apparently cruelty comes in many forms.
Anything but the fact that my body still aches from the way he loved me.
When he pulls up outside my apartment, neither of us moves. The city moves around us. Cars pass. People hurry down the sidewalk. Someone laughs under an umbrella.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say.
His jaw tightens. “At the office.”
“At the office.”
His hand moves like he might reach for me but stops himself. That hurts more than if he hadn’t moved at all.
I open the door.
“Laurel.”
I look back. His eyes are on me, and for one second, the truck feels like it did before Amsterdam. Before everything. Before we knew exactly how much damage we could do to each other.
“Last night—”
“Don’t,” I whisper.
His mouth closes.
“If you say it meant something, I’ll cry. If you say it didn’t, I’ll hate you. So don’t.”
Pain crosses his face. Then he nods once. I get out before I can change my mind. He waits until I’m inside before he drives away.
The next morning, I dress like nothing has changed even though it has. Because I love Sin. I know that now.
At the office, Opal asks, “Seattle good?”
“It was. How was your weekend?”
“Good.” Her tone lowers. “Any guesses on what Mr. Sinclair is going to wear today? There’s a big pot.”
I laugh and almost cry at the same time. “I’d say something black.”
In my office, I close the door behind me and gather myself before I get to work.
For the first half of the day, I don’t see him. I hear him, once, in the hallway. My body reacts like an idiot, but I stay at my desk.
At eleven, we’re both in the launch meeting. He sits at the head of the table. I sit halfway down. He doesn’t look at me when he discusses Seattle or when Tate says the trip was clearly worth it.
But his left hand is bare on the table.
I stare at my notes until the ink blurs. No one else seems to notice. Or maybe they do and are too polite to say anything. Either way, it feels like a secret sitting in the middle of the conference table.
When the meeting ends, everyone gathers their things.
Sin stands. “Ms. Cross, stay back a moment.”
My pulse jumps because apparently my body does not understand professional tone. The room clears and the door stays open.
He doesn’t come near me, thank god.
I hold my notebook against my chest. “Yes?”
His expression is unreadable. “The board wants the final launch calendar by Friday.”
“I’ll have it to you Thursday.”
“Good.”
Silence. We stare at each other across the conference room like two strangers who know each other’s bodies too well. Then someone laughs in the hallway and the spell breaks.
He looks away first. “That’s all.”
I nod. “Of course.”
I walk out of the room with my spine straight. I make it to my office. Close the door. Lean against it. And finally let myself breathe.
Nothing changed.
Everything changed.
And somehow, we’re expected to survive both.