24. Delilah
DELILAH
The next day, I work late again.
The temporary kitchen is quiet after Priya leaves at seven. I stay, spreading Fisk's payment records across the steel worktable beside my own incident log, trying to match dates.
February twenty-sixth. That's when Hearth & Harvest canceled our account. Fisk received a wire for twelve thousand dollars on February twenty-fourth.
March first, the fake health inspection. Fisk's ledger shows eight thousand on February twenty-seventh.
I draw lines connecting the payments to the attacks, building a timeline Skye can use in court. The work is satisfying in the way good evidence always is—clean, factual, impossible to argue with.
But I keep losing focus.
My mind keeps drifting back to last night. To Kane standing in the hallway outside my door, close enough that I could smell his cologne, and the way his voice went rough when he said he missed me.
To the moment I almost said fuck it and kissed him anyway.
I drag my attention back to the spreadsheet. March fourth, the hit-and-run truck. Fisk was paid fifteen thousand on March second.
My phone sits on the table beside me, screen dark. I've checked it twice in the last hour, which is ridiculous because Kane hasn't texted me since I forwarded Fisk's message to Skye yesterday morning.
He's doing what I asked. Giving me space. Letting me be angry.
I should be grateful.
Instead I'm sitting alone in an empty kitchen at eight-thirty at night, missing him so badly my chest hurts.
This was supposed to make me feel better. Standing my ground. Making him understand that he can't just ask me to give up pieces of my life every time he gets scared.
And he does understand now. I could see it on his face when he admitted he'd been punishing me. When he apologized for walking out after the Fourth.
So why do I still feel like this?
I close the laptop and put my forehead down on the cool steel table.
The problem is that I love him. And hating the way he tried to control me doesn't change that. Neither does spending three nights in a guest room pretending I don't wish I was in his bed instead.
All it's done is prove that I can hold a boundary. That I won't give in just because he apologizes or looks at me like I'm breaking his heart.
But now what?
He offered to come to the Poconos. He promised to stop asking me to stay home when he gets scared. He's doing everything I asked him to do.
And I'm still keeping him at arm's length because I'm afraid that the second I let him close again, I'll forget why I was angry in the first place.
My phone vibrates.
I grab for it too fast, then feel stupid when it's just Priya asking if I'm still at the kitchen.
ME: Yeah. Finishing up.
PRIYA: You've been finishing up for two hours.
ME: I'm working.
PRIYA: You're brooding.
Well. She's not wrong.
ME: Maybe.
PRIYA: Just call him, Delilah.
ME: I don't know what to say.
PRIYA: Call him anyway.
I set the phone down and turn back to the spreadsheet. December thirty-first, the photographer at the New Year's Eve ball. Fisk received twenty thousand on December twenty-ninth.
I miss Kane. I miss the version of him who pulled me onto his lap at family dinner and made terrible eggs and told me I could always come back. I miss falling asleep beside him and waking up with his arm around my waist.
I miss us.
And if I'm being honest, a specific part of me is missing him most of all right now.
I've been keyed up for days. Horny as a goddamn reindeer. That's just what happens when you go from having sex with Kane Makov every night—which usually entails multiple orgasms—to locking it up to prove a point.
Cobwebs. That's how fast they grow down there now.
I push the spreadsheets aside and lean back in my chair.
This is stupid. I'm thirty-two years old. I can take care of myself.
I slip my hand down the front of my jeans.
The kitchen is deserted. The doors are locked. No one's going to walk in on me touching myself at my own desk because I'm too stubborn to go home and do this in an actual bed.
I close my eyes and try to focus. Try to picture something generic. A faceless man with good hands. A romance novel scene. Anything that isn't Kane.
It doesn't work.
I can’t stop thinking about how he looked in the hallway last night. The roughness in his voice. The tenderness in his touch.
I press harder, chasing the friction, but it's not enough.
I need more pressure. More contact. I unbutton my jeans and push my hand inside, touching myself properly now, trying to find the rhythm that usually works.
Still nothing.
My body feels tight and frustrated and completely uninterested in cooperating with my brain's desire to stop thinking about Kane for five goddamn minutes.
I try again, slower this time.
I picture his mouth on me. The way he goes down on me like it's a religious experience, like making me come is the only thing that matters. The way he holds my thighs open and doesn't let me hide.
Heat spreads through me finally, and I ride the edge of it, chasing the release I've been too angry to ask him for all week.
But just as I'm about to tip over, the image shifts.
I'm not just thinking about his mouth anymore.
I'm thinking about the fact that I sent him away.
That he's sitting alone in his house three days after I told him I couldn't trust myself around him, and that I've been proving my independence by sleeping in a guest room instead of in his bed where I want to be.
The arousal dies immediately.
I try to get it back. I touch myself harder, faster, trying to force my body to cooperate.
Nothing.
I pull my hand out of my jeans and drop my forehead to the desk.
This is humiliating.
I can't even get myself off without my brain sabotaging me with feelings.
I try two more times over the next ten minutes. Each time I get close—close enough that my breath goes short and my thighs start shaking—and each time I lose it at the last second because I'm too busy missing him to actually come.
Finally, I give up.
I button my jeans, wash my hands at the kitchen sink, and look at my phone.
Then I pick it up and call Kane before I can talk myself out of it.
He answers on the first ring.
"Lilah?"
His voice does something to my chest that makes it hard to breathe right.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey. You okay?"
"Yeah. I just—" I stop. Start again. "Are you busy?"
His pause makes me irrationally paranoid that he knows what I've been up to. "No. Why?"
"I was wondering if you could come get me."
Kane pauses. "Where are you?"
"The temporary kitchen." When he says nothing again, I prod, "Kane?"
"I'm trying to figure out if you're calling because you want a ride or because you want me."
The distinction hits heavier than it should.
"The second one," I admit.
"Okay." His voice goes softer. "I'll be there in fifteen."
He hangs up.
I sit there staring at my phone, my heart doing something complicated in my chest.
Then I start packing up the spreadsheets.
Kane arrives in fourteen minutes.
I hear the car pull up outside, then his footsteps on the stairs.
I walk to the door and unlock it. My legs are still unsteady from all my failed attempts to get myself off.
When I pull the door open, he's already there.
"Hey," I say, a little breathless.
"Hey." He crosses to me slowly, like he's not sure I want him closer. "You ready?"
"I am."
But we stay like that.
Heat pools low. I realize I'm still keyed up, so keyed up I can barely take a step without sending sparks of pleasure through me. My jeans are uncomfortably tight, rubbing with every shift of my thighs.
I finally realize how bad it must be for men. This is the closest I've ever come to experiencing an unwanted erection.
I'm ready, I realize, but not to leave.
Kane's gaze grows dark. He must see it there too—the hunger. But he still doesn't move.
So I close the distance.
It's not a gentle kiss, but Kane doesn't seem to mind.
I fist my hands in his shirt and pull him closer, opening my mouth against his, letting him feel everything I've been holding back for three days.
He makes a rough sound in his throat and backs me against the worktable, his hands going to my waist. I arch into him, wanting him closer, wanting the last three nights erased.
"Lilah," he says against my mouth.
"Shut up and kiss me."
He does. Deeper this time. Harder. His hands slip under my shirt, fingers splaying across my ribs, and I bite his lower lip hard enough to make him groan.
"Here?" he asks.
"No. Not here."
"Then we need to stop."
"I don't want to stop."
"Neither do I. But if we don't, I'm going to fuck you on this table."
The image hits me low in my stomach. "Would that be so bad?"
"Yes. Because you deserve better."
"What if I don't care?"
His hands tighten on my waist. "You might care tomorrow."
"Kane—"
"Let me take you home." His voice is rough. "Let me do this right."
I want to argue. But he's looking at me with that stern gaze that tells me arguing will take longer than going along with what he's asking.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't care.
Tonight, I want him so bad that every wasted second hurts.
"Okay." I swallow. "Take me home."
We barely make it to the car.
He opens the door for me, and I sit into the passenger seat, already reaching for him when he gets in on the driver's side.
"Lilah—"
I kiss him before he can finish the sentence.
He makes that rough sound again and pulls me closer, one hand tangling in my hair. I straddle him in the driver's seat, my knees bracketing his hips, and grind down against the hard length of him through his jeans.
"Fuck," he says against my mouth. "We're not doing this in the car."
"Why not?"
"Because someone might see."
"I don't care."
"You will." He grips my hips, holding me still. "And I'm not having our first time back together after our fight be a dirty quickie in a car."
"What if I want a dirty quickie?"
"You'll regret it tomorrow."
"I won't."
"You might." He kisses me once more, then physically lifts me off his lap and sets me back in the passenger seat. "Home first. Then I'll make you come as many times as you want."