Chapter 7 #2
Elia didn’t look away. She held his gaze as if she were listening for something beneath the words, as if the silence itself carried meaning.
The air between them shifted, thickened.
He saw the moment she understood there was more behind what he’d said than he was willing to voice.
Her eyes moved over his face, searching, not fearful but cautious, as though she were testing the word in her own mind and deciding what it might cost her to believe it.
Magnus picked up his fork but didn’t eat. Instead he studied the way her fingers curled around her own. The faint tension in her wrist. The awareness she carried even while pretending calm.
“You’re not eating,” she said. Her tone wasn’t accusatory. It was observant, and the way she said it told him she’d been tracking him just as closely as he’d been tracking her.
“I am.” He didn’t look down at his plate. He didn’t bother pretending.
“No.” She tilted her head slightly, studying him across the candlelight. “You’re watching.”
He let the silence stretch instead of denying it. Because she was right.
He hadn’t tasted anything since she’d sat down.
His attention had been fixed on the subtle shifts in her posture, the way her fingers curved around the stem of her glass, the faint parting of her lips when he leaned forward.
He’d been measuring her reactions. The second uncertainty gave way to awareness.
Magnus reached across the table with careful deliberation, giving her every opportunity to withdraw.
She didn’t.
He closed his fingers around the fork still resting in her hand and eased it from her grasp. Her eyes widened, not in fear but in surprise. The brush of his knuckles against hers was light. Intentional, along with the warmth of her skin against his.
“What are you doing?” she asked, and the question carried something new beneath it. Not protest. Anticipation.
“You’re holding it wrong.” His tone was calm, almost instructional, but his pulse had begun to thicken under his collar.
A faint crease appeared between her brows. “No, I’m not.”
“You are.”
He let his thumb slide once across her knuckles before drawing the fork fully away. The touch was minimal. It still sent a visible tremor up her arm. He saw it. And he liked that she didn’t pretend she hadn’t reacted. He cut a small bite from her plate and lifted it toward her mouth. “Open.”
She stared at him. “You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
The silence stretched. She leaned forward. Her lips brushed the fork as she accepted the bite. The contact was light, but it struck him, intimate, immediate, and hot. He set the fork down. “Does that satisfy you?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
He picked up a slice of pear from the small plate between them and held it out to her. “Your turn.”
She tilted her head. “You want me to feed you.”
“I want to see if you will.”
She studied him for a long moment, then reached forward and took the pear from his fingers. Instead of placing it on his plate, she leaned across the table and lifted it toward his mouth. “Open,” she said.
He did. Her fingertips brushed his lower lip as he took the bite. She didn’t pull away immediately. The heat between them thickened.
“This is dangerous,” she murmured.
“Yes.”
They ate like that for several minutes, neither of them acknowledging when the shift had happened, when the meal had stopped being dinner and started being something far more purposeful.
Food passed between them by hand instead of utensil, fingertips brushing, lingering half a second too long before retreating.
Each exchange tightened the space between them without either of them moving their chairs.
Conversation wove through it in measured threads—questions about nothing that mattered and answers that meant more than they admitted.
Everything moved slower now, heavier, edged with awareness neither of them pretended not to feel.
The candles burned lower. The air thickened.
And every time her skin met his, even in something as simple as passing a bite across the table, Magnus sensed the line between restraint and inevitability strain a little further.
“You asked me something on the phone,” she said. “You asked me what I wanted.”
“I did.”
“And I didn’t answer.”
“No.”
Her fingers traced the rim of her glass. “Does it really matter to you?”
“It does.” Magnus leaned forward slightly. “Because I don’t want compliance. I want you to choose.”
Her inhaled sharply. “You bought my debt.”
“I removed it,” he corrected.
“And now?”
Magnus rose and moved around the table. He didn’t rush. He never rushed. Elia tracked him with her eyes. He stopped beside her chair. “Now you decide who you are here,” he said.
Her pulse beat visibly at her throat. “And if I decide I’m still a debt?” she asked.
Magnus bent slightly and slid his fingers into her hair, tilting her face up toward him. “Then I’ll disagree,” he said.
“You think this is inevitable.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you look at me like you’ve already chosen.”
Her lips parted. “I haven’t,” she said.
“You have.” His thumb brushed her lip. “You just haven’t admitted it.”
Her hands rose to his chest, not pushing him away. “Magnus…”
He leaned down and kissed her. The contact was gradual at first. Then she made a sound in the back of her throat and his restraint fractured.
He pulled her to her feet and into him, her body fitting against his with delicious ease.
Her hands slid up his chest and around his neck.
He tasted wine and heat and something sweeter beneath it. He lifted her without thinking.
She gasped as her feet left the floor, her legs brushing his hips. He carried her from the dining room up the steps, kissing her as he moved. Her fingers tightened in his hair.
“You’re very sure of yourself,” she murmured against his mouth.
“I am.”
“And if I tell you to stop?”
He paused at the bedroom door and looked at her. “Then I stop,” he said.
Her eyes searched his. “And if I don’t?”
He opened the door and carried her inside. The lamplight was creamy and warm. He laid her on the bed carefully, as though she were something fragile and not the source of the tension tearing through him. The bronze fabric rode up her thighs when she shifted.
Magnus stood beside the bed for a moment and looked at her.
She looked young. Inexperienced. Aware of him in a way that made his body tighten.
He removed his jacket, then his tie and shirt, and finally his trousers until he stood in only his boxer briefs.
His movements were intentional, giving her every opportunity to stop what was coming.
Her gaze followed his every move. “You’re looking at me like you’ve already decided something.”
“I have.” He stepped closer and reached for the hem of her skirt.
She went still.
“Tell me,” he said. “Do you want this?”
Her voice trembled, but she didn’t look away. “Yes.”
The word hit him harder than he’d expected.
For a moment Magnus didn’t move. He stayed exactly where he was, standing beside the bed, looking down at her as if the single syllable had altered the ground beneath his feet. He’d expected hesitation. Questions. Perhaps even fear.
Instead, her answer had been straightforward, but it hadn’t been reluctant. The tremor in her voice wasn’t refusal. It was awareness.
His gaze moved over her where she lay against the dark sheets, the bronze skirt drawn tight from where she’d twisted slightly beneath him.
The fabric of her blouse traced the fullness of her breasts, while the skirt traced the shape of her waist, the curve of her hips.
Her hair spread across the pillow like spilled ink, and her eyes—wide, steady, watching him—held a kind of fragile courage he hadn’t anticipated.
She knew what she was saying yes to.
Or at least she thought she did.
That knowledge tightened something deep in his chest. Not doubt. Not regret. Something far more dangerous.
Responsibility.
Magnus reached out and brushed his fingers lightly along the side of her knee where the hem of her skirt had ridden upward.
The contact was brief, almost absentminded, but it made her inhale sharply.
He noticed the reaction immediately. The way her fingers tightened slightly in the bedspread.
The way her throat moved as she swallowed.
He watched all of it.
Because part of him still needed to be certain.
“Say it again,” he insisted.
Her brows drew together. “Why?”
“Because I want to hear it when you’re looking at me.”
She hesitated for a heartbeat, searching his face as though trying to understand the demand behind the request. Then she lifted herself slightly on her elbows so she was closer to him, closer to eye level.
“Yes,” she said again. “Please, yes.”
This time the words landed differently.
Not fragile.
Certain.
He climbed onto the bed, the mattress shifting beneath his weight as he braced his hands on either side of her shoulders.
For a moment he simply looked at her. The lamplight caught in her dark hair where it haloed around her.
Her breath came faster now, lifting her chest in small, uneven rises, and the sight of it tightened something low in his gut.
He dropped his head and kissed her again, deeper this time.
The first kiss had been restrained. This one wasn’t.
His mouth claimed hers with a hunger he’d been holding back all evening, the self-control he prided himself on thinning with every second her hands remained on him instead of pushing him away.
She answered him immediately.
Her body arched beneath him, pressing closer as if the contact had become necessary rather than optional.
He shifted carefully so he didn’t crush her, one knee sliding between hers as his hand moved from her waist along the curve of her hip.
The thin fabric offered almost no barrier to the heat of her skin beneath it.
His fingers continued downward, tracing the line of her thigh as though memorizing the shape of it.
Every inch of contact sharpened his awareness of her. The warmth of her body. The quickening rhythm of her breathing. The way her fingers tightened against his shoulders as if she were holding on to him rather than resisting.
His control was still there.
But it was beginning to strain.
She gasped as his hand slid beneath the hem of her skirt and pushed the fabric higher, baring the long line of her thigh before he unfastened the zipper at her hip and dragged the skirt off her entirely.
Her blouse followed next. He paused just long enough to look at her lying there in nothing but her panties, her skin warm beneath his hands.
The heat of her as her fingers dug into his shoulders.
“If we do this now,” he said against her mouth, “nothing between us will be simple.”
“It wasn’t simple to begin with,” she replied.
He kissed her again, harder this time, the restraint he’d held all evening finally beginning to crack.
His mouth lingered against hers, deepening the kiss until the world narrowed to warmth and the helpless sound she made against his lips.
His hand slid higher along her thigh, the movement unhurried but unmistakably possessive, his palm tracing the length of her leg as though he intended to memorize every inch of her.
His cell phone rang. He ignored it and she pulled him closer. The phone rang again. Magnus swore and pushed up off the bed.
“Don’t answer it,” she pleaded.
“I have to. As the Severin Captain I’m available 24/7.” He crossed to the table and picked up the phone, crossing to stand by the windows. “Severin.”
There was a pause across the line. An inhalation, the faint sound of air moving through teeth before the voice came on—low, dark, threaded with restrained fury. “Vittorio Donati,” he announced at last. “You have something of mine that I want back.”
Magnus’s gaze shifted across the room to the bed.
Elia lay curled against the dark sheets where he’d left her, hair tousled across the pillow, the lamplight spilling over the full curve of her breasts and the narrow line of her waist. The outfit he’d bought her was gone.
She wore only her panties now, one knee bent, the other leg stretched along the mattress as if she’d been a heartbeat away from pulling him back down to her.
A minute. Maybe less. That was all that had stood between her and losing her virginity to him.
Magnus’s expression hardened as he looked at her. “No,” he said coldly into the phone. “You’re mistaken.”
“Let me tell you why I’m not mistaken.”
Magnus’s expression shifted as Vittorio continued speaking, the air in his lungs turning to ice. “That’s an interesting claim,” he said with exquisite calm.
“You’ve taken possession of something that belongs to my family. You will both meet me tomorrow at the Alabaster Club. Eleven. Return her tomorrow, or she becomes a liability.”
Something dark settled in Magnus’s chest. “No.” The word came out flat and absolute.
He didn’t raise his voice, but something in it went lethal.
His gaze shifted once more to Elia on the bed—half-naked, flushed, unaware that her existence had just been reduced to leverage in another man’s mouth.
“You don’t get to threaten her,” he said, each word stripped of heat and edged in steel.
Vittorio inhaled, as if preparing to respond.
“You’re also mistaken about one thing,” Magnus cut him off.
Vittorio didn’t reply.
Magnus continued, each word measured. “No one threatens a woman under my protection. We’ll discuss terms tomorrow.” Then he ended the call.
His gaze slid to Elia.
She was curled against the pillows, hair tousled, the sheet barely covering her breasts, her body still flushed from the moment they’d nearly crossed a line neither of them could undo. A minute later and she would have been naked beneath him.
Vittorio Donati thought he could demand her return.
Magnus knew something the man clearly did not. Elia Lucia wasn’t something Magnus had taken.
She was someone he intended to keep.
Elia sat up, her hair disheveled, her mouth swollen from his kisses. She’d crossed one arm shyly over her breasts. “Who was that?” she asked. “What did he want?”
Magnus turned toward her. “That was your father,” he announced. “And he’s insisting I return you.”