Chapter 16
MAGNUS WOKE BEFORE ELIA.
That wasn’t unusual. He hadn’t slept past five in the morning in fifteen years, and his body didn’t ask permission before pulling him back to the surface regardless of what the previous night had held.
What was unusual was Elia against his side.
The warmth. The even rhythm of a heartbeat that wasn’t his own.
He didn’t move.
She lay tucked into him with the specific, unguarded trust of someone who had fallen asleep expecting to be safe and had not been proven wrong.
Her hair spread across his shoulder in dark waves.
Her hand rested open against his chest, fingers loose, palm warm.
In sleep she’d released every careful posture, every calibrated expression, every layer of composure she wore in waking hours the way other people wore armor.
She looked younger. Completely herself in a way she probably didn’t allow during daylight.
He studied her without apology.
Her bruise hadn’t developed yet—it would, where his arm had braced across her shoulder pulling her behind him on the balcony—but he could see the faint marks his hands had left on her hips. Not damage. Evidence. He ran his thumb across one and something territorial moved through him at the sight.
She’d chosen this. He kept returning to that fact the way a man returns to ground he knows will hold him.
She hadn’t offered herself as payment. She hadn’t submitted out of obligation or fear or the long training of a woman who’d learned compliance as a survival skill.
She’d reached for him. She’d said yes and please and don’t you dare stop with a ferocity that had taken him apart more thoroughly than anything purely physical could have managed.
He’d had women before. He wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
He hadn’t wanted any of them the way he wanted her. That distinction mattered, and he was too honest with himself to minimize it.
Her lashes moved. A small shift of her body. She was surfacing.
He watched her come back to consciousness, the slight tightening of her fingers against his chest, the gradual deepening of her breath, the moment her eyes opened and the room registered and she remembered where she was.
She didn’t tense. Didn’t pull away. She turned her face up toward him instead, and her eyes found his in the early golden light. She didn’t say anything, just looked at him with that direct gray-blue gaze that had been undoing his composure since the first evening in the Donati drawing room.
“Morning,” she said. Her voice was gravelly with sleep.
He liked it and a rare smile eased the corners of his mouth. “Morning.”
A small silence. Not empty. Charged with the awareness of two people in close proximity who had spent the night learning each other’s bodies and hadn’t yet established the language for the morning after.
She solved it by pressing her mouth to his jaw.
The contact was soft. Tentative in a way that told him she wasn’t entirely certain of her welcome. That the old reflex to wait for permission still lived in her hands even when the rest of her had moved past it. He turned his head and caught her mouth properly.
He kissed her thoroughly. The way he intended to kiss her every morning going forward, though he kept that particular decision to himself for now. When he finally lifted his head, her eyes were dark.
“Shower,” he said.
Her mouth curved.
“Together?”
“Definitely.”
The water was hot by the time she stepped in after him, steam already filling the glass enclosure, the large rain head sending sheets of water across the stone floor.
Magnus watched her cross the threshold through the glass—the unselfconscious way she moved now, unhurried, her dark hair already loose around her shoulders—a familiar tightening gathering low in his body that he’d managed with varying degrees of success.
He didn’t manage it now.
He reached for her the moment the door closed behind her, pulling her under the water with him.
She came without hesitation, her wet hands finding his chest, her face tipping up through the warm cascade.
He kissed her again, deeper this time, with none of the morning’s restraint.
The water ran over both of them and she pressed into him with a smile against his mouth.
“You’re not a patient man in the morning,” she said.
“I’ve been patient for long enough,” he replied against her lips. “I’m done with it.”
She laughed, a real one, brief and startled and unguarded, and the sound of it moved through him with a force entirely disproportionate to its size.
He’d wanted to hear that laugh without reservation or fear behind it since the first time he’d caught a glimpse of it in the sitting room, edgy and surprised, breaking apart before she could rein it back.
He intended to hear it often.
He turned her so the water ran down her front and her shoulder blades were against the cool stone of the wall.
Her breath caught at the temperature contrast. He pressed his mouth to her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder, taking his time, learning the sounds she made with the same attention he’d given the contract language the morning by the pool.
Methodical. Thorough. With a hint of volatility.
Unwilling to miss anything.
Her hands slid up into his wet hair and her head fell back against the stone.
He moved downward, mouth tracing the swell of her breast, tongue finding the tight peak of her nipple.
She arched hard into his mouth and made the sound he’d catalogued last night as the one that cost her the most composure.
He filed it under repeat frequently.
He sank to his knees in front of her.
The position wasn’t submissive. Not remotely. It was possession. Like claiming territory no one else would ever touch.
She went still. Her fingers tightened in his hair in a way that wasn’t directing.
It was surprise. He looked up at her through the water, through the steam, and found her staring down at him with wide eyes and slightly parted lips, the expression of a woman who hadn’t expected this and didn’t know what to do with the reality of it.
“Magnus—”
“Hold on to me,” he said.
A beat passed. Then her grip shifted, steadied. Trusting.
He turned his attention to the task with the same focused patience he applied to everything he intended to master.
Here, with water running over his shoulders and her thighs trembling on either side of his face, patience was the only thing worth deploying.
He took his time. Learned her responses.
The way her respiration changed when he pressed closer, the specific sound she made when he found the right angle, the way her hips rolled forward involuntarily when he used his tongue in a dragging circle that reverberated through her entire body.
She said his name.
He kept going.
Her thighs began to shake in earnest. One of her hands released his hair and braced against the stone wall instead, needing the anchor.
He pressed closer while she tried to contain the sound building in her and failed completely.
It broke out of her, ragged and helpless and honest, and the wave of it moved through her body against his mouth.
She came apart with a shuddering intensity that gripped every muscle and left her crying out.
He rose, steadying her against him as the last quivers moved through her. Her face was pressed into the side of his neck. Her breathing was wrecked.
He felt extraordinarily satisfied.
“You could’ve warned me,” she managed.
“Where’s the value in that?”
She laughed again—another real one, fractured and delicious—and the sound hit him the same way it had before.
He turned off the water but didn’t reach for towels.
Instead, he pulled her dripping from the shower and walked her backward across the cool marble floor, through the bathroom door, and into the bedroom where the morning light was still pale through the curtains.
She made a sound of protest that he swallowed against her mouth.
The backs of her thighs hit the edge of the mattress and they went down together in a tangle of wet limbs and damp sheets that he was going to have to apologize to housekeeping for and didn’t remotely care about.
She pulled him over her immediately. Her wet hair spread across the pillow like dark ink, her skin flushed from the heat of the shower, water still gleaming in the hollow of her collarbone and along the curve of her waist. She looked at him with an openness she hadn’t possessed yesterday.
Something in the night had shifted the last layer of her careful distance.
She wasn’t waiting to be told what happened next. She wasn’t braced for cost.
She reached for him.
He caught her wrist. Turned it gently. Pressed his mouth to the inside of it, over her pulse.
The trust in her body still surprised him. She moved toward him instead of away, as if somewhere during the night she’d decided he was safe to want.
“Turn over,” he instructed.
Her eyes widened. A small hesitation. Not fear, he’d learned to read the difference. It was curiosity edged with the awareness of new territory. Then she moved, rolling onto her stomach with a trust that tightened something deep in his chest.
He took a moment to simply look at her. The long line of her back. The curve of her waist flaring into her hips. The beautifully rounded cheeks of her ass. Water still beading on her skin.
He pressed his palm flat between her shoulder blades—not restraining, just present—and she exhaled into the mattress.
He kissed the back of her neck. Her spine. The small of her back. She shivered under each point of contact, the tension rebuilding in her despite what he’d already done to her in the shower. Her fingers curled into the damp sheets.