Chapter Ten #2
Ari watched it happen. His thrusts didn’t stop—slower now, deeper, the kind of deep that pressed against every sensitive place inside me and kept pressing—and the look on his face was satisfaction, pure and warm and entirely undisguised.
Like he’d won something.
He had.
His rhythm faltered. His hand left my cock, braced against the mattress beside my head, and his forehead dropped to my shoulder. His breathing went ragged.
One final thrust, deep, holding, and I felt him come—the pulse of him inside me, the way his body went tight against mine, the low sound he made against my skin that was not a word, but might have been my name if names had been the point.
Ari did not pull out. He did not move. His weight settled over me, heavy and warm, one hand still pressed flat to the mattress beside my head, the other on my hip like he was not planning to let go.
He did not let go.
I lay there. Breathing. Cataloguing. The stretch of him still inside me, the warm mess on my stomach, the heaviness of a body that had just been thoroughly rearranged.
Ari’s face was in the curve of my neck. His breathing slowed. His arm across my ribs, his hand on my hip, and the weight of him was something my body had already decided was correct, which was its own kind of problem.
I reached up. My fingers found the scar on his cheekbone, traced the line of it—pale against his skin, raised slightly under my touch—and Ari’s eyes opened.
Black. Warm. Looking at me with an expression I had no category for, because Aristoteles Romano did not do expressions the way normal people did expressions, and what was happening on his face right now was several standard deviations outside the operational parameters I had established for him.
He kissed me. Once. Soft.
Then his arm tightened around my ribs, and he settled against me like he was planning to stay exactly where he was for the foreseeable future, and my brain, which had opinions about everything, had no opinion about this whatsoever, which was either concerning or perfect and I was too tired to decide which.
I closed my eyes. The gold stripes moved across the bed as the sun climbed, and somewhere in the palazzo, the day was starting, and somewhere in this bed, something had started that had no reverse gear and no off-ramp and I was, against all available evidence, completely fine with that.
* * * *
My brain came back online at approximately sixty percent capacity, which was enough to notice that Ari was looking at me.
Not the way he usually looked at me. Not the operational watchfulness, the cold assessment, the focus of a man who was categorizing threats and assets and calculating the distance between them.
This was something else. Direct. Warm. The kind of look that would have been alarming on anyone else’s face and was, on his, exactly what I wanted pointed at me, which was its own kind of problem.
The palazzo was quiet. Early sounds of the city filtering through the shutters—distant church bells, the rumble of a delivery cart on cobblestone, and the hum of Florence waking up.
Ari’s arm was still across my ribs. His hand resting on my side, warm through the thin sheet that had somehow ended up covering approximately thirty percent of my body, which was thirty percent more than it had been covering five minutes ago.
“I moved your things,” Ari said. Flat. Operational. The same tone he used for security briefings and contract disputes and statements of fact that were not subject to discussion.
I blinked. “What?”
“Leon picked them up last night. Paid off your lease. Everything’s here. Room down the hall.”
I stared at him. The words arranged themselves into a sentence, the sentence arranged itself into a concept, and the concept landed in my frontal lobe with the approximate force of a freight train hitting a kindergarten.
“You moved me in.” Not a question. Couldn’t be a question, because questions implied the possibility of a negative response, and what Ari had just described was several exits past a negative responses.
“Yes,” he said.
I frowned at him. “That’s insane.”
“I agree.”
He said it without any indication that he found this a problem. No apology. No qualification. Just the flat certainty of a man who had made a decision, implemented it while I was asleep, and was now waiting for my reaction.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Looked at the ceiling. Looked back at Ari.
Six-foot-three of scarred, unreasonable man. Black eyes watching me with the absolute stillness of someone who had already decided that I belonged here and was now waiting for me to catch up to the conclusion he had reached.
I had arguments. Excellent arguments. Professionally constructed, airtight arguments, the kind of case I could build in under three minutes because building cases was what I did for a living and I was very good at it.
I thought about my apartment.
The mildew smell in the bathroom that no amount of cleaning had ever fully defeated.
The neighbor’s cooking—something with garlic, always garlic, at hours when garlic had no business being active.
The way the walls had started to feel like they were getting closer, millimeter by millimeter, the longer I stayed there.
Nothing good. Nothing warm. Nothing that had ever made me feel like the space I occupied was something someone had designed with me in mind.
I thought about this bed. This room. This man whose arm was across my ribs and whose hand was warm against my side and whose expression, right now, was doing something to my chest that my professional vocabulary did not have a category for.
“You’re adding a relocation fee to my invoice,” I finally said.
“Fine.”
“It will be substantial.”
“I assumed.”
“I’m also keeping the switchblade on the nightstand.”
A pause. Ari’s thumb moved against my ribs, once, a small circle that registered somewhere below my sternum. “I would expect nothing less.”
I reached for the caramel on the nightstand. Gold foil, slightly crumpled, the crumple of something that had been handled by large, careful hands and placed exactly where it was supposed to be.
I unwrapped it. Slow. The foil caught the light, warm gold against the pale stripes coming through the shutters.
I broke it in half. Held one piece out to Ari.
He took it.
This surprised me more than anything else that had happened this morning, and that was saying something, because the list of surprising things that had happened this morning included waking up in Ari’s bed, having spectacular sex with Ari’s cock inside me, and being informed that I no longer had an apartment because Ari Romano had decided, unilaterally, that I lived here now.
He put the caramel in his mouth. His jaw worked once, the muscles shifting under skin.
We lay there sharing the caramel in silence. The early light moved across the bed, the stripes shifting as the sun climbed, and Ari’s hand pressed slightly warmer against my side.
I ate my half. Sweet. Salty. Like a series of catastrophic decisions and committing to every one of them.
Ari’s breathing was steady against my shoulder, and the weight of him was something my body had already decided was correct, which was either the most alarming thing that had ever happened to me or the only thing that had ever made complete sense, and the line between those was getting thinner by the second.
I looked at him. Really looked. The scar on his cheekbone, pale in the morning light. The line of his jaw, set with the certainty of a man who did not apologize for the space he occupied. The black eyes that were watching me with a warmth that had no business being as direct as it was.
I was done for.
Completely. Irrevocably. The kind of done for that came with no reverse gear and no off-ramp and the distinct, terrible realization that I did not, in fact, want either of those things.
I didn’t say it. Didn’t need to. The caramel was doing the talking, and the arm across my ribs was doing the talking, and the way Ari was looking at me was doing several paragraphs of talking without requiring a single word from either of us.
His thumb moved against my side again. Another circle. Slower this time, like he was writing something on my skin that he expected me to read later, when my brain was working at full capacity and I had the vocabulary to process it.
I closed my eyes. The gold light pressed warm against my eyelids, and somewhere in the palazzo, the day was properly starting.
Something had started that I was not going to do anything about, because doing something about it would require moving, and moving was currently several levels down on the list of priorities, and the list of priorities was currently dominated by a single item that looked suspiciously like stay right here.
I stayed right here.