33. CHAPTER 30 #2
I trailed kisses down her neck, sucking marks into the soft skin above her collarbone. Her pulse raced frantically under my lips. She arched, whimpering, as I hooked my fingers under the straps of her dress, and eased them down her shoulders.
Then the knock came. Hard. Too loud in the quiet of the room.
I stilled.
She froze under my hands, her chest rising and falling in sync with mine. For a heartbeat we both stayed there, suspended between instinct and the sudden interruption.
Then the knock came again, followed by a voice from the other side of the door. One of my mother’s housekeepers.
“Monsieur Kade? Lady Kade sent me. She says it’s important you come to the east wing now.”
I closed my eyes.
“The worst timing ever,” I muttered.
Léonie let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a bitter laugh.
“I could fire him, you know,” I whispered against her lips. Would you like me to fire him?”
“We’re not firing anyone.”
We. I liked the sound of it more than I should admit.
I pressed my forehead to hers, the heat of her skin still grounding me even as the outside world had started clawing its way back in.
“Fine. But I’m going to hunt down and kill whoever invented the word ‘important,’” I whispered.
“You can add it to your hit list,” she replied, a faint, sleepy wink following the words. “Right under the man in Antwerp and the chef who took too long with the scallops.”
She shifted, the movement dragging the sheets across my skin in a way that made me want to ignore the housekeeper entirely.
“Go,” she murmured, her voice sounding tired. “You know how your mother hates waiting.”
Her voice held a hint of nonchalance, but her eyes gave her away—frustration, yes, but also a trace of…understanding? Possibly. I wasn't sure.
I stopped myself from cursing out loud.
“It’ll wait for five minutes,” I growled, taking one last, lingering taste of her lips, silently promising that this wasn't an ending, just an intermission.
Pulled away, and felt the loss of her warmth immediately.
I didn't have time for a shower. I dressed under the room's low light, the rustle of my fresh shirt unusually loud in the stillness.
From the bed—my bed—I felt her eyes on me. It wasn’t the bold challenging gaze from the restaurant. It was a gentler version watching as I buttoned my cuffs and adjusting my mask for whatever my mother needed me for at this hour.
There was something about watching her here, like she belonged. I didn't want her anywhere else.
“You look like you again,” she murmured, her voice thick with sleep. “The big bad wolf that makes headlines.”
I let out a laugh. “Only on the outside,” I replied, adjusting the sleeve of my shirt.
Then I crossed back to the bed, leaning over her until I was breathing her in one last time. I was so reluctant to leave her, my feet felt stuck to her ground, as my lips hovered over hers.
Wait for me.
I kissed her deeply in a lingering claim that tasted of the ‘82 Petrus and the raw release of everything we’d finally broken tonight.
“Don’t move,” I commanded, my voice rough near her mouth. “Stay right here. I want to find you exactly like this when I get back.”
Her brows lifted. “Here?”
“Yes.”
She studied me for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”
I wanted to kiss her again. To ignore the knock and my mother and my father’s failing body and everything else until the only thing that existed was the woman in front of me, and the way she was looking at me.
I pulled back and left.
Whatever my mother needed me for at this hour better be worth it.
It took two hours. One twenty minutes. Seven thousand two hundred seconds for my mother and Dr Gérard to get all their points across.
Dr Gérard’s update was exactly the kind of layered disaster I’d expected Words like plateau, decline, and comfort measures threaded together in a way that would be palatable on paper and devastating in reality.
Nothing had changed with my father from the last time. He barely had six months at this point, according to the good doctor.
My mother’s mood moved between nervous composure and cutting-edge, misdirected questions that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with controlling everything.
I centered the conversation towards the point, so I could return to my wife. My mind still wandering between this meeting and her in my bed.
Placing my elbow on the arm of the cushion, my hand moved toward my lips and I could smell her, an intoxicating scent that definitely didn’t belong in this room.
Gathering whatever self-will I had left, I pulled myself into the room and focused on the discussion.
We discussed the board. Optics. Timing. What could be shared now and what had to wait. I gave answers, drafted strategies in my head, filed away action points for the morning.
Through it all, a small, stubborn part of my mind wouldn’t obey me. It stayed lodged firmly in my bedroom, replaying the way Léonie’s hands had moved at my waist, the way her eyes had looked as she watched me leave, and how I hoped to find her when I returned
By the time I extracted myself, it was past midnight.
The house felt heavier as I crossed back to our wing.
All the lights were off now, the corridors swallowed by the eerie stillness that only old manors like ours could achieve.
It used to spook Severin and I when we were younger.
The thought of wind howling and the trees forming shadows at night while we hid, made me huff a laugh as I made my way upstairs.
I pushed my bedroom door open slowly, only to find the room empty.
The lamps were still dimmed the way we’d left them. My jacket remained where I’d tossed it. Her scent lingered faintly in the air, but my wife wasn’t in my bed.
Displeasure twisted in my chest.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d told her to wait; I hadn’t told her how long my mother would keep me captive. She wasn’t an ornament I could expect to sit obediently on my bed until I returned.
Logically, I knew that.
Emotionally, a sour disappointment slid through me anyway.
Not just because the clock on the wall told me the prime hours of her cycle were gone for tonight.
Or because the meticulously aligned plan in my head had been interrupted.
But because I’d wanted her there. In my space.
In my bed. And I’d hoped she would obey me for one last time today.
I forgot how unpredictable my wife could be. One of the many qualities that attracted me to her, honestly.
I exhaled, hard, and stepped back into the hall.
Her door was closed, but I stood there longer than I should have. A rational man would have turned around, gone back to his room, and slept off the rest of the night.
I wasn’t feeling particularly rational.
Quietly, I removed my shoes, leaving them neatly by her door, then I turned the handle and slipped inside.
The room was dark, the curtains pulled. As my eyes adjusted, I made out the shape of her in bed. She lay on her side facing away from the door, the covers pulled up, her hair spilling over the pillow.
She looked fragile like that. Not in the way my mother meant when she called women delicate. Her was a guarded stillness. Like she'd pulled everything inward to protect herself.
For a moment, I simply stood there, listening to her breathing slow and even. She was definitely deeply asleep. I should leave, but I didn’t.
I crossed the room, moving by memory more than sight while unbuttoning my shirt, placed it on a chair by the bed, and eased down onto the mattress behind her. The bed dipped under my weight; she shifted, murmuring something unintelligible, but didn’t wake.
I lay on my back at first, staring at the dark ceiling, every part of my body acutely aware of where hers ended and mine began.
Over twenty years of keeping my own bed as the last private border. I’d slept in countless hotel suites, on planes, in villas. I never shared space with anyone I slept with. Once the sex was done, I was gone. I never cuddled, or saw the need to give more than I felt.
This was new. This honest, uncurated closeness of a night that didn’t end with sex. It was different.
Carefully, I turned onto my side and reached for her. My arm slid around her waist, my palm flattening over her stomach, drawing her gently back toward me.
She came without resistance, instinct responding even in her sleep. Her body fitted into mine like she’d been shaped to the exact dimensions of my chest. Her back to my front, warmth bleeding between us.
I breathed in the scent of her hair. The scent of her shampoo, and the warm distinctive smell of her skin. I pressed closer near where the curve of her neck met her throat and inhaled again, memorizing the exact chemical composition of what made her her.
My hand splayed over her ribs, feeling the steady rise and fall of her chest.
She made a soft sound in her sleep, a simple exhale that lodged somewhere deep under my sternum. I pull her closer, heat licking down my spine from her body being so close to mine.
“Goodnight, Léa,” I murmured at the back of her head.
I pressed my lips to her hair in a light kiss that tasted of nothing and everything at once, then closed my eyes.
Tonight might not have gone as planned, but as her breathing evened again and my own finally began to slow, all I could think was that for the first time in my life, I wasn’t sleeping alone. And I didn’t want to be alone.
Tomorrow, I’d worry about missed windows and cycles and my mother’s obsession with heirs.
Tonight, I held my wife and let myself admit, in the dark and only to myself, that she, soft and warm and real in my arms, was the only thing that had made life currently bearable.