Chapter Three #2
Chelsea couldn't answer. All she could do was stare back at him helplessly. His accent had noticeably thickened, and the sound of it made his words feel more intimate. Darker. Like words spoken in a room where the lights had been dimmed and no one was expected to leave.
"Because I have a feeling we're thinking the same thing."
They were?
"So what do you think, wife?" A pause. Lazy. Devastating. "Should I just kiss you?"
Her eyes went wide, her lips parting in surprise...and that was it.
One moment, her world was what it always was, what she had always known.
And then...everything changed, the moment his lips touched hers.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
The kiss was soft at first. Almost careful, as if he were testing a hypothesis, gathering data, running calculations the way she'd already learned he ran everything.
But Chelsea's mouth had absolutely no interest in being a hypothesis, and the small, involuntary sound that escaped her—-helpless, wanting, nothing she could have produced on purpose—-changed the terms of his experiment entirely.
The kiss deepened in an instant, her arms somehow finding their way around his neck as he pulled her onto his lap.
His hands were at her waist, her back, her ribs, learning the geography of her with the same methodical intensity he'd used to assess her in the elevator, except this wasn't assessment anymore.
This was something that had broken through the floor of assessment and was falling into territory that didn't have a name.
She had come here to find out if this marriage was real.
His mouth on hers was the most real thing she had ever felt.
The thought of stopping him didn't cross her mind because everything felt so, so right.
How they ended up married was immaterial.
He was her husband, she was his wife, and what God had joined together was exactly this: his breath against her lips, his hands pulling her closer, and the knowledge, settling into her bones like warmth, that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
Oooh.
Olivio had only planned to kiss her. A strategic demonstration.
A branding exercise, if he was being honest with himself, which he was not and had no intention of being.
But the moment he had a taste of her lips, it seemed to unlock a hunger inside of him that had never existed before, and a kiss was no longer enough.
He wanted more. He wanted everything. Everything, dammit.
She tasted like the latte she'd been drinking and something underneath it that was just her, something sweet and clean that had nothing to do with coffee and everything to do with the fact that no man had ever kissed this woman before. The knowledge hit him like a fist to the sternum.
No one.
Just him.
"I want you, Chelsea," he gritted against her lips.
"I w-want you, too." She didn't think anything of it, her need for him making her whimper the words out as his lips trailed down her neck, and oh!
She realized belatedly that he was marking her, his mouth pressing against the column of her throat with an intent that went beyond kissing, and she couldn't help it.
Her arms tightened around his neck, her body molding against his as her eyes squeezed shut at the pressure of his mouth.
Her heart hammered against her chest, faster and faster, and when the pressure finally eased, it felt as if his lips had burned an imprint on the side of her neck.
Her eyes drifted open, her gaze locking with his. He watched her with intense dark eyes as her fingers rose to touch his mark.
It was like he had claimed her.
And she...liked it.
The realization caught her off guard. She hadn't expected this about herself—-that the sensation of being claimed by this man, of wearing his mark on her skin, would make something inside her chest bloom rather than recoil.
She'd read about desire in the abstract, had imagined it as a polite, manageable warmth, something she'd be able to examine from a safe distance.
This wasn't that.
This was standing in the middle of a fire and realizing she'd been cold her entire life.
"Give yourself to me, Chelsea."
The command in his tone was like being wrapped in velvet, and all she could do was whisper, "Yes." She didn't understand exactly what he was asking. She just knew there was only one way to answer that...because she was already his, had been so from the moment they were married.
Chelsea let out a gasp when he suddenly swept her up into his arms, and then he was carrying her to—-oh? A secret panel that was actually a door and—-OH.
A bedroom?
He had a bedroom outfitted like a penthouse suite in his office, and ah!
The relief was physical before it was anything else.
Her leg, which had been bracing and negotiating and compensating since the lobby, went quiet in his arms the way it only did when she was lying down, and the absence of that constant low effort was its own kind of surrender—-her body letting go of one burden just in time to be overwhelmed by another.
She couldn't think again, with his mouth claiming hers for another long, drugging kiss as he laid her on the bed.
The sheets were cool against her back. The ceiling above was white, unmarked, a blank canvas, and for a dizzy moment she imagined it cycling through artwork the way the screen in the other room did—-Monet dissolving into Vermeer dissolving into whatever was happening to her right now, which was something no painter had ever been brave enough to capture.
She could sense his hands moving, but it was only when she heard a slight ripping sound—-oh!
"I'll buy you this same dress, I promise."
She could only choke back a laugh, but then he was kissing her again, and this time she understood what his hands were doing. Her dress was open now, the blue flowers parted like a curtain, and his gaze traveled down her body with an expression that made her forget how to breathe.
She should have been embarrassed. She'd never been looked at like this, never been this bare in front of another person who wasn't a nurse or a doctor or a physiotherapist evaluating her range of motion.
But the way he was looking at her wasn't clinical.
It was the opposite of clinical. It was the gaze of a man who had just opened something he couldn't close, and knew it, and didn't care.
And she...she was helping him, too. She couldn't help it.
Her hands found his buttons, his collar, the warm skin beneath the fabric that had been driving her mad since the elevator, and the sound he made when her fingers touched his chest—-low, involuntary, almost angry—-sent a shock of power through her that she had never, in her twenty-two years of life, experienced.
She could affect him.
This man who controlled everything, who moved through the world like it was a chess board and he had already calculated the endgame—-she had made him make that sound.
Her. Chelsea Regis, with her provincial dress and her limp and her Bible study case, had reached through every wall this man had ever built and found something underneath that was alive and raw and shaking.
The discovery was terrifying.
It was also the most magnificent thing she had ever felt.
Her need for him had her caught up in waves of pleasure that she had no name for, and she was just following her instinct, and oh, the moment his weight pressed down against her, his skin against her skin—-there was so much of him, warm and solid and overwhelming, and her body, which had spent three years in stillness and five years in invisibility, was suddenly and violently awake to every point of contact.
His chest against hers. His thigh between her thighs.
His breath against her collarbone. The weight of him, real and present and not a dream, not something she'd have to wake up from.
A helpless sound of desire escaped her as his mouth moved down her body, touching, kissing, claiming every part of her, and she couldn't keep quiet.
She tried. She pressed her lips together and then her hand over her mouth, and Olivio caught that hand and pinned it gently above her head, his dark eyes finding hers.
"Don't."
One word. An instruction. A world.
Don't hide from me. Don't muffle yourself. Don't be invisible here.
And Chelsea found herself obeying.
She let herself be heard as his mouth and hands learned her, and every sound she made carved itself into a part of Olivio's brain that he hadn't known existed.
He'd been with women who performed. Who knew what to say and when to say it, whose responses were as calculated as a quarterly report.
This girl performed nothing. Every gasp was startled out of her, every arch of her back was involuntary, every whispered oh was the sound of someone discovering a continent she hadn't known was there.
It was wrecking him.
He refused to think about why.
He kissed the hollow of her throat where her pulse was hammering at a rate that would have concerned a doctor.
The smartwatch on her wrist glowed faintly against the sheets, its numbers ticking upward, and he didn't know what the numbers meant but he understood what they confirmed—-that this girl's body kept a record of everything it felt, and right now it was feeling him.
She trembled underneath him so hard that he actually stopped, his forehead against her shoulder, his breathing ragged.
He needed a moment. Just one. Because what was building in him wasn't behaving the way it was supposed to—-satisfied by increments, manageable, subject to discipline.
It was getting worse with every touch, deepening with every sound she made, and if he didn't get control of it now, he wasn't sure he'd be able to get control of it at all.
She made the choice for him.
Her hands, those gentle uncertain hands, slid down his back, and her body opened to him with a trust that had no business existing between two people who had met an hour ago, and the last of his control snapped like something that had been carrying too much weight for too long.
"Olivio."
He entered her in a single, irreversible movement, and she could only whisper his name because there was no turning back now. The sound of it—-his name, in her voice, breaking in the middle like a wave—-did something to his chest that he would spend the next several weeks refusing to examine.
There was a moment of stillness. Her breath caught.
Her eyes were wide, shining, and there was pain in them—-he could see it, couldn't not see it—-but she didn't flinch away.
She pulled him closer. Her nails dug into his back and her legs wrapped around him and she held on like someone who had decided that this was real and she was going to stay in it regardless of what it cost.
He began to move.
Her nails dug deeper into his back as the pain dissolved into something else, something that made her whimper and arch and forget every word she'd ever known except his name.
She tried to muffle her cries but it was impossible, with the way he was moving, the way he was gripping her hips, the way his body was claiming hers—-
"Olivio!"
She came apart with a sob, pleasure engulfing her so completely that for a moment she was nowhere—-not in this room, not in this body, just somewhere vast and bright where nothing hurt and everything was warm—-and a moment later, her husband gritted her name out—-
"Chelsea."
And it started all over again, shudders rocking her body as she clung to him. It was just wave after wave, and as much as she tried to be present, it was just too much...and her eyes slowly drifted close even with her husband still inside of her.
Olivio's heart was still pounding in the aftermath.
He gazed down at his wife, with her pale cheeks flushed pink even in sleep.
Her lashes cast small shadows. Her lips were swollen from his kisses.
The mark on her neck was already darkening into a bruise he should have been clinical enough to regret and wasn't.
A virgin, dammit.
He had never been with one...while she had never known any other man but him.
A virgin.
The word kept returning to him, insistent, rearranging things he'd thought were settled.
He'd walked into this conference room with a strategy.
He'd had the Marquez acquisition in one hand and the convenient solution of an accidental wife in the other, and the two had fit together with the clean logic of a deal that needed only his signature.
But deals didn't tremble underneath you.
Deals didn't wrap their arms around your neck and whisper your name like it was the only word left in the language.
Deals didn't fall asleep with that expression on their face, the one that said I trust you with a simplicity that bordered on reckless, that went beyond reckless into something so unguarded it made his chest hurt.
Even for someone like him, that mattered.
And it changed everything.