Chapter Four
CHELSEA HAD BEEN DRESSED by other people before.
Nurses, mostly. Physical therapists who needed access to her left leg and didn't have time to wait while she negotiated her way in and out of hospital gowns that opened in the back and closed around whatever dignity she had left.
She'd learned to hold still for it, to let herself be managed with the same passive compliance she'd brought to everything in those early weeks of waking.
Blood draws, range-of-motion tests, the daily indignity of needing help with buttons.
But this was not that.
This was Olivio Cannizzaro, standing behind her in the private bedroom adjoining his conference room, easing a dress over her shoulders with hands that were doing something very different from what the nurses' hands had done.
The new dress was black. Silk. It had arrived in a bag that looked like it had its own postcode, and Chelsea had stared at it for a long moment, aware that her blue-flowered cotton dress was currently in two pieces somewhere on the bedroom floor, and that the man responsible for this was now holding its replacement open for her with the composed efficiency of someone who had never ripped anything in his life.
Don't think about it, Chels.
She stepped into the dress. His hands guided the fabric up, over her hips, and the silk settled against skin that was still remembering everything his hands had done to it twenty minutes ago.
Definitely don't think about that.
"Hold your hair."
She gathered her braid, what was left of it, which at this point was more of a suggestion than a hairstyle, and lifted it off her neck, and his knuckles brushed her spine as he found the zipper.
The sound of it going up was the loudest thing in the room.
Chelsea's breath caught somewhere around her fourth vertebra and didn't come back until the zipper reached the top.
In those three seconds, she understood something about intimacy that no observation or fiction could ever prepare her for.
This was something she could only learn from experience, and it was how a man dressing you could undo you more completely than a man undressing you.
All Chelsea could do was bite her lip as his fingers moved ever so slowly. Don't squirm, don't squirm, don't squirm. At least when he'd been taking things off, the urgency and the heat had been there to sweep her away, just so many things happening all at once to make her not think.
But now?
There was nowhere to hide, nothing else to think of but his hands on her skin, and the quiet fact of what they'd done sitting in the air between them like something that had been said and could not be unsaid.
"Turn around."
The command nearly made her jump. Nearly.
But while she had managed to squash that, it was her heartbeat she couldn't control, skyrocketing like it had been doing since meeting her husband as she turned to face him, slowly, her left foot dragging a beat behind the rest of her the way it did when her body was tired, and she caught herself with a small correction so automatic she didn't even register it.
But he did.
Her breath caught as his dark gaze captured hers. A part of her had been terrified that she would see something in his eyes that would make all of this...sordid.
But instead, there was...warmth.
Not the kind that burned (she knew that kind now, knew it in her blood and her bones and in places she would need to have a very long conversation with God about later).
This was different. Quieter. It was the look of a man who was seeing something he hadn't expected to see, and instead of cataloguing it the way he did everything, he was just..
.looking. The way she'd looked at the view from his floor. Like it was a gift he hadn't asked for.
And all her fears, every single one that had been lining up in her chest like patients in a waiting room—-did I do that right, was I enough, does he regret it, will he send me away now—-melted.
Just gone.
He pulled her close, and she went without resistance, her forehead finding the place just below his collarbone that her body had apparently already decided was hers. His mouth brushed the top of her head, and then he tilted her chin up and kissed her.
Not the way he'd kissed her before, not that consuming, floor-dropping kiss that had rewritten her understanding of what mouths were for.
This kiss was slow. Deep. The kind that had time in it, as if he was learning something about her that could only be learned at this speed.
By the time he lifted his head, her lips were tender all over again, and she was fairly certain that her face was doing something visible and uncontrollable and probably very, very pink.
Is this what married people do? Is this normal? Is there a manual for this? Because if there is, she would like a copy, preferably annotated, with a FAQ section and maybe a helpline for moments exactly like—-
"Come."
The thought scattered like birds.
Olivio had never been the type to hold a woman's hand. He had taken women to galas, to dinners, to events where a well-placed palm at the small of a back could generate the exact impression required. He had never once had the impulse to simply take a woman's hand and hold it while walking.
So he could not explain what he was doing right now.
His fingers had found hers somewhere between the bedroom door and the hallway.
Not a conscious decision. Not a strategic one.
One moment his hand was at his side and the next it was wrapped around hers, and the genuinely baffling thing, the thing he intended to examine later with the rigor it deserved and then dismiss entirely, was that it didn't feel like enough.
Her hand in his was warm and small and slightly uncertain in its grip, as if she couldn't quite believe he was doing this and didn't want to hold on too tightly in case the whole thing turned out to be a misunderstanding.
And that hesitance was doing something to him that was entirely inconsistent with the fact that they were walking down a corridor in his own building toward a man who was going to look at Olivio with an expression Olivio was not prepared to receive.
Without breaking stride, his hand released hers.
Before she could wonder why, his arm curved around her waist instead, drawing her against his side, and he brushed his lips against the top of her head.
His pace adjusted to hers without thought, his body matching the rhythm of her walk the way it had matched nothing else in his life, and if he'd noticed, he would have been alarmed by it.
He didn't notice.
Better.
The thought arrived without permission, and he did not examine it.
Every head on the floor turned. He didn't give a damn. Let them stare. Let every analyst and associate on this floor register this image and understand exactly what it meant.
This was his wife. She was his.
Proprietary interest, he told himself. Consistent with the new arrangement.
Edgar was waiting for them.
Chelsea could tell the exact moment her godfather understood what had happened, because his face went through four expressions in under a second: surprise, comprehension, a flash of something protective, and then the kind of exhausted resignation that reminded her of the time she'd told him she was going to meet Olivio without even looking him up first.
"Seriously?"
The word was directed at Olivio, and it carried the weight of twenty years of mentorship and the specific weariness of a man who had arranged a proxy marriage to protect his goddaughter's inheritance and was now confronting the evidence that the arrangement had become considerably more than proxy.
Something extraordinary happened then, and Chelsea nearly pinched herself to make sure she wasn't imagining it. Because if her eyes were working correctly...
Olivio was flushing.
Not the way Chelsea blushed, total and immediate, the red flag of a body that had never learned to conceal a single thing it was feeling.
His was subtler, a dull wash of color at his neck that he contained the way he contained everything, by simply refusing to acknowledge its existence. But it was there.
"I realize," Olivio said, and his voice was controlled, his posture impeccable, his jaw set with the rigidity of a man who had never been embarrassed a day in his life, "that things progressed...quickly."
Chelsea nearly choked.
Quickly. He'd said quickly, as if they hadn't gone from first meeting to...to that...in the span of approximately ninety minutes, which in Chelsea's admittedly limited understanding of human courtship was not quickly so much as land speed record.
But underneath the absurdity, she heard what he was actually saying.
His speech had gone formal. Fewer contractions.
More distance between words. And she had been around Edgar long enough to know that when powerful men started speaking carefully, it was because they were feeling something that their vocabulary hadn't been built to hold.
He was saying he should have waited. That she deserved more than a conference room and a stolen hour and a dress that had to be replaced because he'd lost the control he'd spent his entire adult life perfecting.
He was saying sorry, in the only language he knew how to speak.
Chelsea turned to her husband, rose up on her toes, and whispered against his ear: "I don't mind."
Her voice was soft enough that only he could hear it, and it was the most honest thing she had ever said.
Honest and earnest and tinged with an embarrassment so total that her face was practically incandescent, and she couldn't look at him after she said it, couldn't look at Edgar, couldn't look at anything except the very interesting patch of carpet directly between her shoes.
But she meant it.