Chapter 35
Pav knew how to deny his body. He didn’t know how to deny the part of him that wanted to be held like this.
She turned in his arms. Her face, lifted to his, her cheeks flushed. Her mouth still soft from what had happened between them, her eyes on him with no question in them.
He’d read people in seven languages across three continents, and the question was always the same—what does this person want from me, and can I give it without dying? Harper’s face wasn’t giving him the question.
She was looking at him the way someone looks at something they’ve already decided about. He didn’t know the protocol for being looked at like that.
His grip was still on her waist from the turn. Heat dragged low through him, immediate and overwhelming. He locked every muscle down.
She lifted her hand.
He had the time. Time to step back. Time to catch her wrist. But didn’t.
His training, which had kept him alive until now, went quiet. Her fingers pushed through his hair, her nails teasing his scalp.
Pav remained motionless. Not from restraint. Restraint required choice. But because every possible movement ended with his mouth on hers, his hands on her skin, the last functional part of his control gone.
He hadn’t been touched, palm to skin, in years. The thought arrived with the clarity of a target acquisition, and he flinched away from it.
Not sex. Not even desire. Just contact.
Her eyes registered the flinch, but she didn’t remove her hand.
Her thumb moved across his cheekbone. She slid her fingers down his jaw, the side of his neck, and onto his chest where his shirt was open.
Her fingers spread there, her palm flat over the place his heart was doing something uncharacteristic.
She’d feel it. She was meant to.
People wanted things from him.
Protection. Violence. Solutions. Results.
Harper wanted none of those. She wanted him. And he had no training for that.
Her hand left his chest. Not far. Just to the first button on his shirt. She undid it without looking down, her eyes locked on his.
The second button. The third.
She already knew his body. She’d touched it when the fever had taken him somewhere beneath himself, where he’d heard her voice but been unable to answer it.
Now she was learning it as something else.
The shirt opened down his chest, and her fingers slipped inside, palms flat against his ribs, careful of the dressing on his chest. She slid it off his shoulders, and his shirt fell.
Her eyes dropped finally.
Stand still.
Her hands moved to his belt. She was waiting for something—permission, or just for him to be the one to say no. When he remained silent, she unbuckled it. The leather pulled free.
She got off the bed and pulled him to his feet.
She pushed her dress from her hips and stepped out of it.
Not far. Half a pace. Golden light from the stove painted her skin into something exquisite.
Her eyes darkened. He hadn’t braced for this. No one looked at him the way she did now.
Hunger. Desire. Reverence.
He understood hunger and desire had rules, but reverence undid him.
She walked around him. Her hand trailed across his stomach as she went, down the line of his hip, around to the small of his back.
Pav didn’t move.
Moving had become dangerous. His body had ideas. His hands had worse ones. Her fingers traced his spine the way his had traced hers. The same patience. The same attention. He stood in the center of her circuit and understood, with a clarity that did him no good, that he was the terrain now.
And she was reading him. Not for weakness. For him.
She stopped behind him, her hand between his shoulder blades, then sliding up to his shoulder. The puckered skin where the round had exited, years ago, in a country he didn’t name even in his own head.
He braced for the question that didn’t come. Her fingers skated across the raised edge of the scar the way she might trace a word on a page. Then she pressed her mouth to it.
He closed his eyes.
No one touched old damage like that. No one put their mouth to the place where violence had left him and made it something else. Something went through his chest with the force of a round.
She came back around to his front, taking in the bruising along his ribs from the shoulder reset—yellowing now to the color of old tea.
She skimmed his arms, his flank, the tattoo on the inside of his bicep. Two words in Cyrillic: a name and a date. Her touch passed over it and lingered for the half-second it took to register that this mark differed from the others—not violence done to him, but something he’d chosen.
Then she moved on.
He hadn’t breathed in a while. His hands were rigid at his sides. He hadn’t put them on her since she turned. If he started, he wasn’t entirely certain he’d remember how to stop.
He was standing in front of a woman with her hands on his body, who’d examined every mark his life had left and not asked him to explain a single one of them. He’d known what to do with his hands his entire adult life.
But not now.
Her eyes came back to his face. “Pav.”
His good hand cupped her shoulder and held her there.
He drew her against him, more careful than instinct, as if he was measuring the distance even as he closed it.
The whole length of her, warm and giving in a way nothing in his life had ever been.
He held her there for a moment—because moving forward would mean choosing this, and he wasn’t sure he’d survive it intact.
His good arm sank lower, settling between her shoulder blades. His injured arm came more carefully around the softness of her lower back.
She made a small sound against his throat, her touch riding the ridges of his abdomen. Yes.
Snow built at the window, hiding them from the world. He’d never been in a room he couldn’t exit in under three seconds.
He was now.
She lifted her face to him.
He had to say it while there was still some part of him capable of speech.
“Harper.” His voice came out strange, too low and rough. “I haven’t—" He started again. “I have nothing.”
The words came out rough, graceless, dragged from whatever part of him was still trying to protect her from him.
She went still, then understood.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “I’m on the pill. For my period.” Her hand rested over his heart. “And I’m clear too.”
The last exit closed.
He’d handed her the knife, and she’d set it down.
The relief moved through him unevenly, almost painfully. Like warmth returning to a body that had been cold for too long. When he opened his eyes, she smiled at him.
“Pav. Come to bed.”
She unbuttoned his borrowed pants and pushed them over his hips. He helped, because his body might have limits, but letting her do everything would break something in him.
Then there was nothing left between them but breath and choice.
“Come.” She took his hand and led him back to the bed. She lay against the pillows.
Pav breathed out, gathering himself. He knew how to survive pain. He had no experience of being wanted gently.
Her hair framed her face. Solnyshko. Little sun.
Careful of his injured arm, he lowered himself onto the bed beside her. Forehead to forehead.
For three years, he’d held the line.
Against grief. Against memory. Against wanting anything he couldn’t afford to lose.
Now, for the first time, he let it go.