Chapter 25 #2
"Geoffrey looked like he was going to faint," he said. "And you told him…what was it?" I could hear it now, under the flat delivery. A dry, dark thread. Unhurried. "Do I ask you about the marks your partner leaves on you?"
"You were watching that."
"I was watching everything." Another pause that felt a lot like a man painstakingly choosing his next move.
"I sat in that restaurant every night for months and watched you walk into a room full of men who would've killed you if they knew what you were doing, and you sat there and played beautiful music back at them while collecting everything they said.
" He let that sit for a second. "I've worked for some calculated people.
Some brave people. I've never seen anything like it. "
The back of my neck prickled.
"That sounds like a compliment," I said.
"It is."
I turned toward him. "You're not angry."
"No."
"You should be angry."
"Should I?" The same measured delivery, the one that held everything and revealed nothing.
"You lied to protect yourself from an organization that dirtied your father's dreams and killed people right outside, then employed men like me to erase the evidence.
You held that secret through an hour of torture with Viktor in the room.
" A beat. "I'm a lot of things right now, little bird. But angry isn't one of them."
Little bird.
The first time he'd called me that was in an alley, a name that landed like a hand wrapped around my throat. Gentle, but capable. It still did exactly that.
I should say something. There were probably things that needed to be said. Practical things, tactical things, the shape of what happened next between us.
Instead I reached across and found the front of his shirt.
He went still under my hand.
"Raven—"
"You've been waiting a long time," I said. "Ever since the cabin."
"Yeah." His voice had dropped. "I have."
"I told you I wasn't ready."
"You did."
My fingers curled into the fabric. "I'm telling you something different now."
He moved. Not fast. Milo was never fast when it mattered, he was deliberate, and the difference was something I'd learned to feel in my pulse before he even closed the distance.
His hand came up and found my jaw, tilting my face up, his thumb pressing just below the corner of my mouth where a bruise had been and wasn't anymore.
"You're sure," he said. Not a question. A check. "Because I wouldn't blame you if you hated me forever for what I did. Or at the very least didn't trust me not to do it again."
"I'm sure," I told him. "And I trust you."
He kissed me then.
Not the way he'd kissed me before the warehouse, all controlled hunger and careful restraint. There was nothing careful about this. It was the kiss of a man who'd been counting days and had run out of patience for gentleness, thorough and deep and faintly rough at the edges.
I made a sound against his mouth that I couldn't contain, because I'd been hungry too, and felt his grip tighten.
"Come here," he gritted out, and pulled me off the bench.
I went with him willingly. My hands found his chest, his shoulders, the back of his neck, relearning the geography of him the way I relearned every space.
By touch. By building the map in my head until it felt like mine.
He walked me backward through the apartment and I let him, trusting the count of steps, trusting him.
It was either the most rational thing I'd ever done or the most dangerous.
Maybe both. With Milo, those had always been the same fucking thing.
My back met the bedroom wall and he pressed in close, caging me there.
One forearm rested above my head, the other hand sliding under the hem of my shirt to find the curve of my waist. He buried his face against my throat and inhaled deep, the scent of him filling my senses until I was dizzy with it.
"Hi," he said, the word vibrating against my jaw.
"Hi," I breathed.
His hand spread flat against my ribs, right where the worst of the bruising had been. His palm was warm and the pressure was light—achingly careful—and it shouldn't have undone me, but it did.
"I'm fine," I told him, my voice trembling. "I'm all healed."
"I know." His mouth dragged down my throat, lips skimming the pulse that fluttered there like a trapped bird. "I just need to see."
A second later, he pulled my shirt over my head.
The air in the room was cool, and my nipples hardened, but his gaze was hot, burning tracks over my bare skin.
His breath left him in a ragged, controlled exhale that told me more than words ever would have.
His hands moved over me, unhurried and thorough, mapping the healed skin as I stood with my palms flat against the solid wall of his chest and let him look with his hands the way I looked with mine.
"Milo," I said.
"Mm." His thumbs brushed the sensitive underside of my breasts, teasing the lace of my bra but not removing it. Not yet.
"Stop checking for damage," I whispered. "And touch me."
He paused, his fingers tightening around my ribcage. "Yes, ma'am."
Then he touched me.
His hands slid down my stomach, heavy and possessive, popping the button of my jeans with a rough flick of his wrist. He shoved the denim down, his hand seeking the heat between my thighs through the thin cotton of my panties.
When he found the dampness there, his forehead dropped to rest against mine.
"So fucking wet," he gritted out, the words dark and rough.
Another pulse of desire went through me and I couldn't stop the small whimper that left my throat at his words.
It'd been so long since he touched me.
And those hands knew exactly what they were doing, rubbing circles against me through the fabric until my spine went liquid and my head fell back against the wall.
Every thought I had dissolved into the sensation of him learning me all over again from the beginning.
He wasn't gentle about it. He was starving for me as I was for him. And god help me, I wanted to feed him.
Somehow I got his shirt off. My fingers fumbled with his belt, desperate and clumsy, while his mouth left new marks on my collarbone, my throat, the curve of my shoulder.
Nothing like the other bruises. This was something else.
This was a claiming. The kind of touch that said I know exactly where I am and you are mine without needing either sentence spoken aloud.
I finally got his pants undone, my hands wrapping around the hard, heavy length of him, and his hips snapped forward, grinding against my palm.
"Fuck, Raven." The control in his voice was fraying, snapping like an overstretched wire.
I said his name again when his hand slid inside my panties, fingers pushing deep into my slick heat, and he said "I've got you" against my ear in a low voice that made the phrase mean half a dozen things at once.
"I know," I managed, gasping as he moved his hand, wreaking havoc on the sensitive nerves there.
I felt him smile against my skin, sharp and predatory.
He didn't wait any longer. He moved me through the bedroom without hesitation, with the same quiet competence he brought to everything, laying me down on sheets that smelled like us.
He came over me with the crushing, careful weight of a man who'd spent three weeks thinking about this exact moment, settling between my legs and pressing the tip of his cock against my entrance.
He held himself there, his muscles trembling with the effort of not burying himself inside me, his breathing harsh in the quiet room.
"Milo, please," I begged.
He gave me exactly what I asked for, sliding inside me slowly as I stretched around him, filling me balls deep. A shudder went through his big body when he could go no deeper, and then he started to move.
It was desperate and slow and achingly careful in equal measure, and somewhere in the middle of it I gave in to him entirely, because this was Milo. A man capable of terrible things and impossible tenderness in the same breath, capable of taking me apart and holding every piece while he did it.
And when he said "mine" with his mouth at my throat and his hand locked in my hair and every inch of him pressed against me, inside me, it sounded like the most perfect music to my ears.
"Yours," I said, and meant it the way I'd only meant a handful of things in my entire life.
He didn’t stay gentle. The moment I said I was his, the last thread of his restraint snapped.
He withdrew almost completely, leaving me aching and empty for a heartbeat, before slamming back into me with a force that knocked the breath from my lungs.
I gasped, my nails digging into his shoulders, anchoring myself as he began to drive into me.
It wasn't the rhythmic, polite friction of a lover.
It was the desperate, possessive cadence of a man trying to erase the last month of our lives.
"You feel so fucking good," he gritted out, his voice rough against my ear. "So tight. So mine."
"Milo—" I cried out his name, unsure if I was asking him to stop or go faster.
"Take it," he growled, his hands sliding down to grip my hips, bruisingly hard. "Take all of it, Raven. Take all of me."
I threw my head back, arching into the punishment of his thrusts.
It was too much and not enough all at once.
The friction built a heat in my belly that coiled tighter with every stroke, a heavy, electric tension that made my toes curl.
I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, needing to feel the weight of him pressing the air out of me.
I needed to know he was real. That this was real.
Every thrust hit that sensitive bundle of nerves deep inside, wringing a broken cry from my throat.
"That’s it," he whispered, nipping at the sensitive cord of my neck. "Sing for me, little bird. Let me hear you."