Holland #2
"I need you to know," I said, my voice quiet but firm. "This isn't about Callum, or about filling a space he left. This is about you. It was always you, underneath everything else.
"I know what it is."
"Then tell me."
He put his hand over mine, his fingers warm and his grip light. "It's you finally seeing me the way I've been seeing you for ten years. It's not new. It's finally happening."
I kissed him.
It wasn't like the night before. That had been about breaking something open, about the months of tension and the years of silence and the gala and the adrenaline and the need to feel something other than the weight of what I'd just done.
This was different. This was slow and certain, his hand coming up to cup the back of my head and his mouth moving against mine like we had all the time in the world and neither of us was going anywhere.
He pulled back just enough to look at me. "You sure?"
"I've never been more sure of anything."
He kissed me again, and this time there was no hesitation in it.
His hands found my waist and pulled me closer, and I let him.
I let my body press against his and I let my fingers find the hem of his shirt and I let myself want him without running a cost-benefit analysis in the back of my mind.
There was no calculation. There was no strategy.
There was just Finn, solid and warm and exactly where he'd always been, waiting for me to finally turn around and see him.
We moved back toward the couch, and he laid me down against the cushions with a care that made my throat tighten.
He didn't rush. He didn't fumble. He took his time, his mouth tracing a line from my collarbone to my shoulder while his hand worked the buttons of my shirt—his shirt, the one he'd given me last night.
When the fabric fell open, he paused and looked at me.
"You're beautiful," he said. "You know that?"
"You've mentioned it."
"I don't think I've mentioned it enough."
His hand slid across my stomach, and I arched into the touch without meaning to. He smiled, just slightly, and then he bent his head and kissed the hollow of my throat, and the only thing left in my head was the warmth of his mouth and the sound of my own breath.
The rest of it was slow and quiet and full of small sounds – my breath catching, his name in my mouth, the creak of the couch when he shifted his weight.
He moved like he knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what I needed, and when I pulled him closer he went willingly, and when I said his name again he answered with his mouth against my skin.
Afterward, we lay tangled on the couch, the blanket half on the floor and the morning light stronger now, cutting bright white lines across the hardwood. His arm was around me, and my head was on his chest, and I could hear his heart beating, steady and slow, like it had no reason to hurry.
"I should call the business attorneys back," I said.
"You should."
"And I should call the Morrisons."
"Probably."
"And I need to find an office. And a contractor. And—"
"Holland." He pressed his thumb against my shoulder blade. "You can do all of that. But you don't have to do it in the next five minutes."
I closed my eyes. He was right. I didn't have to.
For the first time in seven years, there was no deadline, no crisis, no man waiting for me to solve a problem he'd created and then hand him the credit.
There was just this: the studio, the light, the sketch on the drafting table, and Finn's arm around me, holding me in place without holding me down.
"I want to lead the Evanston project," I said. "Under my own name. With my own firm."
"Then do it."
"It's going to take months. The permits alone—"
"Then it takes months. You're not on anyone else's timeline anymore."
I sat up, pulling the blanket with me, and looked at the drafting table. The sketch lay on the table, the roofline and the cantilever, and next to it sat a blank sheet of vellum with a title block in the lower right corner. Empty. Waiting.
I stood up and walked over to the table. Finn's shirt hung loose around my thighs, and the floor was cool under my bare feet, and I picked up the pencil he'd been using and held it over the blank page.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Starting."
I wrote my name in the title block. Not Callum's. Not Crestline's. Mine. Holland Hart, in clean block letters, with the date underneath and the project name still blank because I hadn't decided what to call it yet.
Finn came up behind me and looked over my shoulder at the page. He didn't say anything for a long moment. Then he reached past me and picked up a second pencil, and in the space next to my name he wrote his own – not as a partner, not as a claim, just as a note in the margin, small and unobtrusive.
"He tapped the margin beside his name. "For the structural consult. When you need it."
I looked at the page. At my name. At his. At the blank space where the project title would go, and the clean lines of the border, and the morning light that was still coming through the windows, steady and pale and asking nothing of me.
I was not the wife behind the walls anymore. I was not the foundation someone else stood on. I was not the invisible hand that kept the whole thing running while someone else took the applause.
I was the architect.