Chapter 20 TESSA
Tessa
“You’re a virgin.”
I nod.
He looks like a man letting it sink in before he touches it.
For half a breath, I think he’s going to let me go.
He doesn’t.
“Then you’re going to hear me first.” His hand comes up to my jaw and stays there.
“You hand yourself out to every person who needs you. Your brother in a ditch. Your patients. Me. I’ve watched you do it for weeks, and I’d put money on you having done it a great deal longer than that. And you kept one thing back.”
He lets that sit.
“And now you’re standing in my kitchen, and you’re going to hand me that too.”
I can’t speak.
“So here’s how this goes. You change your mind and it ends.
At the door. On the stairs. In my bed with me inside you.
You say stop and I stop. Period. And I will still be downstairs in the morning making your coffee exactly how you take it.
” His thumb moves once. “That’s not a favor, Tessa. That’s the arrangement.”
My eyes sting. “And if I don’t say stop?”
“Then God help me.” His voice drops. “Because I’ve never wanted to be worthy of someone this badly.”
He gets a hand into my hair, fingers spreading at my nape, and he tips my head back and takes my mouth—deeper than before, hungrier than before, like the truth I just gave him changed everything.
Like whatever he just decided, this is the signature.
I’m pressed against him before I realize I’ve leaned in, my hand closing around his wrist—not to stop him, to hold on—and when he finally breaks it, his forehead comes to rest against mine.
“Not here,” he says quietly.
He takes my hand, laces our fingers together, and turns.
The wrong way.
Away from the hall. Away from the fifteen steps to either of our rooms and everything I assumed about the next hour of my life. He walks us toward the front of the house, and stops, and looks up.
The stairs.
“Ronan.”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t—”
“I know.”
He puts his hand on the banister, and I have a choice to make in the next second. Nurse or woman. The nurse knows he’s not cleared for stairs. The nurse ordered the cane that is lying on the kitchen floor behind us. The nurse has a protocol.
The woman puts herself on his bad side and sets her shoulder under his arm, because it is the most natural thing in the world. I’ve walked this man up and down these hallways—I know exactly where I fit against him. I just never knew it was here.
We climb.
The first three steps are strong, almost easy, and I feel the exact stair where they stop being easy.
His arm goes heavier across my shoulders.
His breath changes, quiet and controlled, and the strain comes into him by degrees—his side, his hand, the little hitch he thinks I can’t feel. He doesn’t slow down.
Neither do I.
At the landing he stops.
I don’t count the seconds. I don’t say we can go back down.
I stand there with his hand heavy on my shoulder and the daylight coming through the tall window, and I let him have the pause without turning it into a chart note.
I’ve nursed soldiers and hockey players and marathon runners with pinned ankles, and I have never had a patient as strong as this man, or as stubborn.
Somewhere in this house I stopped being able to tell the difference.
He looks at the remaining stairs. Then at me.
“Why up here?” I ask, because one of us has to say something or I’m going to cry on a staircase. “There’s a perfectly good bed fifteen steps from the coffee maker.”
He climbs the last stairs the same way, and at the top—standing in the upstairs hallway of his own house for the first time since a drunk driver took it away from him—he looks down at me.
“Because I can.”
Dear God. He’s flushed from the climb, breathing harder than he’ll ever admit, one hand braced on the newel post—injured, held together by titanium and spite, and looking at me like that. On one good leg. It shouldn’t be allowed.
He watches it hit me, that smirk arriving at the corner of his mouth. Then he reaches for my hand and leads me down the hall, favoring the leg and not caring that I see, all the way to the end.
He walks me into his bedroom.
The room downstairs is a nice guest room with a hospital’s worth of equipment hidden in tasteful cabinets.
This one is his. Navy and slate, a wall of windows full of open ocean, a big bed facing the water.
Mrs. Vale has kept it ready. It smells like cedar and him, and it has been sitting up here waiting, like the rest of his life.
It’s the middle of the day. Sun everywhere, bright off the water, nowhere to hide.
He crosses to the bed, one hand finding the footboard on the way, and turns to look at me.
“Come here,” he says.
I go.
“Let me.”
I have undressed him a hundred times and never once imagined it turned around.
He gathers the hem of my sweater in both hands and pauses there, knuckles warm against my stomach, until I lift my arms. Then he draws it up and over, and my hair falls loose, and before I’ve finished catching my breath he reaches around me and the clasp gives, and the bra slides down my arms and drops—and his eyes stay on mine.
The whole time. A muscle ticking in his jaw with the effort of it, this man refusing to take one thing before he takes everything.
My hands lift—want, not habit—and he shakes his head once, slow.
He sits me on the edge of his bed, and then Ronan Sinclair lowers himself in front of me onto one knee—the good one, my nurse brain notes, even now, even here—and peels my leggings off one leg at a time, freeing my ankles like they’re something delicate, his mouth following his hands up the inside of my knee until I’ve forgotten how breathing works.
The last of it goes the same way, except this time he looks up at me first, one eyebrow doing the asking, and I lift my hips and answer.
He braces a hand on the mattress and pushes himself up, the forearm under his rolled sleeve going hard with the effort, and draws me to my feet. Then he steps back and looks at me. All of me. Bare in front of a wall of windows, the Atlantic at my back, nothing between his eyes and every inch of me.
And the bravery I had a minute ago runs out all at once. My arms start to rise on their own, wanting to cover, an instinct as old as being fourteen.
“Don’t,” he says. Quiet. And my arms go back down, and standing there in front of him is the bravest thing I have ever done.
On the beach it was firelight and cold, my sweater staying on, his hands learning what his eyes couldn’t. He has never seen all of me at once.
No one has.
He’s seeing me now, and he isn’t hiding one thing that’s happening on his face while he does it.
“Better than the terrace,” he says, low.
I’m shaking, and it isn’t cold, and we both know it.
He closes the space between us and takes my face in both hands, the bad shoulder lifted and ignored, his thumbs moving along my cheekbones, steadying me as I’ve steadied him a hundred times.
“You’re shaking,” he says.
“I know.”
His thumb drags across my bottom lip. “I’ll be careful with you.”
Oh, this man is going to ruin me.
Then he kisses me, and the kitchen was nothing.
He draws me in, and I forget what I was afraid of. There’s cotton against my skin where there should be nothing, and I feel every button.
Then he reaches past me and pulls the covers back.
“Lie down,” he says.
The words should feel strange.
They don’t.
I lie down.
He doesn’t move yet. He just looks at me, taking in the fact that I’m letting him.
Then he moves to the foot of the bed and starts on his buttons.
The first one is fine. The second one costs him—the shoulder catches, and I’m sitting up and reaching before I’ve decided to.
“I’ve got it,” he says. Then, quieter, “Today I do it.”
I know this body. I’ve charted it and dressed it and worked it through protocols.
None of that prepared me for him peeling the shirt off in his own bedroom in full daylight with that look on his face.
The shoulders. The scar at his ribs. The strength coming back into him week by week.
Then his hands go to his belt and finish it, and there is nothing left between us at all.
And I look. Fair is fair.
I’m a trauma nurse. I have seen every version of the human body there is. None of them were Ronan. He’s big. Everywhere, big. And the virgin in me starts doing some very fast math.
He comes down beside me on the navy sheets, settling onto his good side in a pool of afternoon sun. He doesn’t reach for me yet.
“Let me take care of you,” he says, his hand spreading warm over my stomach.
His eyes travel over me, down and back up, missing nothing, until I’m flushed everywhere they’ve been.
Then he comes down and kisses me, slow and deep, and his hand starts to move while he does it—my jaw, my throat, the line of my collarbone, learning me in the light where the fire only let him guess.
When his thumb finds my nipple I gasp into his mouth, and I feel him smile against me, and he does it again.
His mouth follows next, retracing every place his hand just went, and when it closes hot over the same peak he just teased, I arch up off the sheets, my fingers burying themselves in his hair.
He takes his time there—licking, sucking, long torturous pulls that send heat lancing straight down through me—one breast and then the other, patient, thorough, until I’m losing my mind underneath him.
“Beautiful,” he says against my skin. And when I arch again, “Look at you.”
I moan. He’s breathing as hard as I am.
His hand slides down my body, over my stomach, my hip, and finds me wet, swollen, desperate for him—and he groans against my ribs.