Chapter 24 TESSA
Tessa
I wake up alone, which means he’s in the gym again.
The clock says five-thirty. I lie there in the gray light and listen to him work—plates going on, plates coming off, that grunt he’d deny making.
In June he couldn’t cross a room without the cane.
Now he’s up before dawn, under a bar, hurting himself on purpose, and I don’t go down there and stop him, because I’ve decided to call it healing instead of stubbornness.
Most mornings I even believe it.
He comes up from the gym at six-thirty, sweat still on him, a towel around his neck and a looseness in his shoulders that never used to be there. He leans over the bed and kisses the top of my head.
“You’re awake.”
“Somebody was clanging weights around under the bedroom at five-thirty.” I catch the towel and tug him down an inch. “You know most people ease back into things.”
“Two months of easing. I’m done easing.” He says it into my hair, kisses me once more, and heads for the shower.
Going to Boston is his idea, and I say yes before he’s finished asking.
“Come with me,” he says over coffee. “One day. Dinner somewhere with cloth napkins, and you get to watch me remind everyone in that room whose company they’re sitting in.”
“I have nothing to wear to a place like that. I packed for a nursing job, Ronan. It’s scrubs, leggings, and one sundress.”
“Wear the sundress.”
“Everyone in that building owns clothes I’d be afraid to sit down in.”
He looks at me over his coffee. “Tessa.”
Just my name. Low and final.
I stop.
“You could walk into that building in your scrubs and nobody would say a word.” He sets his cup down. “You’re walking in with me. Let them look.”
I forget what I was arguing about.
“The sundress,” he says. “Bring your sweater. You’ll be cold in there.”
He can make wear the sundress sound like something I want to be told.
“Fine.”
His mouth twitches.
“Good.”
* * *
The drive down takes two and a half hours, and he works the whole way, phone against his ear, Petra’s name and Frank’s name and a Katie he actually says thank you to.
It’s the voice he only uses for Boston, the one I’ve caught pieces of through closed doors.
Clipped. Certain. Giving instructions like they’ve already been carried out.
And I start to smile, because I know this man.
The short answers. The silences that make people nervous.
The complete refusal to soften anything for anyone’s comfort.
I’ve spent all summer calling it grumpy and learning to tease it out of him.
These people don’t get to tease him. On them it isn’t grumpy. On them it’s a loaded gun.
The Synapse building is glass and it goes up forever, and I cross the marble lobby in my cotton sundress and my one good sweater, feeling exactly as underdressed as I am. His hand stays at the small of my back the whole way.
In the elevator, it’s just us. Mirrored walls, brass rail, the numbers climbing.
I’ve spent weeks peeling this man out of cotton T-shirts, and I can hardly reconcile him with the one standing beside me now.
Charcoal suit, tailored to fit the shoulders and arms I’ve had my hands on every day since June.
A deep blue tie, because today is too big for an open collar.
Dark hair actually combed, jaw scruff trimmed neat but never taken all the way down, because bare would show the scar and he’d never say so out loud.
It’s the only thing on him that doesn’t look assembled for a boardroom. It’s my favorite part.
No cane. He left it in the car, over my objection, because he was not walking into this building leaning on anything, and I took one look at his face and knew better than to push.
He catches me staring in the mirror.
“You’re doing it again.”
“You’re very distracting in a suit. It’s a problem. I’d like it on the record.”
“Keep looking at me like that.” His mouth comes close to my ear, one hand sliding down to the curve of my ass and pulling me in against him. “I’ll clear the top floor and have you against that glass.”
Heat floods up my neck. The elevator dings.
He steps back, calm as anything, and I’m the one left flushed and rattled and trying to remember how to stand.
The doors open. He straightens, and he isn’t mine anymore.
The top floor is all glass and quiet money, and it’s full of people, and the temperature of the room changes the instant they see him. People straighten. Somebody says “He’s here” into a phone and hangs up.
A woman with a tablet reaches us first, early thirties and pretty, warm where everyone else has gone stiff.
Pretty enough that a younger, greener version of me might have spiraled over her.
But I’m watching Ronan, and Ronan doesn’t so much as register her face, because his hand hasn’t left my back since the elevator and I’m the only thing in this whole building he’s actually looking at.
“Mr. Sinclair.” She’s beaming. “It’s so good to have you back where you belong.” Her eyes go to me, bright and frankly curious, and stay there a second too long to be polite.
He doesn’t explain me to the room. There are a hundred and fifty people on this floor and not one of them gets a second of his attention. But the woman gets his hand settling more firmly against my back, and a look I’ve only ever seen him give Sadie.
“Katie. This is Tessa.” A pause, just for her. “She’s the reason I’m walking in here at all.”
Katie’s whole face goes soft. “Well,” she says to me, taking my hand in both of hers, “then I’ve been wanting to meet you for weeks.”
And that’s the only introduction I get, and the only one he offers.
Everyone else on that floor can wonder. I watch it dawn on the nearest few faces anyway—he brought someone, he never brings anyone—and my face goes hot, and Ronan, who could not possibly care less what any of them think, is already moving.
I sit in a glass alcove with a cup I don’t drink and watch, through a wall of windows, a man run a room full of people who are afraid of him.
I can’t hear a word. I don’t need to. I can read it on the other side of the table—leaning back, then nodding, then signing.
Ronan doesn’t stand the whole time. He doesn’t have to.
He tilts his head and taps one finger on the table and a lawyer two seats down goes pale, and I press my cold coffee to my mouth so nobody sees me smiling.
I have loved the man in the sweatpants for weeks.
I did not expect to fall for this one too, in an afternoon, through a pane of glass.
The door opens at ninety minutes. The other side files out shaking hands, and something in the set of their shoulders tells me exactly who won. Frank is grinning.
Petra reaches me first, sharp suit and sharper eyes, and looks me over with open curiosity and says only, “So you’re the reason he’s answering emails at five a.m. again,” and moves off before I can decide whether that’s a compliment.
Ronan comes out last. Three more hands before he’s clear of them, and he’s still wearing all of it. The height, the stillness, the terrifying quiet.
Then he finds me across the room.
He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t soften. He looks at me exactly the way he looked at that table an hour ago, and everything in me goes hot and still at the same time.
He crosses the floor. In front of Petra, in front of Frank, in front of the entire top floor of Synapse, he holds out his hand, and I take it.
He doesn’t look away from me.
“Everyone out.” A pause. “Go home, we closed it.”
He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t have to. A laptop snaps shut somewhere behind me. Petra takes one long look at him, then at me, then decides not to ask, and steers Frank toward the elevator. The floor empties. Faster than I would have believed. Nobody looks at me twice.
The last elevator closes and it’s a hundred and fifty empty desks and us.
My stomach drops.
Oh my God.
He actually cleared the floor.
I have never once been afraid of this man.
Standing there with that suit and that look, I finally understand why everyone else is. And I have never wanted him more in my life.
“Come here.”
Just that. The same voice he used on a room of lawyers an hour ago.
I go.
He doesn’t kiss me. He slides the straps of my sundress off my shoulders without once looking away from my face.
The dress goes down and lands around my ankles.
His thumbs hook into my underwear and draw them down, and I step out of them because there is nothing else to do.
And that’s it. I’m standing on the top floor of Synapse in a pair of flat sandals and nothing else, and he still hasn’t taken off his jacket.
Every wall on this floor is glass. So is the building across the street.
“Ronan.” My arms come up on their own.
“No.” He catches both wrists, easy, and puts them back at my sides. “Sixty floors up. Nobody out there is looking.” His eyes go all the way down me and back. “I do.”
And that’s all it takes, apparently. Whatever I was going to say about windows goes out of my head, and what’s left is being looked at on an empty floor by a man in a charcoal suit who hasn’t even loosened his tie.
He walks me to the glass wall of the alcove and puts my back against it.
I know this pane. I sat behind it all afternoon with a coffee I never drank, watching him take that table apart without lifting his voice, and somewhere in there I stopped being able to breathe right.
The glass is cool against my bare skin. He works his belt open one-handed, and it’s the only thing on him that changes.
“You sat in my building all day in that dress.”
“You told me to wear it.”
“I did.” His fingers find me, and I’m embarrassingly ready—since about the second he said everyone out, if I’m honest—and he makes a low sound against my mouth. “You’ve been like this a while.”
It isn’t a question. I answer it anyway. “Since the elevator.”
“I know.” His mouth drags along my jaw. “I closed that deal thinking about fucking you against this glass.”
He doesn’t make me wait after that, because we are not doing slow. Not up here. Not with a table booked for eight.
Then his hands are under me and I’m off the floor, my spine to the glass, and he’s inside me before I’ve finished making whatever sound that was.
I hold onto his shoulders. He isn’t gentle and I don’t want him to be. An hour ago I sat on the other side of this glass thinking nobody could see me. Now there’s nothing holding me up but him.
“Eyes on me.”
I open them. The suit, the tie, that jaw, the scar—nothing on him disarranged at all except his breathing, and his eyes, and his eyes are wrecked.
“Look where you are now.”
He moves in me slow and deep, every stroke pinning me a little harder to the glass, and I feel it start to gather low and tight, that heavy pull that means I’m close, climbing with every roll of his hips until I can’t hold his eyes and can’t look away either.
“Come, Tessa.” Against my mouth, low. “Now.”
And just like that, I come with the glass warm now against my back and his name in my mouth, and he follows me a stroke later, his forehead against mine and his arms locked under me.
Two months ago I got this man standing with a gait belt.
After, he holds me until my legs work again.
Then he finds the sundress on somebody’s desk and puts me back into it himself, which takes considerably longer than it needs to.
My underwear turns up two rows over. He picks them up, and instead of handing them back he folds them into his jacket pocket with a grin that should be illegal.
He gives me my sweater. By the time the elevator arrives he’s Ronan Sinclair again—cuffs straight, nothing on his face at all.
Then the doors close, and the whole apparatus of him falls away all at once, and he’s a man leaning on a brass rail looking at me.
“Hungry?”
“Starving.”
“Good.” He takes my hand. “Let’s go be a couple somewhere expensive.”
* * *
The dinner is perfect. Cloth napkins, exactly as promised, and a waiter who calls him Mr. Sinclair, and Ronan across the table with his tie still perfect and his eyes not remotely on the menu.
“You’re very quiet,” he says.
“I’m sitting in a nice restaurant with no underwear on because of you. I’m concentrating.”
His mouth does something dangerous. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t have to—he just looks, all through dinner, like a man biding his time.
We drive back north into the dark, and somewhere past the New Hampshire line I notice him shift his right leg. Then again. His hand goes down and presses along the calf, absent, and comes back up.
“Leg okay?”
“I went heavier than I should have this week.” He doesn’t look over. “It’s complaining.”
The nurse in me is already moving. “Calf pain, after sitting that long? Let me feel it.” I reach across the console, hand going for his leg.
He catches my wrist before I get there, brings it to his mouth, kisses my knuckles. “It’s a sore muscle. I’m fine, I promise. I’ll ice it when we’re home.” He’s smiling, the most relaxed I’ve ever seen him. “Stop working. You’re off the clock.”
And that’s the part I’ll go over later, hating myself for: I let him talk me out of it.
Because he has been overtraining. Because he’s smiling.
Because I want, so badly, to just be the woman he held his hand out to today, and not the one who takes a pulse in the dark.
So I fold my hand back into his and I let it go.
* * *
We barely make it inside.
It’s been building since the last stretch of highway, his hand high on my thigh the whole dark drive, my head tipped against the window pretending I could still think.
By the time he pulls through the gate neither of us is pretending.
His mouth is on mine before the door’s even shut, mine just as bad.
Both of us past patience, his hands hard at my hips, walking me back into the wall.
He kisses me like he’s trying to outrun something, and I kiss him back and let him, because I want him and because I’ve spent all day watching every version of this man and I want every one of them at once.
“Bedroom,” he says against my mouth, rough.
We make it as far as the stairs.
He gets me down onto the steps and shoves the sundress up, and there’s nothing under it to deal with because my underwear is still in his pocket, and he takes me right there, fast and hard and frantic, his name and mine tangled together.
Too far gone for the bed. And if there’s something underneath it—a man burning through fuel he shouldn’t be spending—I don’t read it, because his hands are on me and the whole drive back has been leading here.
After, he holds me too tight and his heart takes a long time to come down, longer than it should, and I lie against his chest counting it out of habit and then making myself stop.
He’s asleep before I am. I feel his breathing change, and I stay awake a while in the dark with my hand over the scar on his ribs, happy enough that it scares me, listening to him breathe.
His leg twitches once in his sleep. He makes a small sound and doesn’t wake.
I tell myself it’s nothing, and I believe that too.