Chapter 35 TESSA #2
The words hit him. I watch it happen—his breath going ragged, his eyes flaring—and his hand rewards me for them, deeper, harder, and everything low in my body pulls tight all at once.
“Ronan—I’m going to—”
“Not yet.” He takes his hand away and I whimper at the loss of it, actually whimper, and he gets a better grip under me instead, and he carries me up the stairs, sure and strong with my whole weight wrapped around him and his mouth on my neck.
He lays me on the bed and strips the last wet things off me, off himself, and then he’s above me in the gray storm light, all of him, the shoulders and the scar and every ounce of his attention on me.
My hands reach for him and go gentle without asking me first—nurse’s hands, checking, careful of his heart, careful of the leg—and he catches both my wrists in one hand and presses them into the pillow above my head.
“You’re off the clock, Tessa.” His mouth comes down to hover over mine. “Careful’s over.”
And then there is nothing careful anywhere in this room.
“Look at me,” he says.
I look at him. Rain still in his hair, that beautiful ruined jaw, everything he is focused down to this one point where our bodies meet, and then he pushes into me, one long deep claim, and we both stop breathing.
“Don’t you ever,” he says against my mouth, moving now, “do that to me again. Don’t you ever go where I can’t follow.”
“Never.” My nails are in his shoulders. “Never, I swear—”
And then he moves—flips me over onto my hands and knees in one strong, easy motion, drags my hips back to him, and drives into me from behind, so deep and so good that I cry out into the pillow, and there is nothing in the sound but pleasure. His chest comes down over my back, his mouth at my ear.
“Only me.” He drives the words into me with his body. “Nobody else. Ever. Say it.”
“Only you—only you—” I’m not saying it anymore, I’m moaning it, breathless, rocked forward with every slam of his hips, full of him, surrounded by him, and the pressure is already building all over again, impossibly, so soon, his name spilling out of me louder and louder, pure ecstasy, past anything the storm outside can cover.
He drives into me deep and relentless, those skilled hands everywhere at once, his body remembering every single thing it ever learned about mine and using all of it, and I push back and match him, and somewhere in it the fury burns down into something that has only ever been love.
He turns me over before the end, because he wants my face—and when I break it’s with my eyes on his, and he follows me a stroke later and says my name into my neck like the last word of a long argument.
And then there’s just the two of us, and the rain, and his heartbeat everywhere I’m touching him.
We lie tangled in the wreck of the sheets while our breathing comes back, his fingers trailing over my bare back, and after a while he tips my chin up so he can see my face.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t look at you this morning,” he says quietly. “If I’d looked at you, I’d have been out of that chair.”
“Don’t apologize to me. I knew exactly why you couldn’t.”
“Thank you.” It comes out in a whisper. “For Whitaker. For the hearing. For walking through that door when you had every reason to let me sit there alone.” My hand finds his heart. “You saved my career today—”
“Don’t.” His hand comes up over mine. “Not for that. You’d have to start thanking me for breathing next.”
“I’m not finished, Ronan.” Because he isn’t getting out of this. “You saved me.”
He’s quiet for a while.
“They read August twenty-seventh into the record today,” he says.
He knows. Or he’s one question away from it.
His hand doesn’t stop moving. “I’ve had all day to work out where you were that morning.”
I wait, because I know what’s coming and I can’t make myself go first.
“Were you with me?”
I make myself look at him when I say it.
“Yes.”
His hand stops.
“I didn’t go. They marked it as a failure to appear.” My voice doesn’t hold all the way through it. “I’d make the same choice tomorrow.”
His arm comes tighter around me, and when he speaks his voice isn’t steady.
“Listen to me. You never carry it alone again. Not a hearing. Not a bad shift. Not a broken faucet. Nothing, ever, as long as you live. That’s the deal now.”
“Okay,” I whisper.
“Okay.” He kisses my forehead and holds his mouth there, one quiet second, and I fall asleep with the rain on the glass and his arms all the way around me.
* * *
I wake in the dark and reach for him.
My hand goes out across the sheets expecting cold, because that’s what it’s found every night for a week.
He’s there. Warm, breathing slow and even, one hand lying open on my side of the bed, and when my fingers slip into it, it closes around them.
The storm has worn itself down to a soft rain against the glass. The clock says 2:36 a.m.
I should let him sleep.
I don’t. I can’t. I slide across the space between us and burrow into him—chest to his ribs, my face into the warm curve of his neck.
He smells like rain and sleep and him, and tucked against all that warm solid muscle, those thick arms, I feel small in the best possible way.
And it still isn’t enough. A week of missing him is awake in me all at once, every night of that awful narrow apartment bed, and I press my lips to his throat, to his jaw, to the scar, and my hand flattens over his heart just to feel it keep going.
His arm comes around me first. His hand strokes down my side, over my hip, and rubs, warm and easy, over the curve of me. My whole body is pressed to him with no space left anywhere. He turns his head and finds my eyes in the dark.
“I need you to know something.” My hand is flat over his heart.
He waits.
“Do you know why it was you, Ronan? Why I waited twenty-five years?”
His hand goes still on my hip. “I’ve wondered.”
There’s only the rain against the glass while I find where to start.
“I wasn’t waiting for the right man. I was guarding.” I have to stop and start again. “I’ve been the one who carries since I was fourteen. Our mother worked two jobs, I raised my brothers, and there was never anybody on the other side of it. So I didn’t hand anyone anything. Not one piece of me.”
“Tessa.” It’s barely more than a breath.
“I didn’t just give you my first time, Ronan. I gave you my first everything. I’m yours. Completely.”
His eyes move over my face in the rain-light, back and forth, and I watch this man who is never at a loss come undone by one sentence. When his hand lifts to my cheek, it isn’t quite steady.
Then he kisses me, his lips still soft from sleep, his hand sliding from my cheek into my hair to cradle the back of my head. He gathers me up and rolls me gently beneath him, settling his weight over me like a blanket.
He’s slow, unbearably slow, kissing me the whole time—my mouth, my eyelids, my mouth again—and when he finally slides into me there is nowhere I end and he begins.
He stays close, his lips brushing mine with every slow stroke, and we’re breathing each other more than kissing, trading the same air back and forth in the dark.
“Stay just like this,” I whisper.
“I’m not going anywhere. Not tonight. Not ever.”
When I come apart this time it moves through me in long waves while he watches me and murmurs that he loves me, and he follows me down moments later with my name on his lips and his forehead pressed to mine.
He stays there a while. Then he shifts off me without letting go, pulling me with him, tucking me back into him, our breathing settling together in the dark.
“Sleep,” he murmurs against my hair. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
And for the first time in my whole life, I hand somebody the weight of me, all of it, every last pound, and let him carry it into the morning.