Chapter 13
CECILIA
I'd been kissed by boys before.
I understood that now in a way I hadn't the night before, because there was absolutely no comparison between the fumbling attempts of boys who didn't know what they were doing and waking up in the warm dark with Constantine's mouth on my neck and his hands moving over my body like he'd been studying me and intended to use everything he'd learned.
I hadn't even fully surfaced from sleep before my body was already ahead of me, already responding to his touch with a certainty that bypassed thinking entirely.
His fingers slid between my thighs and touched me where the only person to go before was me, and I made a sound into the pillow that I had no interest in managing.
"Good morning, amore." His voice was low and rough with sleep against my ear, and I felt it everywhere.
"Is it morning?" I managed.
"Just." He pressed his mouth to the curve of my shoulder. "Go back to sleep if you want."
"Don't you dare stop," I said, and felt him laugh against my skin.
He didn't stop.
"You're beautiful," he said as he moved down my body, unhurried, like a man with no competing interests in the world.
He settled between my thighs and looked up at me once before he lowered his head and his tongue found my clit and the touch on that sensitive spot made me buck my hips hard, which only made him press harder, and I gripped the sheets with both hands and stopped pretending I had any dignity left to protect.
It was getting genuinely difficult to breathe when he slid a finger into me, and then a second, and moved them in a way that made my vision go white at the edges.
"Con, please." I couldn't manage his whole name.
I didn't have the brain cells for it. Why had anyone ever told me this was something to be afraid of?
Was it wrong to feel this extraordinary?
The thought dissolved immediately because he crooked his fingers and found a place inside me that made coherent thought completely impossible.
My breaths were shallow and the familiar buildup of my climax was washing over me in waves and I stopped fighting it, stopped managing it, just let it come.
Constantine moved his fingers against that spot and I gave into the moment with total surrender, my body spasming around him while I ran my hands through his dark hair and groaned his name, and another wave exploded through me before the first one had finished.
He slid up my body while I was still shaking, keeping his fingers moving slowly, drawing out every last tremor. "That's it, baby. Are you ready for more?"
"Yes," I said, without any hesitation whatsoever.
He looked at me with dark eyes and a smile that was doing things to me that had nothing to do with his hands. "Have you ever tasted yourself, CeCe?"
I shook my head because finding the word no required resources I didn't currently have, and then he drew his fingers away and pressed them gently against my lips and I opened my mouth and he slid them in and I tasted myself on his fingers and heard him make a low sound deep in his chest that told me the effect was entirely mutual.
"Good, isn't it?" I didn't need to open my eyes to know he was smiling. I could hear it.
He pulled his hand away and shifted on the bed. "Open your eyes."
I did, and looked down at him, and my entire nervous system made a collective decision that last night had not been nearly enough.
He watched my face with the focused attention he gave everything and rubbed the crown of his shaft slowly between my legs and I felt my hips tilt toward him of their own accord.
I wanted to touch him. I reached for his chest, the tattoo I'd been meaning to ask about since I first saw it, tracing the lines of it with my fingertips while he watched me do it with an expression that was heat and patience in equal measure.
"Con," I said.
"Yeah."
"I want you." I held his gaze when I said it, the way I'd held his gaze last night when I'd told him the other thing, because this man deserved directness and I was done being afraid of my own wants. "Now. Please."
Something moved across his face that I was going to spend a long time learning to read.
He pressed into me slowly, watching me the whole way, and this time there was no pain, just the extraordinary feeling of being completely filled by him, and I exhaled on a long slow breath and felt him shudder slightly above me at the sound of it.
"God, CeCe," he said against my mouth. "You're going to be the end of me."
"Good," I said, and pulled him down to me.
He moved and I moved with him, and the morning light was beginning to come through the curtains in thin pale lines, and I thought about the fact that yesterday I had woken up in this house as a guest and today I was waking up as the woman who belonged here, and the thought didn't frighten me at all.
It felt like something I had been moving toward without knowing it, like a door I'd been walking toward in the dark and had finally found the handle.
"You're so perfect for me," he mumbled against my mouth.
"We fit like a glove." He grasped my breast and kneaded it in his palm before pulling at my nipple, and my breath caught hard in my throat when he moved his mouth down and captured the tight bud between his teeth with a careful pressure that made my back arch completely off the bed.
This was too much. Yesterday I had been afraid for my life, and today I was in bed with my husband in the growing morning light, and both things were equally true and somehow equally part of the same story.
The reason we'd married hadn't changed. The danger was still real.
But whatever came next, I had had this, and I intended to keep having it, and that felt like the most defiant possible response to everything my father had tried to make of my life.
I was riding the thin line of pleasure and something beyond pleasure when my climax built to a point I couldn't manage anymore.
"Let go, baby," Constantine said, and looked at me with dark eyes and held my gaze, and I did, without reservation, my legs shaking and my body spasming and a sound coming out of me that I had no control over whatsoever.
He followed me over the edge with one last deep thrust, my name in his mouth, his arms holding me like something he intended to keep, and then he was heavy and warm above me and we were both breathing like we'd run somewhere and I felt completely, entirely wrung out in the best possible way.
"Am I dead?" I whispered into the warm skin of his shoulder.
Constantine laughed, and the vibration of it against my chest was almost enough to start the whole thing over.
"If you're dead, so am I." He rolled off me and pulled the blanket up over us and I curled into his side and thought that my father had wanted to make me a weapon and instead had made me someone who knew exactly what she wanted and wasn't afraid to reach for it.
"Con."
"Yeah." Half asleep, his voice low and rough.
I pressed my hand flat against his chest. "I love you." The words came out before I'd decided to say them, which was probably the only way they would have come out at all, and once they were in the air I couldn't take them back and discovered I didn't want to.
The arm around me tightened. He was quiet for a moment and I felt him come back from the edge of sleep, felt the shift in his breathing that meant he was fully present again.
He rolled toward me and looked at me in the pale morning light coming through the curtains, his dark eyes clear and specific, and what was in them was not surprise. It was the expression of a man who had known something for a while and was glad to finally have it confirmed.
"I love you," he said. Simply, completely, like a fact that had been true for longer than today.
I looked at him and thought about Sicily and the airport and the coffee shop and the floor of his office and the kitchen at five thirty in the morning and the library in the lamplight and the ceremony in the candlelit great room and every small specific thing that had built this between us in five days, and I thought that some things didn't need time to be real. They just needed the right two people.
"Good," I said, and kissed him, and felt him smile against my mouth.
Outside Chicago was waking up, gray and cold and indifferent, and inside our room the morning light was coming through the curtains in wider lines now, and somewhere in the house I could hear the distant sound of the kitchen starting up, and I thought that this was what it felt like to be exactly where you were supposed to be.