She looks around with those sharp eyes that miss nothing, and I watch her register the absence. The gun on the nightstand. She sees it and doesn't flinch. After the warehouse, after the blood behind my ear, the Beretta is just another fact about me she's already accepted.
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Because of what you saw? Some kind of —"
"I'm here because I want to be here. Don't make me say it again."
The words hit me the way bullets never have. Center mass. No armor. Straight through. I look at this woman standing in my bedroom in silk and bare feet. She walked thirty feet of dark hallway. She knocked on a door I told her was hers to open and mine to wait behind. She's not here out of obligation or adrenaline or some complicated reaction to watching me kill a man. She's here because she decided. The way she decides everything. Eyes open and her spine straight and a certainty thatmakes me feel like I've never been certain about anything in my life.
She's the bravest person I've ever met. And I've met men who walked into gunfire.
I cross to her. Slowly. Giving her time, giving her space, giving her every chance to change her mind. She doesn't move. Doesn't step back.
My hand cups her face. My palm against her jaw, my thumb on her cheekbone. The calluses on my skin catch against the softness of hers and I think about what these hands have done, today and this week and this lifetime, and the fact that she's letting them touch her face. These hands.
"I've thought about this." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Rougher. Lower. Stripped of every layer of control I've spent thirty-two years building. "Every night since you moved in."
"So have I."
My control breaks.
Chapter 16
Siobhan
* * *
He kisses me, and fourteen nights of waiting end.
Not gentle, like the wedding. That kiss was a question. Not frantic, like the desk. That kiss was a fight. This one is deep and consuming and unhurried, two weeks of restraint dissolving into heat, and the relief of it is so total that my knees almost give. He catches me. Of course, he catches me. One arm around my waist, the other hand still cradling my face, and I melt into him the way I've wanted to since the dark kitchen, since the zipper, since the first morning he made me coffee and I knew I was in trouble.
His mouth moves against mine, and I taste him. Clean. Warm. The ghost of scotch. My hands find his chest. Bare skin, warm skin. His heart is hammering under my palm, and this time I'm not pressing my hand there because he grabbed my wrist and placed it. I'm choosing to feel this. The steady rhythm of a man who controls everything is going unsteady because of me.
His fingers find the straps of my nightgown.
He pauses.
Not a hesitation. A question asked with his eyes, not his voice, the way he's asked at every threshold since the wedding night. The nightgown straps, the altar kiss, the open door. Always giving me the exit. Always letting me walk through or walk away.
I nod.
He slides the straps down. One shoulder, then the other. The ivory silk slips off my body and pools at my feet, and the cool air hits my bare skin and I'm naked in front of him, completely, in his bedroom, in the room where no woman has ever stood.
The sound he makes is low and wounded, dragged out of his chest involuntarily. "Christ."
He's looking at me. Not the way men usually look. Not appraising, not performing hunger for my benefit. He's looking the way he looks at everything that matters to him: with precision. With total attention. His eyes trace the freckles across my shoulders that even I forget are there. The curve of my waist. The place where my hip meets my thigh. He's building an inventory, the way he's been building one for two weeks. The sweater, the coffee, the bare feet, the collarbone. Except now the inventory is complete and his eyes are dark, and his breath has gone ragged and the man who catalogs everything has run out of categories for what he's seeing.
I don't cover myself. Don't shift. I let him look. I chose to be here, I chose the silk, I chose to wear nothing beneath it. The permission to see me is an act of will, not surrender.
Then I reach for him.
My hands find the waistband of his pajama pants and I push them down. He inhales sharply. A sound I've never heard from this man who controls his breathing the way he controls his empire. I wrap my hand around him. Hard. Hot. The weight of him in my palm makes heat clench low in my stomach, and thesound he makes when I tighten my grip is broken and desperate andmine.
I'm claiming him. The way he said mine in his office, the way I said it back in the hallway of my own head. This is the physical contract. My hand on him. His breath caught. His forehead dropping to mine because the sensation is too much, and he needs to anchor himself somewhere.
My other hand finds his ribs.