No one brings it up again. Not to my face.
Camille avoids me unless she has to speak to me. Ethan avoids me too, though I catch him looking twice, like he still can’t decide whether he’s angry, embarrassed, or just irritated that the evening stopped bending around him.
Viktor says nothing more to me.
That almost makes it worse.
I can feel him in the room even when I’m not looking. A shift in the air. A weight behind me. The sense of being watched by someone who doesn’t waste his attention. Once, when I’m speaking quietly to Nadine near the service doors, I glance up and find him across the room, one hand around a glass, already looking at me.
He doesn’t look away.
Neither do I.
Not quickly enough.
By the time the rehearsal dinner finally winds down, my face aches from holding it together. I make it upstairs on instinct.Out of my shoes, out of my coat, out of the dress that feels like it’s been clinging to my nerves all night. I wash my face, brush my teeth, take my vitamins, sit on the edge of the bed in the dark little room and breathe through the ache in my back and the low, heavy pressure of the baby shifting inside me.
I should be too tired to feel anything except relief. Instead, my whole body still feels lit from the inside.
I switch off the lamp and slide under the blankets. The sheets are cool. The room is quiet. Rain taps softly at the window.
I tell myself not to think about the terrace. About his voice. About the way he looked at me after making Ethan apologize. I tell myself a lot of things.
Sleep comes anyway. And with it, him.
I’m back in that open stone passage, only it’s darker now, quieter, the lantern light low and gold against the walls. The air is cold, but he’s standing close enough that I don’t feel any of it.
“Sienna,” he says.
Just my name.
His hand comes up to my face, large and warm, thumb brushing my cheek with a gentleness that undoes me more quickly than roughness ever could. I lean into it before I can help myself.
Then his mouth is on mine.
Slow at first. Deep. Thorough. Like he’s been thinking about this longer than he wants to admit and now that he has me, he means to take his time. I make a sound into his mouth and feel him smile against me, one hand sliding around my waist, the other settling low on my back to hold me there.
I kiss him harder. I can’t help it.
He tastes like whiskey and heat and something dark that seems to belong only to him. His mouth is hungry, but never rushed. He knows exactly how to kiss a woman until she forgets every good reason she has to stop.
“Tell me no,” he murmurs against my lips.
I shake my head.
He kisses me again, deeper this time, until my knees go weak and I’m clinging to his shoulders just to stay upright. His hands move over me with slow certainty, down my sides, over my hips, then back up to cup my breasts through the thin fabric between us.
I gasp when his thumbs brush over my nipples, already hard, and my whole body goes tight.
“Sensitive,” he says softly.
“Viktor.” My voice sounds wrecked already.
He kisses the corner of my mouth, then my jaw, then the side of my throat. Every touch is deliberate. Every breath he lets out against my skin makes me shiver.
His hand slides down between us. I know what he’s about to do before he does it, and I’m already wet enough in the dream that the thought alone makes my thighs press together.
He notices that too.