Desire and something too fast to decipher flash in his eyes, bright as the diamonds at my throat, and the world narrows to the way we are looking at each other while I come apart in his hands.
After, there’s a stunned quiet where we just breathe.
He rests his forehead against mine. I taste chocolate and salt and the dizzy high of being wanted so completely I can’t remember how to be careful.
He kisses me again—soft, almost grateful—then slides me higher on the linen and comes over me, bracing on his forearms, eyes searching my face like he’s waiting for me to close a door. I don’t. I wrap my legs around him and pull him down and the sound he makes, low, wrecked, undoes me all over again.
We move together. The music threads through it; the greenhouse holds us; the ocean keeps its own time beyond the glass. I’m vocal; he coaxes more from me, names I didn’t know for sensation, the past a flicker at the edges: the first time’s laughter and fumbling hands, the rain on the panes, the frantic joy. Now there’s heat and hunger and the sharp, undeniable relief of not pretending anymore. He says the dirtiest, truest things in my ear and I answer in the same language; he guides and I follow; I push and he yields and then takes, and when he tells me to let go, I do, dragging him with me.
When the world rights itself, we’re a tangle of breath and quiet, my fingers in his hair, his mouth on my shoulder, both of us shaking a little in the aftermath.
The candles gutter and the necklace lies like a river of stars against my skin.
I lift a hand to the clasp again, suddenly shy in the wreckage. “I should take this off before I break it.”
“Leave it,” he murmurs without looking, voice gone lazy and frayed.
I hesitate. “It’s beautiful, Vasso. But it’s heavy.”
He lifts his head, meets my eyes, and smiles, soft and unguarded. “That’s the point.” Then, almost under his breath, careless and fatal. “Signs of my possession look good on you.”
It’s a joke, a boast, an old instinct he didn’t bother to polish—and it slices clean.
Something in me goes cold. I feel the old fault line crack, the one that runs from driveway gravel to tonight’s linen. I gather myself, dress, breath and pride, with hands that want to tremble and won’t let themselves.
He sees it, too late. “Naomi?—”
“I should go.” My voice is polite, unfamiliar. “Thank you for dinner.”
“Don’t,” he says, already standing, already reaching. “I didn’t mean?—”
“Signs of possession?” I laugh, and it is not a nice sound. “How romantic.”
“Naomi.”
I step off the table on legs that remember how to hold me even when the rest does not. I find my clutch by the door with new, brutal efficiency, and I don’t look back because if I do, I’ll forgive him and I’m not ready to spend forgiveness here.
The greenhouse door is warm when I touch it; the night beyond is cool and clean.
“Naomi, wait,” he says, the command under the plea, because Vasso Dillinger, even as the lowly housekeeper’s son was born alpha and would remain so until he took his last breath.
But I don’t stop.
I open the door and step into the dark.
10
VASSO
She runs.
Not in the conventional sense, with panic or agitation. Even at her most desperate, Naomi has never fled like prey at risk of being cornered.
She strides off with that clipped, measured, furiousgracethat turns corridors into catwalks and doors into movie frames.
The greenhouse air is still warm on my skin when the night cuts across my face. I follow the scent of jasmine and her, past the gallery, up the floating stairs and along the cedar hall that still lingers with ghosts of arrogant Kanes, to the guest wing.
Her door is open.
