Slowly, like a wisp seeping into his psyche and taking shape, he realized this moment wasn’t about the future. It wasn’t about what he and Helia might become or what the next week or year might hold. It was about the past. About reassuring that young boy that peoplecouldbe trusted. Thathecould be trusted to take back what had been stolen from him so long ago.
Helia must have seen the revelation in his eyes, because a flicker of anticipation lit hers, and her fingers curled in his chest. Lowering his head, he brushed his lips against hers. The touch wasn’t tentative, but it was new. A connection he wanted to draw out, absorb, savor.
Again, his lips slid over hers as she lifted her face, inviting him to take and give. She held him close, slipping her hands around his waist, her delicate fingers gripping his sides.
When his tongue touched her lips, she opened. Desire rolled through him, but it didn’t take control. Not at first. As the doubts and distrust and pain of his past slid away with each touch oftheir tongues, it grew stronger, though. Not washing away the past, but quieting it, giving it permission to let go.
Angling his head, he deepened their connection, drawing a sound of need from Helia, triggering a primal need in him. Sliding one hand down the curve of her shoulder, along the arch of her back, it settled on her behind. Shifting his leg between hers, he pulled her body closer, her heat searing his thigh.
“Collin,” she said on a strangled whisper as he pulled away, kissing a line down her throat. He rocked her against him, drawing a gasp as her fingers dug into his sides.
The need to hear her come undone tore through him. To see her expression when she came. To have the scent of her arousal surround him.
Gripping her hip, he shifted his thigh, her short gasps telling him the angle and pressure was exactly what she craved.
She muttered his name again, but he covered her mouth with his. He was a man on a mission now. He knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it. Helia would have her reason to come back to the castle, to him, when her workday was done.
Kissing her hard, tasting her with every touch, he rocked against her, his movements quickening with her breath. With two layers of denim between them, he couldn’t feel the first flutters of her orgasm, but he could hear them. In her staccato breathing, in the tiny, gasping sounds coming from her throat. And he could feel it in the way her back bowed under his hands, in the way she drew away from his kisses, wholly lost in the feeling taking over her body.
When her head fell back and her eyes fluttered closed, her body going taut under his touch, his own responded. For a split second, embarrassment threatened to douse the heat of the moment, but he let that thought flit away. He let it dissolve into nothing, instead choosing to focus on experiencing this pleasure with Helia.
Sensing his arousal through her own haze of desire, she pressed her core to his thigh, shifting her hip against the zipper of his jeans and the raging erection that fought for release—in every sense—on the other side.
“Fuck, Helia,” he muttered, his other hand dropping to her hip to hold her tighter.
“Collin,” she responded on a breathy huff that trailed off to a long, low moan as her body tumbled over the edge. The feel of her, the knowledge of the release he’d given her, brought him to his own on a rumbled groan that matched hers.
Holding each other as their bodies came down, he let his head fall against the door as hers came to rest on his chest. Without thought, he lifted a hand to cradle her there, holding her to his heart as their unsteady breathing slowly evened out.
“That was some kiss,” she muttered, her lips brushing his shirt and drawing a sated chuckle from him.
“Will you come back tonight?” he asked. He wouldn’t presume they’d take things any further than they had, but if she was willing, his mind had already conjured a hundred and one ways to worship her.
“Will you let me touch you? Taste you?”
An obvious answer for most men, but they both knew that in this, he wasn’t most men. Still, the thought of her doing to him even a tiny percentage of the things he wanted to do to her had his body coming back to life.
“If that’s what you want,” he managed to say.
“I definitely want, but do you?”
He pressed his hips against her. “What do you think?”
She chuckled softly, the sound fading to a sated silence as they savored the quiet moment of connection.
Finally, dropping a kiss on her hair, he shifted away, reluctantly separating them. “You need to get to work,” he said.
She ran her hands through her mussed locks. “And you need to change your pants.”
Again, the thought struck him that he should be embarrassed, but the hot look in Helia’s eyes, as if she’d enjoyed sending him over the edge, stopped him. “Thankfully, I have a second pair,” he said with a grin. A load of laundry a small price to pay.
She stared at him for several seconds, then, with a shake of her head, she stepped forward and gave him a big smacking kiss. “I’m going to leavenow. It’s not a good idea for me to be in the room when you change your pants. I might get all sorts of ideas that will keep me here, and we both have things to do today.” And with that, she nudged him away from the door and stepped out. “I’ll tell Gretchen you’ll be down in a few,” she added over her shoulder as she walked away.
He watched her go until she disappeared down the staircase. Tempted as he was to replay the last fifteen minutes again and again in his head, he shut the door, changed quickly, then started down the stairs only to halt a few steps down, turn around, and head to Kendall’s room.
Knowing she probably still wore her headphones, he knocked loudly on the heavy door. A beat passed before she called out for him to come in. He hadn’t set foot in the room since he’d been back but wasn’t surprised to see it neat as a pin. She’d had enough instability in her life that she was no doubt ready to flee at a moment’s notice with everything she owned. He both admired and hated it for her.
“Gretchen Roan is downstairs; she manages Bacco. I didn’t get any indications that she’s involved with Roger and his life in any way, but I wanted to be sure she’s not who you heard the day he died. Would you mind coming downstairs to meet her? Or if you don’t want to meet her, you can listen in from the hallway while she and I talk, and you can text me if her voice is familiar?”
