By some miracle, as the door opened up into the still bedroom, it didn’t creak. As it neared the wall, the door’s momentum slowed and it halted, resting just inches away from the wall without making a single noise. Now that Kilian’s bedroom door was open, Grace knew there was no turning back—she wouldn’t allow someone as selfish and manipulative as Kilian to come in between her and her destiny. She was going to return the book to her father whether he wanted to stand in her way or not. Grace needed to make this trip alone, she told herself as she slowly waded across the wooden floor towards the table at the side of Kilian’s bed. As she crossed the room and made her way silently to the side of his bed, Grace looked down at his sleeping face. He was still very much asleep, pulling in large mouthfuls of air before blowing them out with a grumbling noise that Grace could feel reverberating through the wood boards beneath her feet. His dark hair was strewn about, jutting out in various directions and stuck to the surfaces of his pillows by static electricity. His bare chest was fully visible with the navy sheet draped around his waist as if he had worn a partially-torn toga to bed last night. His tattoo rose and fell with his even breathing, swelling the size of the iron structure until it looked as though it had caught a sizeable wind like a ship on the open water.
Staring down at his sleeping face, she felt conflicted. He looked sort of sweet, she mused, a stark contrast to the sex appeal from the night before. His face was relaxed and vulnerable in this state, and his slender cheek looked as though it had sunken into his mouth. With each long breath out, his cheek inflated with a warm gust of air from his slumbering form. Laying on his side, Kilian’s lips folded in on themselves, forming an open triangle shape that released the air from his lungs. Luckily, the sun still had a long way to go to shed its blanket of light over the sleeping man.
Grace’s eyes tracked the golden streams that had pulled her out of her own sleep, relieved to find them on the far edges of his room. Turning her attention back to Kilian, the events from last night replayed in Grace’s mind—the feeling of his warm hand on the small of her back, his hot breath on her lips—a distraction, she tossed the memories aside mentally. She’d allowed him to have too much power in this situation and the longer he held onto the piece of the mystery that she really needed, the more power he sought to gain. The wink had been the final straw for Grace, feeling a sharp stab of irritation in her mind as she replayed the moment of intimacy that had almost transpired between them last night.
Reliving the moment that Kilian had pulled away from her and left her in a state of arousal and confusion for the remainder of the night, Grace gritted her teeth.
Her gaze moved from Kilian to his nightstand. Like the other surfaces in his home, it was cluttered with a variety of things—old papers, a security badge for a building Grace was certain that his family owned and operated out of, and an assortment of candy wrappers. Having searched the surface of Kilian’s nightstand with her eyes first, Grace lifted up the larger pieces of paper to make sure he had tried to obscure the map in plain sight. Moving as silently as she could manage, Grace’s eyes turned to look at Kilian as his hand pulled at the sheet around his waist, pulling it up and exposing the meat of his thigh. Cheeks burning, Grace hastily lifted her gaze away from the newest patch of exposed skin. As she lifted her eyes, she found exactly what she’d been looking for. Carefully placed in between the fitted sheet Kilian slept on top of and the pillow that cradled his head, the corner of the folded map peeked out from underneath the pillowcase.
Grace stared at the piece of paper in disbelief. It was inches away from the sleeping cop, from the man who would surely wake when she reached for it.
Just as she was beginning to talk herself out of sneaking the map out of Kilian’s possession and into walking back out into the living room to pretend she hadn’t ever entered his bedroom, she felt a pulling sensation in the center of her chest. An unspoken, voiceless motivation built up inside of Grace as she stood at the edge of the bed, cautiously reaching out her trembling hand for the scrap of paper underneath Kilian’s pillow. She moved slowly, afraid that even the most minor disturbance in the air around his face would alert him to her presence. She pinched the corner of the map in between her thumb and pointer finger, clamping her fingers down on the paper until the joints in her fingers turned a ghastly, bone-like white.
Watching as the folded piece of paper gently and easily slid out from underneath his pillow, Grace struggled to keep her breathing even. If she moved too quickly here, she had no doubt in her mind that Kilian would catch her in the act and refuse to work with her after that—she tried to ignore the part of her brain that conjured up the image of Kilian making a snarky remark about how they needed to trust each other in order to work together, especially on the mission of such importance to both of them. She’d rather keel over now than give Kilian another excuse to give her any more hell—he’d done and said enough throughout the years that they’d been acquainted. Even before her father had confided in her, taking the time to detail the long-lasting bad blood between the Kelly and Walsh families, leading back to when they referred to themselves as clans, back when the world was less civilized than now. Despite the strange fluttering sensation Grace felt in the center of her chest when she looked upon Kilian’s face now, she knew that if she wanted to return to her father with the book, she needed to do it without Kilian around. She wasn’t sure that her father would even accept the token of her loyalty with the Kelly boy present, especially after expressing her distaste for Kilian in particular. At least Rory’s other sons had the decency to stay silent when they happened to be in the same room.
Grace let out a small, soundless breath when she pulled the final piece of the map from underneath the dark blue pillowcase.
Before she could move to turn around, Kilian’s hand clamped around her wrist with a relentless strength, forcing a gasp from Grace’s lungs. She only had time to meet Kilian’s eyes—they were an intensely pale blue this early in the morning and lined with an unbridled annoyance that startled her—before he pulled her towards him. Tumbling over the edge of his bed, Grace landed on her side as Kilian’s other arm wrapped around her. Her body rolled, tucking until he was straddling her like before. In a brief flash of his pale body, shining brilliantly against the dark color of his bedding, Grace caught a brief glimpse of his naked body. His muscles rippled as he moved on top of her, stretching out the lean tendons of his torso.
“It’s me!” Grace shouted instinctually, hoping that whatever manic craze she’d discovered him in would pass with the sound of her voice.
The dark blanket settled around them, resting on Kilian’s shoulder blades as his other, crawling hand found her free wrist. Looking unphased by her desperate call for freedom, Kilian locked her wrists against the firm mattress underneath her back.
“What are you doing in my room, Grace?” The low light casted shadows across his features, working in conjunction with his dark hair to obscure his eyes. As he shook her hands against the bed, the map she’d been holding in between her fingers shook loose. It fell onto the bed and rolled down, landing on its side in the midst of her dark hair. Hovering above her, Grace watched as Kilian inhaled slowly, sending another ripple through his muscles. “Nice try, your tricky minx…” he purred, leaning in towards her face to get a better view of the embarrassment that tickled at the tops of her cheeks.
Grace stared back at him, every attempt at an explanation dying on her lips. “Kilian—” she breathed, trying to make out the shapes of his eyes in the sea of dark hair that rained down from his scalp. “I, I wasn’t…”
“You were,” he responded, lowering his body on top of Grace slowly. As he relaxed, his hair revealed his pale eyes, showing the understanding that rested just beyond the smugness that he almost always emitted. “But it’s okay,” Kilian continued, his eyes trailing down the length of her face to her lips. “Since we’re already here…” he whispered, lifting one of his shoulders into a sheepish shrug before leaning in.
Before Grace knew what was happening, Kilian’s lips pressed against hers. For a moment, they were hard against hers—awkward and unsure, even—and then, in the next second, they melted into a warm shape that moved in time with hers. His tongue slid over the length of her bottom lip, sending her pulse racing. The hand that held onto her wrist, the one that had reached for the map and attempted to steal it from him, released it. His palm slid up, moving into her own to lace his fingers with hers, and ground his body against hers.
Her breath caught in her chest, and he pulled away. More than that, she frowned, he hopped off the bed, leaving her breathless and cold. Her eyes followed him, her throat dry and her heart hammering in her chest, working so hard she was certain that it was going to burst. Watching him in a completely shocked state, Grace’s heart sank when he pulled open the door to a safe and tossed the map that she had dropped on top of the safe’s other contents. A passport, a collection of dollar bills, and a black shape that she knew was a gun. He shut the safe without reaching in.
Grace stared at him with wide eyes, caught between the urge to search him for any weapons and the separate, but equally-crucial urge to look away from his naked body. He stood before her, unphased by her presence as he rubbed at the remainder of sleep in the corners of his eyes.
“I need coffee,” he groaned mostly to himself, as if he hadn’t a care in the world for the Walsh girl in his bed.
Grace, brimming with rage at this point, stared at the arrogant man in front of her, how could he grab her and let go like that?
Unable to control the anger that burned in the center of her shoulder blades like a pair of demonic wings, Grace pulled her legs behind her and launched herself at Kilian.
Colliding with Kilian in the center of the room, Grace’s weight pushed him into the wall. His back left a deep impression in the wall just as his eyes opened. His arms wound around Grace, his fingers digging into her sides as his teeth gritted with anger.
12
Catching Grace in his arms,Kilian felt his back slam against the wall.
He gritted his teeth as a low grunt escaped from his mouth and a flicker of pain washed over his face. It tightened his angular features, making them appear harsher. His brow became a dark, rigid line jutting across the center of his forehead and his lips parted from each other to expose the white teeth underneath in an animalistic flash.
When his eyes opened and focused on the woman in his arms, their blue color caught the gentle green hue that reflected off the lake water. For a brief moment, both of Kilian’s eyes narrowed with anger, but in the next moment, his eyes widened with surprise. Kilian watched as a fresh bead of sunlight shone in from the window, illuminating Grace’s face with a strip of blinding light.
Despite the fist that struck hard at his gut, she looked beautiful in the early morning light—a type of beauty he’d seen in her before, and felt an admiration for her determination for her family, and her iron backbone.
The strip of light cut down the left side of her face, over the strong line of her dark brow and the surface of her smooth, pale skin. Her brown eyes were warm, with flecks of golden shimmer floated in her irises like bubbles rising to the water’s surface.
Her cheeks were flushed with a rosy hue, highlighting the dark brown spots that wove up the tops of her cheekbones and along the ridge of her nose. With each blink, her long eyelashes fluttered with a graceful nature that reminded Kilian of a bird’s wings. The anger that had evaporated from Kilian’s system just a moment ago was mirrored in Grace’s eyes. As she returned his gaze, however, Kilian could see the anger fading away in her—her expression melding into something closer to the breathless confusion that he was feeling. Some part of himself told him to snap out of it—out of whatever hold she had over him—but he couldn’t find the mental strength to move through it. He could only watch as her plump lips, which had been pulled into a rage-fueled grimace, fell open in a breathless o-shape.
Grace’s breathing slowed in time with her fists and soon, her breaths became slow and even. The musculature of her upper body rose with her slow breathing, filling in the spaces where her collarbones pushed the straps of her tank top from her skin.
