“Then we’ll be afraid together.” I reached for her hand. She gave it. Her fingers were cold. “I’m not going anywhere, Rose. Not unless you look me in the eye and tell me to go. And even then, I’ll probably argue.”
She laughed. The most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.
“Don’t go,” she whispered.
I pulled her down to me.
The kiss started gentle. Her mouth on mine, soft, careful, like she was checking that I was real. I let her. Let her take whatever she needed, my hands on her waist, thumbs tracing circles against her hips through the fabric of her shirt.
Then her fingers fisted in my shirt and pulled me closer, and the sound she made against my lips was half sob, half demand, and whatever restraint I’d been holding shattered like it had never existed.
We stood without breaking the kiss. She tasted likeRose. The specific, irreplaceable taste of her that I’d been dreaming about in my mother’s house in Scotland while the world called me a villain.
“I missed you,” I said against her mouth. “God, Rose, I missed you so much?—”
“Stop talking.” Her hands were under my shirt, pulling it up, her fingers hot against my ribs. “Stop talking and touch me.”
I kissed her hard, lifting her shirt over her head in the same motion. She fumbled with my buttons, gave up, grabbed the fabric, pulled. A button pinged off the wall. Neither of us cared.
Her bra was simple, black, cotton, nothing designed to seduce, and she was the most stunning thing I’d ever seen. I kissed her collarbone, the hollow of her throat, the space between her breasts where I could feel her pulse racing against my mouth.
“Bed,” she breathed.
I walked her backward until her knees hit the mattress. She sat, then pulled me down on top of her, and the full-body contact, skin against skin, her legs wrapping around my hips, punched a groan out of me.
This wasn’t the slow exploration of a first time. This was reunion. Six weeks of silence and distance and aching compressed into hands and mouths and the desperate need to prove that the other person was still here, still solid, still yours.
“Jeans,” she said. “Off. Now.”
I unzipped hers. She kicked them free. I stripped mine and she pulled me back before I’d even gotten them past my ankles, impatient, greedy, her hands everywhere.
I kissed a path down her body, throat, chest, the soft skin of her inner thigh, taking my time because I needed to relearn her. She made a frustrated sound and tried to pull me back up.
“Graham—”
“I’m memorizing you,” I said against her hip. “Give me a minute.”
“I’ll give you thirty seconds.”
I used them well.
When my mouth found her, she gasped, then moaned, then said my name in a way that made every lonely night in Scotland worth it. I worked her slowly, deliberately, reading every sound, every shift of her hips, every sharp intake of breath. She was louder than the first time, less controlled, like whatever filter she’d been running for six weeks was gone and everything came out unguarded.
I brought her to the edge twice before I let her fall. When she came, her back bowed off the mattress and her hand fisted in the sheets and she said my name like it was the only word she had left.
I kissed her through the aftershocks, then moved back up her body. She was trembling, flushed, her eyes glassy.
“Condom,” she murmured. “Please tell me you have one.”
“Bag. Side pocket.”
“Of course you packed condoms and forgot socks.”
“Priorities.”
She laughed, breathless, giddy, and I rolled off to dig through my bag. Found it. Tore the wrapper. Her hand covered mine.
“Let me,” she said.
