By the time he reaches the kitchen, the medical kit is already on the counter. I found it under the sink on the first proper look around and I've known where it lives ever since.
"Sit," I say.
He sits without arguing, which tells me more than he'd want it to.
The second stool goes up in front of his. I take his right hand in both of mine and look at the damage properly in the warm kitchen light, two knuckles split, a third abraded, the skin broken in the clean way that impact leaves rather than anything with an edge. Nothing broken beneath; I press carefully along the bones and he doesn't flinch, which is its own confirmation.
I start with the antiseptic, working slowly, the cotton pad moving in small deliberate circles. His breath hisses once through his teeth and then he's still.
His eyes are on my hands, and the quality of his attention is something I feel without looking up, the same weight he gives a room he's not sure is clear.
"You didn't look away," he says. His voice is low. The house is quiet around us.
"In the alley."
"No."
"Should I have?"
His thumb moves under my hands, slow, deliberate, staying exactly where it is.
"Most people would," he says.
"Most people haven't spent the last week or so being chased across two continents." I look up at him. The kitchen light is warm and low, his knees bracketing mine, his hand in my lap, the smell of the city still faint on his jacket.
"Fair point," he says, and his thumb moves again.
The set of his jaw shifts. Remy's composure is a fixed thing in most rooms, the operational distance he wears like a second jacket, but it comes down a fraction now, and what's underneath is a man exhausted in the bone-deep way that follows violence, and present in the way that means he came out the other side of it.
Looking at me like I'm the only still point in the room.
The antiseptic goes down.
His uninjured hand finds my waist and draws me in. When his mouth meets mine, all of last night's carefulnot tonight, lateris gone. The thumb tracing my jaw, the promise in his voice, none of it survives contact. This isn't the careful, deliberate man who took his time the first time in this house. His hand tightens at my waist and he kisses me like somethingin him finally stopped calculating, like the alley and the plane and all the hours since have stripped whatever restraint he had left down to nothing. I kiss him back the same way, because I'm done being careful about this too.
We make it as far as the kitchen table before he pulls back, puts me at arm's length, his forehead tipping toward mine.
"We should go upstairs," he says.
"We should," I agree, and stay exactly where I am.
A sound low in his chest. "Isabella."
"Remy."
He answers by sliding his hands to my waist and lifting me off the stool in one clean motion, my feet leaving the floor before I've fully registered the intent. The kitchen light swings past, the counter, the window, the dark garden beyond it. Then his shoulder is under my ribs and the stairs are moving beneath us, his grip certain in the way that leaves no room for negotiation. It suits me entirely.
In his room, with the door closed and New Orleans pressing soft and humid against the old windows, he sets me down and takes his time. Where the kitchen kiss had been urgent and barely contained, this is deliberate. He undoes the zip of the emerald dress the same way he did the first time, slowly, knuckles grazing my spine from nape to waist, and when the emerald silk pools to the floor, he takes a long, measured breath before his hands move again and his own clothes join mine.
A man who is skilled. A man who is paying attention. The difference turns out to be everything.
His mouth finds my throat first, then lower, unhurried in a way that makes me dig my fingers into his shoulders. Every place he puts his lips he follows with teeth, just enough, testing until he finds what makes my breath go uneven, then filing it away and moving on.
By the time he works down my sternum, my stomach, the inside of my hip, I've stopped trying to be quiet about any of it.
When his mouth finally settles between my thighs I stop thinking in language entirely. He reads my body the way he reads a room, cataloguing, adjusting, two fingers curling inside me while his tongue works in slow, deliberate circles that he varies just enough to keep me from bracing against anything predictable. The headboard is in my hands without any conscious decision to put it there.
My hips move against him and he lets me, one forearm pinning me just firmly enough to remind me he's in control of this and chooses to let me have it. The orgasm builds long and thorough and when it breaks I can't keep quiet and he doesn't stop, not until the aftershocks have finished and I pull at his hair with both hands.
