He had never been with one...while she had never known any other man but him.
A virgin.
The word kept returning to him, insistent, rearranging things he'd thought were settled. He'd walked into this conference room with a strategy. He'd had the Marquez acquisition in one hand and the convenient solution of an accidental wife in the other, and the two had fit together with the clean logic of a deal that needed only his signature.
But deals didn't tremble underneath you. Deals didn't wrap their arms around your neck and whisper your name like it was the only word left in the language. Deals didn't fall asleep with that expression on their face, the one that saidI trust youwith a simplicity that bordered on reckless, that went beyond reckless into something so unguarded it made his chest hurt.
Even for someone like him, that mattered.
And it changed everything.
Chapter Four
CHELSEA HAD BEEN DRESSEDby other people before.
Nurses, mostly. Physical therapists who needed access to her left leg and didn't have time to wait while she negotiated her way in and out of hospital gowns that opened in the back and closed around whatever dignity she had left. She'd learned to hold still for it, to let herself be managed with the same passive compliance she'd brought to everything in those early weeks of waking. Blood draws, range-of-motion tests, the daily indignity of needing help with buttons.
But this was not that.
This was Olivio Cannizzaro, standing behind her in the private bedroom adjoining his conference room, easing a dress over her shoulders with hands that were doing something very different from what the nurses' hands had done.
The new dress was black. Silk. It had arrived in a bag that looked like it had its own postcode, and Chelsea had stared at it for a long moment, aware that her blue-flowered cotton dress was currently in two pieces somewhere on the bedroom floor, and that the man responsible for this was now holding its replacement open for her with the composed efficiency of someone who had never ripped anything in his life.
Don't think about it, Chels.
She stepped into the dress. His hands guided the fabric up, over her hips, and the silk settled against skin that was still remembering everything his hands had done to it twenty minutes ago.
Definitely don't think about that.
"Hold your hair."
She gathered her braid, what was left of it, which at this point was more of a suggestion than a hairstyle, and lifted it off her neck, and his knuckles brushed her spine as he found the zipper.
The sound of it going up was the loudest thing in the room.
Chelsea's breath caught somewhere around her fourth vertebra and didn't come back until the zipper reached the top. In those three seconds, she understood something about intimacy that no observation or fiction could ever prepare her for. This was something she could only learn from experience, and it was how a man dressing you could undo you more completely than a man undressing you.
