All Chelsea could do was bite her lip as his fingers moved ever so slowly.Don't squirm, don't squirm, don't squirm.At least when he'd been taking things off, the urgency and the heat had been there to sweep her away, just so many things happening all at once to make her not think.
But now?
There was nowhere to hide, nothing else to think of but his hands on her skin, and the quiet fact of what they'd done sitting in the air between them like something that had been said and could not be unsaid.
"Turn around."
The command nearly made her jump. Nearly. But while she had managed to squash that, it was her heartbeat she couldn't control, skyrocketing like it had been doing since meeting her husband as she turned to face him, slowly, her left foot dragging a beat behind the rest of her the way it did when her body was tired, and she caught herself with a small correction so automatic she didn't even register it.
But he did.
Her breath caught as his dark gaze captured hers. A part of her had been terrified that she would see something in his eyes that would make all of this...sordid.
But instead, there was...warmth.
Not the kind that burned (she knew that kind now, knew it in her blood and her bones and in places she would need to have a very long conversation with God about later). This was different. Quieter. It was the look of a man who was seeing something he hadn't expected to see, and instead of cataloguing it the way he did everything, he was just...looking. The way she'd looked at the view from his floor. Like it was a gift he hadn't asked for.
And all her fears, every single one that had been lining up in her chest like patients in a waiting room—-did I do that right, was I enough, does he regret it, will he send me away now—-melted.
Just gone.
He pulled her close, and she went without resistance, her forehead finding the place just below his collarbone that her body had apparently already decided was hers. His mouth brushed the top of her head, and then he tilted her chin up and kissed her.
Not the way he'd kissed her before, not that consuming, floor-dropping kiss that had rewritten her understanding of what mouths were for. This kiss was slow. Deep. The kind that had time in it, as if he was learning something about her that could only be learned at this speed. By the time he lifted his head, her lips were tender all over again, and she was fairly certain that her face was doing something visible and uncontrollable and probably very, very pink.
Is this what married people do? Is this normal? Is there a manual for this? Because if there is, she would like a copy, preferably annotated, with a FAQ section and maybe a helpline for moments exactly like—-
"Come."
The thought scattered like birds.
Olivio had never been the type to hold a woman's hand. He had taken women to galas, to dinners, to events where a well-placed palm at the small of a back could generate the exact impression required. He had never once had the impulse to simply take a woman's hand and hold it while walking.
So he could not explain what he was doing right now.
His fingers had found hers somewhere between the bedroom door and the hallway. Not a conscious decision. Not a strategic one. One moment his hand was at his side and the next it was wrapped around hers, and the genuinely baffling thing, the thing he intended to examine later with the rigor it deserved and then dismiss entirely, was that it didn't feel like enough.
Her hand in his was warm and small and slightly uncertain in its grip, as if she couldn't quite believe he was doing this and didn't want to hold on too tightly in case the whole thing turned out to be a misunderstanding. And that hesitance was doing something to him that was entirely inconsistent with the fact that they were walking down a corridor in his own building toward a man who was going to look at Olivio with an expression Olivio was not prepared to receive.
Without breaking stride, his hand released hers. Before she could wonder why, his arm curved around her waist instead, drawing her against his side, and he brushed his lips against the top of her head. His pace adjusted to hers without thought, his body matching the rhythm of her walk the way it had matched nothing else in his life, and if he'd noticed, he would have been alarmed by it.
He didn't notice.
Better.
The thought arrived without permission, and he did not examine it.
Every head on the floor turned. He didn't give a damn. Let them stare. Let every analyst and associate on this floor register this image and understand exactly what it meant.
This was his wife. She was his.
Proprietary interest,he told himself.Consistent with the new arrangement.
Edgar was waiting for them.
Chelsea could tell the exact moment her godfather understood what had happened, because his face went through four expressions in under a second: surprise, comprehension, a flash of something protective, and then the kind of exhausted resignation that reminded her of the time she'd told him she was going to meet Olivio without even looking him up first.
"Seriously?"
