His hands. God, his hands. One in my hair, tilting my head so his lips could trace down, and the other drifting down my ribs with a focused, unhurried attention that made each point of contact feel intentional — like he was drafting me, learning my dimensions through touch the way other people learned them through sight. His thumb found the gap between my shirt andthe waistband of my skirt, and that single inch of bare skin — callused fingertip against my stomach, the lightest drag above my hip — pulled a sound out of me I didn’t recognize. My back arched into him. A low sound escaped his throat.
I couldn’t think. Couldn’t construct a sentence, couldn’t remember the name of my own show, couldn’t do anything except find the skin just below his ear where his pulse hammered so hard it pulsed in my fingertips. And I said the two words that had been building since the Patience Test, since a dark room and a man who’d trembled when I said them, since the moment I understood that the most powerful thing you can give someone isn’t control. It’s permission.
“Good boy.”
The sound he made destroyed me. Something deeper than a groan, rawer, a sound that started in his chest and broke open somewhere between my name and a word he couldn’t finish. His forehead dropped to my shoulder like his neck had simply given out, and I felt the full weight of his surrender press into me — his exhale ragged against my collarbone, his fingers gripping my hips hard enough to feel through the silk, his whole body trembling with the effort of being this open and still standing. I pressed my lips against his temple. Held them there. Felt the drumming of his blood under the thin skin, and he let out a long, shaking exhale — the kind that carries everything a person has been holding.
When he lifted his head, I couldn’t look. His eyes were bright, almost wet — not crying, he’d been taught at eight years old that his tears were wrong — but the shine was there, terrified and undefended, and his face was so completely open I felt like I was seeing someone he’d never shown anyone. The version that existed before he learned to hide. He looked young. He lookedstunned. He looked at me like I’d reached into his chest and found something he’d been told wasn’t there.
“Say it again.” His voice muffled against my collarbone, rough and wondering, the vibration of each word humming against my skin. “Please.”
The please. The please nearly killed me. Rhys did not say please — he stated facts and issued observations and deployed sarcasm so dry it qualified as a climate event. But here, with his face tucked against my neck and his hand gripping my hip like he was afraid I’d disappear, he said please like it was the most natural word he’d ever spoken. And I understood, with a clarity that cut through every layer of desire and urgency, that this was what the show had been trying to measure all along. The willingness to ask. The courage to need.
“Good boy,” I said again, slower this time, each word placed against the shell of his ear with a discipline that matched his own, and he lifted me — just lifted, hands under my thighs, smooth and effortless, the motion revealing exactly how strong those arms actually were — and my legs wrapped around his waist because physics demanded it and so did every cell in my body. From this height his lips were level with mine and his eyes were open, close, burning with an intensity that made the garden kiss feel chaste.
“If we don’t stop,” he said, rough, strained, his forehead pressed against mine, “I’m not going to be able to—”
“I know.”
“The cameras—”
“There are no cameras in here.” My fingers followed the line of his jaw. The muscle flexed under my touch. “This room is mine.”
He kissed me again, and this time his mouth was open, urgent, edged with the hunger of two people who’d heldthemselves so still for so long that letting go felt like falling. My fingers found the buttons of his shirt, undid two, laid my palms flat against his bare chest. His heart slammed against my hand — fast, hard, real. I spread my fingers wider, and he shuddered against me, a full-body response to my hands on him that made me feel powerful and terrified in equal measure. He was solid everywhere — under my palms, where his stomach tensed against my wrist, where his collarbone met the open collar and I pressed my lips to the hollow of his throat and tasted salt and cedar and the racing pulse beneath.
“You,” I breathed against his mouth, “are making it very hard to be the responsible one.”
“You were never the responsible one.” His lips grazed my temple, soft, reverent, a counterpoint to the grip of his hands. “You were the brave one. There’s a difference.”
I was going to reply — I had a whole Sloane routine ready about television shows and arm’s-length policies — but his mouth found the spot below my ear and his teeth grazed the tendon of my neck and the retort disintegrated. I tipped my head back against the plaster and felt his lips curve into a smile against my skin, just for a second — a private, boyish grin I could feel but not see — and the tenderness of it, the play in it, hit harder than any of the urgency that had come before. He dropped a kiss to my cheekbone, another to the corner of my eye, light and slow, tracing my face with his mouth like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it.
“Hi,” he murmured against my temple.
I laughed — a real laugh, breathless and surprised, because we were pressed together with his shirt half-open and my skirt bunched at my hips and this man had just said hi to me like we were meeting for coffee. “Hi,” I said back. And his smile buried itself in my hair, and for one perfect, suspended moment theworld was so small it only held two people, and both of them were exactly where they belonged.
My phone vibrated on the nightstand. We ignored it. It vibrated again — a persistent mechanical insistence that cut through the fog of his lips on my neck with the subtlety of a fire alarm at a spa.
“Ignore it,” I murmured.
“Ignoring it.” The buzzing stopped, and his mouth found mine again, and for three blessed seconds the world was just us.
Then it started again. Continuous this time, vibrating with a relentless urgency that meant only one person — because only Tessa Reyes had my Do Not Disturb override, and in fifteen years of friendship she had used the emergency code exactly twice: once when my mother had been hospitalized and once when the network threatened to pull funding. She didn’t call CODE RED for drama. She called CODE RED for actual fires.
I pulled back. “I need to—”
“Go.” He set me down — carefully, so carefully, his hands sliding from my thighs to my hips to my waist, steadying me through each inch of descent until my feet found the floor. His thumbs lingered on my hipbones for one extra beat, and then his hands opened and everywhere he’d been touching went cold. My body had rewired itself around him in fifteen minutes and was furious about operating alone.
I crossed to the nightstand. Picked up my phone. Way too many notifications. Tessa’s name repeated — a distress signal: SLOANE. CODE RED. SLOANE. CALL ME NOW. CODE RED. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
I opened Twitter.
The ground dropped.
I’d seen bad press before — I’d launched a show predicated on making men prove they could listen, which had generatedenough think pieces to paper the entire mansion — but this was different. This was a photo — Rhys and me on the garden bench, faces visible, mouths together, unmistakable, taken from an angle I recognized as the old oak’s shadow where the cameras didn’t reach. Someone had been there. Someone had waited. And that photo, intimate and unambiguous, had been placed alongside a confessional clip where I said I have to stay objective — edited to make tenderness look like conspiracy, a kiss look like corruption. My production notes — how had someone gotten my production notes? — screenshotted and circulating with the caption “THE QUEEN’S SECRET RULES: Sloane Mitchell has been rigging THE GOOD BOY GAMES since Day One.” Forty million viewers. Half of them were currently reading my private notes and drawing conclusions that were wrong, catastrophic, and trending.#RhysloaneScandal. Number three on Twitter. Climbing.
“Sloane.” Rhys was behind me, his voice steady — the exact steadiness that meant he’d already assessed the damage and was managing his reaction. “What happened?”
I turned and watched the moment he registered the look on my face. The open, undone tenderness of thirty seconds ago vanished — every guard snapping back into place because the world had just reminded him what happened when you let people see.
