“I know you don’t need me to.” I pressed my lips to her temple, tasting her skin. “Let me anyway.”
The first orgasm hit her in a wave — a sudden fierce clenching around me that pulled my own control to its thinnest point, her cry muffled against my shoulder, her whole body shuddering with the force of it. I held her through it, kept moving, kept my fingers working, felt her go pliant and oversensitive and then tighten again as I refused to let her come down completely.
“Sebastian—” My name in her voice, stripped of everything except need. “Sebastian, please?—”
“I have you.” I drove deeper, felt her hips slam down to meet me, felt her take everything I gave her and demand more. “Right here. Come with me.”
The second time she fractured it was slower and deeper and she said my name like it meant something she hadn’t decided how to say yet — not composed, not managed, just honest — and I followed her over the edge with my forehead pressed to hers and her name in my mouth like something I’d been meaning to say since a balcony in November.
We stayed tangled together for a long time afterward, the city lights still sliding past the fogged windows, our breathing gradually finding its way back to something normal. Her head rested against my neck. My hand moved slowly up and down her spine, not thinking about it, just doing it.
“This changes things,” she said finally, her voice muffled against my collar.
“It changed things the moment we met.”
She lifted her head. I expected calculation in her expression — the professional assessment, the careful management of what had just happened. Instead I found something rawer. Something that looked like the feeling I’d been carrying since a service corridor, finally reflected back at me without the armor over it.
“I’m still going to write the story,” she said.
“I know.”
“And I’m still going to follow every lead, even if it means uncovering something that destroys everything you’ve built.”
“I’d expect nothing less.” I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear — the gesture so familiar now it was muscle memory. “The truth matters. You taught me to remember that.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Something settled in her expression — not resolved, not simple, but real.
The car slowed, and I realized we’d reached her building. A modest brownstone in Logan Square, warm light in the windowsof the floor above the entrance, nothing like my lakefront penthouse and completely, entirely hers.
“Tomorrow,” I said, as she reached for the door. “Nine AM. We start going through everything together.”
She hesitated. Then: “Nine AM.”
I watched her walk to the entrance. Watched the lights come on in the second-floor window. Stayed until I was certain she was safely inside before I tapped the partition.
“Take me home.”
The car pulled into traffic and I pressed my fingers briefly to my lips, still tasting her, and looked out at the city she’d spent her career trying to make honest.
She’d walked into my gala to expose me. She’d stood in my office and called my bluff. She’d stepped back from something she wanted because her principles mattered more than the wanting, and then she’d spent two weeks watching me earn the right to be chosen again and made a decision with her whole self when she was ready.
I’d left a balcony without giving my name because I’d needed to think.
I’d thought. It had made everything worse and clarified everything that mattered.
Emilia Rivera wasn’t a complication anymore.
She was the only calculation that mattered.
Chapter Nine
Emilia “Em” Rivera
Iwoke up at six-thirty with Sebastian’s scent still on my skin and absolutely zero regrets.
Okay, maybe one. That I’d actually gotten out of his car last night instead of dragging him upstairs like a woman possessed. But I’d needed space to think, and thinking was impossible when Sebastian Laurent was looking at me like I was the only thing standing between him and complete self-destruction.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. Jenna.
