Then I kissed her.
Not the desperate collision of the car, not the slow deliberate burn of the balcony. Something that fell between them — deep and certain, the kiss of a man who had just handed someone his worst secret and watched her hold it carefully.
She made a sound against my mouth that undid the last of whatever had been holding me together all evening. Her hands fisted in my shirt, pulling me closer, and I felt the moment she stopped calculating and just — chose. The same way she’d chosen on the L, I understood. She’d come here already decided.
I pulled back just enough to look at her — flushed, eyes dark, the exhaustion still there but underneath it something bright and alive.
“I’ve wanted—” I stopped. Started again. “Since the moment you walked into my office with your notebook and your impossible stubbornness and told me it was bullshit—” I pressed my lips to her jaw, her throat, feeling her pulse jump beneath them. “I’ve been trying to hold myself together ever since.”
“You could have fooled me,” she breathed.
“I’m very good at fooling people.” I found the soft skin below her ear, felt her grip tighten on my shirt. “You’re the first person in twenty years I didn’t want to fool.”
“Sebastian—”
“I know.” I lifted her against me, felt her legs wrap around my waist, felt the warm weight of her — and started moving. Not toward the elevator. Past it. Down the hallway toward the only room in this penthouse that wasn’t designed to impress anyone.
“Where are we going?” she said against my throat.
“Somewhere that’s actually mine.” I pushed the bedroom door open with my shoulder. “Not the office. Not the elevator. Somewhere real.”
I set her down at the edge of the bed, and the city light came through the floor-to-ceiling glass behind her, catching the dark waves of her hair, the flush along her cheekbones, the way she looked up at me with those hazel eyes that had been seeing through me since a service corridor at a charity gala that felt like another lifetime.
“Hi,” she said softly. Like we were starting something.
“Hi,” I said back. Like I understood that we were.
I reached for her jacket first, sliding it from her shoulders slowly, pressing my lips to the curve of her neck as the leather fell away. She tilted her head back, giving me access, her hands finding the buttons of my shirt with the focused efficiency I’d come to recognize as specifically hers — thorough even now, even here.
“Still calculating?” I murmured against her skin.
“Constantly.” Her palms spread flat against my chest as the shirt fell open, warm against my skin. “My numbers keep changing.”
“I know what mine say,” I said.
She reached up and pulled me back down to her mouth instead of answering, and I understood that was its own kind of answer.
I laid her back against the bed and took my time — more time than the urgency clawing at my chest wanted, more time than the six hours of silence and the threatening photograph and the month of careful restraint had left me feeling patient for. But I wanted to do this right. I wanted this to be different from every other time we’d reached for each other in confined spaces with the world pressing in from outside.
I unzipped her dress slowly, pressing my lips to every inch of skin it revealed — the curve of her spine, the small of her back, the soft warmth of her shoulder blades. She shivered beneath my mouth and made a low sound that went straight through me.
When I turned her over she was flushed and bright-eyed and looking up at me with an expression I’d only seen in fragments before — unguarded, unmanaged, entirely present.
I stayed there for a moment, just looking. She let me.
“What?” she said softly.
“Nothing.” I traced a fingertip from her collarbone to her sternum, watching her breath catch. “Everything.”
I reached behind her and unclasped her bra, let it fall, and instead of moving immediately I simply looked at her — the warm curve of her, the flush spreading down her chest — until she made a small impatient sound that broke into a laugh.
“Sebastian.”
“I told you. I’m taking my time.”
I kept my hands moving over the curves of her — her waist, her hips, the soft skin of her inner thighs as I worked her underwear down and away.
She was already wet when I found her, slick and warm against my fingers, and the sound she made when I stroked through her folds was the most honest thing I’d heard all night.
