“Try.”
“Take the job.” His voice was low, certain. “Not because I want you to go — I don’t, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But because you’ve been building toward something like this your entire career, and I would never forgive myself if I became the reason you held back from it.”
I looked at him for a long moment. “That’s either very evolved or a very sophisticated form of reverse psychology.”
“Probably both.” The corner of his mouth moved. “I’m a work in progress.”
I rose up on my toes and kissed him.
It was different from the other times. Slower. Less desperate. His mouth moved against mine with a tenderness that made my throat ache, one hand coming up to cradle the back of my head with a gentleness that had nothing to do with restraint and everything to do with care.
When I pulled back, his eyes had gone dark.
“Emilia.”
“Don’t talk.” I slid my hands up his chest, feeling the warmth of him through the white linen. “Not yet.”
He caught my wrists. “Are you sure?”
“Sebastian.” I held his gaze. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
Something broke open in his expression — the last of the careful management dissolving into something I’d been watching build since a service corridor in November. He kissed me again, and this time there was heat behind the tenderness, his hands finding my waist and pulling me against him until I could feel the hard press of him against my stomach.
“The fireplace,” he said against my mouth. “I want to see you properly.”
He undressed me slowly, which was its own kind of torment.
Each layer removed with the focused attention he brought to everything that mattered to him — my sweater lifted carefully over my head, his lips finding the curve of my shoulder the moment it was bare. The clasp of my bra undone with one hand while the other stayed warm against my ribs, steadying me. My jeans worked down my hips with a deliberation that made me grip his shoulders for balance.
The firelight played across everything, warm and flickering, and I stood in it feeling entirely seen — not exposed, not performing, just present in a way I rarely allowed myself to be.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. His voice had gone rough in the way it did when the control slipped entirely.
“You’re overdressed.”
He made quick work of his own clothes while I watched — the breadth of his shoulders emerging from the white shirt, the dark trail of hair below his navel, the way every muscle shifted with the easy authority of someone comfortable in his own body. The faint scar along his ribs that I’d noticed before and was only now realizing I’d never asked about.
Later. We had time for later.
He lowered me onto the soft rug in front of the hearth and settled beside me, propped on one elbow, and for a moment he simply looked at me — the firelight catching the angles of his face, the silver threading through the dark at his temples, the storm-gray eyes that had been cataloging me since the first night and still, I understood now, hadn’t finished.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“You.” The word came out without hesitation or management. “Just you.”
He bent his head and found my breast, and the firelight made everything warmer — his mouth, his hands, the soft sounds I made that I didn’t try to manage. He moved to the other sideand gave it the same unhurried attention, his free hand learning the geography of me like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it.
“Sebastian—”
“I have forty-eight hours,” he said against my skin. “I intend to use them.”
He worked his way down my body with a thoroughness that made my vision blur at the edges — his mouth at my stomach, my hip, the crease of my thigh. When he finally pressed his lips to my center I cried out, my hips lifting, my fingers tightening in his hair.
He read every response with the precision I’d come to understand was how he loved — attentively, specifically, returning to what undid me until my thighs trembled against his shoulders and my grip on his hair was tight enough to sting. When I came apart it was slowly and then all at once, a long wave that crested and broke and left me breathless against the rug.
He moved back up my body, his weight settling warm and solid over mine, and I reached for him immediately — felt him shudder when my hand wrapped around him, felt the barely-leashed restraint in every muscle of him.
“Look at me,” he said.
