This is more intimate than Prague. In Prague, clothes came off quickly because speed was part of the strategy. Get it done. Get it over with. Don't let it mean anything.
This means something.
I feel the dress loosen as the ribbon is pulled from the loops. Cool air touches my spine and goosebumps rise along my arms. His breath is warm against the back of my neck and he hasn't kissed me there yet, but I can feel the proximity of his mouth like a gravitational pull.
"I thought about this," he says. His voice is barely above a murmur. "More than I should have."
"Undoing a bodice?"
"Undoing you."
The dress slips from my shoulders. I let it. I let the layers of silk and lace and tulle pool around my feet, and I stand there in nothing but my underwear and heels, my back to him, my arms bare, my spine exposed.
I wait for the vulnerability to hit. For the panic. For the instinct to cover myself and rebuild the wall and turn this into something I can control.
But it doesn't come.
Instead, I feel his hand settle on my hip. Warm. Steady. His thumb traces the curve of my waist, and I hear him exhalebehind me. A slow, controlled breath that sounds like a man trying very hard to hold himself together.
"You're shaking," he says.
"I'm not."
"You are." His other hand comes up and his fingertips trail along my shoulder, down my arm, and yes, I am shaking. Fine tremors running through me that I can't seem to stop.
"I’m not afraid," I say, because I need him to know that. I need him to understand that whatever is happening to my body right now isn't because I'm scared of him. I'm scared of how much I want this. Of how much I wanted it in Prague and pretended I didn't. Of how two years of refusing to think about this man have done nothing, absolutely nothing, to diminish the way my body responds to his touch.
"I know you aren’t," he says. Then his mouth is on my shoulder, and I stop thinking.
His lips trace a slow line from my shoulder to the curve of my neck, and I tilt my head to give him access without deciding to, and his hand tightens on my hip, pulling me back against him. I feel the hard length of him against me, and the knowledge that he's as affected as I am, that this isn't one-sided, that his control is held together with the same fraying threads as mine, does something to me that I can't undo.
I turn in his arms.
He's still fully dressed. Shirt. Trousers. Tie. And I'm standing here in almost nothing, and somehow, I don't feel exposed. I feel powerful. Because of the way he's looking at me. Like I'm not a body he's about to use but a person he's been aching to touch, and the difference between those two things is everything.
I reach for his tie and pull it loose. I undo the top button of his shirt, then the next, then the next, and he watches me do it withdark eyes and a jaw tight with restraint. When I push the shirt off his shoulders, he rolls them back to let it fall, and the sight of him does something violent to my pulse.
He's broader than I remembered. Or maybe I didn't let myself remember properly. Didn't let the details stick because keeping them would have meant admitting they mattered. His scarred chest is firm and warm under my palms when I press my hands flat against it, and I feel his heart beating hard beneath my fingers.
Racing.
"Aidan," I say. Just his name. But I say it the way I said it in Prague, the way I promised myself I'd never say it again, and something in his expression shatters.
He lifts me. Both hands under my thighs, lifting me off the ground like I weigh nothing, and my legs wrap around his waist because my body already knows the things he can do. He carries me to the bed and lays me down, it’s cool against my back and he's warm above me, braced on his forearms, looking down at me with an intensity that should feel suffocating but doesn't.
It feels like being found.
"Tell me what you want," he says.
"You. I want you." The words leave me before I can filter them, and they taste like surrender, but not the kind I've been running from. A different kind. The kind where you stop fighting something that was always going to win.
He kisses me again. Deeper this time. His hand slides down my body with a deliberateness that makes me arch into him, and I stop thinking about Prague and strategy and ice and armor. I stop thinking about anything except the way his touch feels like it was designed specifically for me. Patient in all the places Ineed him to be patient and relentless in the places I need him to be relentless.
And when he finally, finally pushes inside me, I make a sound that I've never made before. Not in Prague. Not ever. A sound that comes from somewhere deeper than performance, deeper than control. From the place where I kept the memory of him locked away and pretended it didn't matter.
It mattered. It mattered so much that two years without it felt like holding my breath, and now I'm breathing again, and I can't stop the sounds coming out of me any more than I can stop the way my body moves against his. With him. Like we've done this a thousand times. Like my body remembers him in places my mind refused to go.
He says my name against my throat. Low. Wrecked. Like it's costing him something to hold on. And I dig my fingers into his back and pull him closer and say it back. His name. Over and over, because it's the only honest word I have left.
