The water pours over us. His hair is plastered to his forehead. My hair is stuck to my back and the tile. Steam fills the bathroom until I can barely see his face, just the shape of him, the dark eyes, the set of his jaw, the mouth that finds mine and kisses me while he fucks me against the wall.
"Harder," I say into his mouth. "I won't break."
He gives me harder. His hips snap up into me and the force of each thrust pushes a sound out of me that's half moan, half cry. I grip his hair with one hand, his shoulder with the other, holding on while he takes me apart in a shower that smells like soap and steam and sex.
"You're so tight." His voice against my ear, rough and broken. "So fucking wet. I can feel everything."
"Good. I want you to feel everything."
He shifts the angle. Hitches my hips higher, and the new position drags the head of his cock against my front wall on every stroke and my vision whites out. I cry his name. Not Charlotte's voice. Not the controlled, measured, ice-queen voice. Something rawer. Something from before the armor and the name and the three years of silence.
"There," I gasp. "Don't stop. Don't you dare fucking stop."
He doesn't stop. He drives into me with a relentlessness that borders on brutal and lands on perfect, his mouth on my neck, his hands gripping my thighs hard enough that I'll have bruises shaped like his fingers tomorrow and I want them. I want every mark. I want proof that this man held me against a wall and fucked me like the world was ending and we had twenty minutes to make it count.
His thumb finds my clit. In the tight space between our bodies, his hand working between us, circling me with a pressure that's precise and devastating. The dual sensation of his cock inside me and his thumb on my clit sends me spiraling, the orgasm building fast and hard, a coiled heat in my gut that tightens with every thrust.
"I'm close," I manage. "Claudio. I'm going to—"
"Come," he says. "Come on my cock. Take me apart, principessa."
I shatter. The orgasm tears through me and my whole body seizes around him, my legs locking behind his back, my nailsraking his shoulders, my voice echoing off the tile in a sound that is not quiet and is not Charlotte and is not anything I'd ever let anyone hear except him. I pulse around him, tight and rhythmic, and I feel every contraction in a way I've never felt before because there's nothing between us, just skin and heat and the raw wet friction of two bodies trying to merge.
He follows. Three more thrusts, deep and hard, and then he buries himself inside me and groans against my neck. I feel him come. Actually feel it, the pulse and the heat and the flood of warmth inside me that's new and shocking and impossibly intimate. He throbs against my walls, and I clench around him and we ride it out together, pressed against the tile with the water pouring down and the steam swallowing us whole.
He holds me there. Against the wall. Inside me. His forehead on my shoulder. His breathing ragged and hot against my wet skin. I hold him back. My arms around his neck, my face in his hair, my heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my fingertips.
"I love you," I say.
The words come out before I've decided to say them. Quiet. Almost lost under the sound of the water. But he hears them. I know he hears them because his whole body goes still. Not tense. Still. The stillness of a man who has just heard a sound he wasn't sure existed.
He lifts his head. Looks at me. Water running down his face. Those pale eyes, stripped of every defense, every wall, every layer of distance he's spent twenty years building. Just him. Justa man holding a woman in a shower, inside her, surrounded by steam and silence and the echo of three words he didn't expect.
"Say it again," he says.
"I love you."
He kisses me. A burning kiss. Deeper than sex. The kind that makes a promise neither of us has put into words yet but both of us understand.
"I love you," he says against my mouth. "I didn't know I could. But I do."
He lowers me to the floor. My legs are shaking. He keeps his arm around my waist while the water runs over us, washing away the sweat and the sex and the fear of the last nine days. Not the memory. The fear. The memory stays. The memory is ours.
He reaches for the soap. Washes me. Slowly. His hands moving over my skin with the careful attention he gives to everything he values, every inch treated like evidence he's cataloguing, except this isn't tactical. This is worship. This is a man who disassembles weapons in the dark using those same hands to trace the line of my hip, the curve of my waist, the space between my shoulder blades where my spine lives.
I wash him back. His scars. His tattoo. The bruise on his jaw from my fist. The scratches on his shoulders from my nails, pink and raised, already fading.
We stand under the water until it goes cold.
He wraps me in a towel. Dresses. Kisses my forehead.
"I have to go back down," he says.
"I know."
"It could be hours."
"I'll be here."
