She stares at me. "I was following your instructions. You said no one moves alone?—"
"I said supervised." I pull a hand through my hair, grip the back of my neck, release it. "I didn't say forty fucking minutes. I didn't say laughing in the garden like you're at a social event."
"I was taking a walk?—"
"With one of my soldiers."
"Who was doing his job." Her voice sharpens, the edge coming out fast. "Which is what you ordered him to do. I didn't ask for an escort. I wasassignedone. I followed the procedure you put in place. What exactly is the problem?"
I look at her.
"He was leaning toward you."
The words come out before I've finished deciding to say them and I hear them the way she does and I know what they sound like and I don't take them back because they're true.
She blinks. Then her eyes narrow. "Luca was standing next to me."
"I know what I saw."
"Then what you saw was a man doing his job while I walked thirty meters of garden path." She takes a step toward me, not back, never back, and her voice drops into something precise and controlled and worse for it. "You had me followed. You put men on the inside rotation. You have the entire staff going in and out of that room one by one. I have done everything you've asked. I haven't questioned it, I haven't complained, I have operated inside every single restriction you've put in place since last night." Her chin comes up the full quarter inch. "So don't stand in this corridor and tell me I can't take a walk in a garden because one of your men was doing what you told him to do."
My jaw is so tight I can feel my pulse in it.
She's right. I know she's right. I knew it in the garden, and I know it now, and knowing does absolutely nothing for the thing sitting in my chest that put me in this corridor in the first place.
I throw a hand up. Let it drop. Run it through my hair again and turn away from her for two seconds, because what's in my face right now is not something I want her to read clearly.
I turn back.
"You're mine," I say. "In this house and outside it and everywhere my men can see you. That is the arrangement and it does not change because you find it inconvenient."
Something crosses her face.
"I know what I am here," she says. Quiet. "I've always known."
"Then act like it." Two feet between us. Less.
At some point the distance closes without either of us deciding it or moving to stop it. She is standing in front of me in the low corridor light, chin up and eyes direct, her robe fallen open at the collar. I can see her pulse at the base of her throat, fast and visible.
She is not stepping back. She has never once stepped back from me. That is the problem. That has always been the entire problem with her.
My hand comes up and braces flat on the wall beside her head. I am not touching her. The six inches between my chest and hers is still there. But her breath changes, the catch of it, the parting of her lips that she closes again immediately. Her eyes drop to my mouth.
I lean in.
Slow. Deliberate. My mouth is close enough to hers that I feel the warmth of her exhale against my lips. Close enough that I can see the exact moment her eyes close, her body stops fighting the thing it's been doing since before either of us had the vocabulary for it.
Her hand comes up to my chest. Fingers curling into the fabric. Not pushing. Just there. Gripping. The same involuntary thing her hands do when the rest of her has given up pretending.
The half inch between us is nothing. It is genuinely nothing. Her lips are parted and her pulse is going at the base of her throat, and I am thinking about one specific thing with the entirety of what is left of my mind. The sound she would make. Whether it would be the sound from the bathroom, that soft bitten-off thing, or something else. Something she hasn't made yet. Something that would be mine specifically, not incidental.
My hand moves from the wall to the side of her face without me issuing the instruction.
Then I hear a door downstairs and voice, so I straighten and step back.
Her eyes open. Her hand drops. We stand in the corridor and look at each other, both of us breathing like we ran. The half inch of air is back, and neither of us says anything because there is nothing to say.
“Go to bed,” I say.
