"You are exactly what I wanted," he says. "You are more than what I wanted, because what I wanted before I met you was a wife who would fit, and what I've found is a woman who doesn't fit anywhere because she's so much more." His thumbs trace my cheekbones and his voice drops lower. "I haven’t touched you because if I start, Katriona, I won't stop, and you have twelve stitches in your abdomen and I refuse to be the reason they don't heal correctly."
"I haven't been thinking about the stitches," I say.
"I know." Something in his eyes darkens. "I think about them constantly. It’s the single most difficult act of restraint in my entire adult life."
I look at him. "What would you do? If I wasn't healing. If I was healed."
The muscle in his jaw moves. "That's not a conversation we should be having right now."
"Why?"
"Because you're standing in my office in the aftermath of major surgery and the last thing you need is—"
"Akyl, please." I hold his gaze. "What would you do?"
He exhales, and his hands drop from my face to my waist, resting there carefully, aware of the incision sites, his thumbs at my hip bones.
"I would start with your mouth," he says, and his voice has changed entirely, shed the careful management, gone somewhere lower and more honest. "I've been thinking about your mouth since the auction. How you speak. How precise you are with your words." He pauses, letting his eyes roam to my lips and stay there. "I want to take all of that precision apart. I want to make you incapable of that control."
Something warm rolls through my lower abdomen and I would appreciate it very much if my body could be slightly less obvious about this.
"And then?" I manage.
His thumbs press fractionally deeper at my hips. "Then I want to learn every part of you that's spent years being in pain, and I want to replace the association." He says this quietly, seriously, in a tone that is somehow more devastating than anything purely physical could be. "I want you to know what it feels like for your body to be a place that gives you pleasure instead of only taking it away."
I stare at him. "You can't say things like that."
"Why?"
"Because it's very unfair when I can't do anything about it."
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Not a full smile, just the suggestion of one. He lifts one hand from my hip and touches my jaw, just the backs of his fingers, the way you'd touch something you wanted to handle carefully.
"When Marsh clears you," he says, "I want to take my time with you. I want every hour we should have had. I want you tohave nothing to think about except what I'm doing to you." His eyes hold mine. "Can you wait a little longer for that?"
The honest answer is absolutely not. The answer I give him is, "I'm going to reorganize your filing system while I wait. As punishment."
He laughs. It's a short sound, but it's real and warm and it lands somewhere directly behind my sternum. I don't think I'll ever get used to that sound. I don't think I want to.
"Sit down," he says, pulling out his desk chair and wheeling it toward me. "You've been standing for too long."
"I'm fine, Akyl, I'm not made of—" The stitches remind me of their presence with a sharp pull when I shift my weight and I stop talking and scrunch my nose.
He gives me a look that says everything. I sit in the chair.
"Thank you," I say, with as much dignity as I can manage, which is not a lot.
He leans against the desk again and looks at me with that expression he's been wearing more frequently, the one where he's decided something and is working out the best moment to say it.
"Tell me what you want from this," he says. "Practically. Once you're well."
I think about this. "I want to be useful." I sigh, knowing he needs more than that. "I mean useful to you. To what you're building. I know I was brought into this arrangement as a wife, and I understand what that means, but I'm also," I pause, looking for the word, "a person with a functional brain who has spent years having nothing to do with it except survive. I'd like to do something with it now."
He's watching me very carefully. "What kind of something?"
"I don't know yet. I need to know more about what you actually do before I can tell you where I'd be useful. The legitimate side." I meet his eyes. "And eventually the less legitimate side, if you'll trust me with it."
"Eventually," he says.
