His hand comes to my hip.
I don’t startle.
I don’t make a sound.
My whole body goes very still and very aware at once, every nerve ending suddenly awake, the weight of his hand through my shirt, the warmth of him close behind me, his breath on the back of my neck.
“Don’t turn around,” he says. So quiet only I can hear.
I don’t.
Through the gap in the shelves, the economics girl is two rows away. Still looking. Her eyes move across the cubicles with the focused patience of someone who believes she will find what she is looking for if she is thorough enough.
Saint shifts closer behind me, so close now that I can feel the full warmth of him against my back, the chair between us the only thing maintaining the space.
His hand moves from my hip to the edge of the table, bracketing me, and he leans down so his mouth is at my ear.
“You were watching her,” he says.
It is not a question.
“I watched her look for you,” I say. My voice is very even. I’m proud of how even it is.
His mouth curves against my ear. I feel it more than see it. “And what did you feel while you watched?”
I don’t answer. I’ll never admit to him how much I hate that she is.
His hand moves.
It slides from the edge of the table to my waist, unhurried, and then lower, and I grip the edge of the table and keep my eyes straight ahead, where the girl is checking the next row of cubicles, getting closer and then turning away, rechecking.
“Amy,” he says. “What did you feel?”
“I felt…” I stop. Start again. “I did not like it,” I say.
“The words for that,” he says, very quietly against my ear, “is because you’re mine.”
Something goes through me at those words, but it’s not fear, not the Roman version of that word that lands like a collar around my neck.
His version.
The version that is a statement about him rather than a claim on me. What he feels. What I am to him.
My grip on the table tightens.
He moves my chair back an inch, smooth, silent, and he is behind me completely now, and his hands are at the waistband of my jeans, and the library is quiet.
We are behind a large row of shelves where no one can see us, and the girl is four rows away, still looking. I should say something, should stop this, should be a reasonable person in a library on a Wednesday afternoon.
I lift my chin.
He takes that for what it is.
Permission.
What follows is the most exquisitely controlled thing I have ever experienced.
He is precise in the way he is precise about everything, methodical, unhurried, attentive to every detail.
