Page 17 of Crown of Thorns

His thumb on my wrist, counting my pulse. The sound he'd made — that involuntary, uncontrolled sound — near the end. The three seconds when the mask dropped and I saw something behind it that had no name I was willing to use.

I wanted it again. The wanting was constant and specific and located in the exact parts of my body he'd mapped with that territorial precision. I couldn't sit in the library chair without remembering his hands. I couldn't shower without cataloguing what he'd touched. I couldn't walk past his study without the low pull in my pelvis that was desire and resentment fused into something I didn't have a clinical term for.

The clinical framing was dead. It had been dying since week three, eroding quietly under the accumulated data of daily proximity — his forearm on the kitchen table, the tendons visible under rolled shirtsleeves. His voice from the study, the low register that meant he was giving orders. The moment each evening when he'd appear in whatever room I'd chosen and stand in the doorway for three seconds before either entering or leaving, and those three seconds held more charge than the hours on either side of them.

I hated it. I hated that my body had decided something my mind was still deliberating. I hated that someone had bought my building and curated my information and installed surveillance on my life had also installed himself in my sensory memory so thoroughly that I couldn't close my eyes without his hands being the first image on the inside of my eyelids.

I dealt with it the way I deal with everything uncomfortable: I pushed.

It was a Thursday night. Late. I'd been in the library reading the quarterly accounts Lorcan had left on the sideboard — deliberately or carelessly, I couldn't tell; with Lorcan, the line between accident and strategy was invisible. The accounts revealed more than they concealed if you knew what you were looking at, and I was beginning to know what I was looking at.

He appeared in the doorway at eleven. Study hours were over. The house was quiet. He stood in the frame and I looked up from the accounts and the charge between us had the quality of a surgical wound — deep, precise, bleeding.

"Reading my accounts."

"They were on the sideboard."

"They were on the sideboard for the accountant."

"And yet here I am." I closed the folder. Set it on the arm of the chair. "You left them where I could find them. Deliberately or not, the effect is the same."

He stepped into the room. The door was already closed, the library had a heavy oak door that I'd pulled shut hours ago because the corridor drafts played hell with the radiator. He stood between me and the door and the geometry was deliberate. It always was.

"You're developing an interest in the finances."

"I'm developing an interest in what's being hidden in the finances. There's a difference."

Something moved in his jaw. A tightening. Not anger, something adjacent. Assessment. I'd challenged his intelligence infrastructure and the challenge had landed.

"You should be careful with that interest."

I stood up. The armchair was low and standing from it put me at a disadvantage, shorter, looking up, the height differential engineered to remind me that this room and everything in it belonged to him. I didn't care. I closed the distance between us until I could smell the cedar and black pepper that had replaced the Jameson as his evening atmosphere.

"You should be careful with what you leave on sideboards."

The kiss happened the way the confrontation had, without preamble, without permission, without the careful choreography of the wedding night. He didn't initiate it. I did. My hand found the front of his shirt and pulled and his mouth met mine and the sound that came from his chest was involuntary and gratifying in equal measure.

He responded with the same intensity, hands at my waist, gripping, pulling me against him hard enough to feel every line of his body through my clothes. The kiss was angry. Both of us. Angry about different things, or maybe the same thing wearing different masks. His tongue against mine. The taste of him, coffee, something sharper, the salt of skin at the corner of his mouth.

He got a fistful of my hair and pulled my head back and put his teeth in my throat, and I made a noise into the ceiling that I would have been embarrassed by in any other week of my life. My hands were already at his belt. His were already under my shirt. Seven weeks of corridors and doorways compressed into about four seconds of arithmetic and neither of us bothered pretending it was going anywhere else.

I pushed him. Literally. Hands flat on his chest, shoving. He went back a step, let himself go back a step, I was under no illusions about the physics, and the surprise on his face was worth more than every moment of clinical detachment I'd maintained for seven weeks.

"You don't get to control every room I'm in and then stand in the doorway like you're waiting to be invited."

"I wasn't waiting to be invited."

"Then stop performing patience. It's not patience when you hold all the keys."

His breathing had changed. Faster. Shallower. The control was present but working harder than it had during the wedding night, and the effort was visible in his hands, fingers flexed, tendons standing, the grip reflex of a man whose body wanted to reach and whose discipline said wait.

I didn't wait. I grabbed his belt. The buckle was cold against my fingers and the leather was warm from his body and the contrast was exactly right, cold metal, warm skin, the engineering of a man whose exterior and interior operated at different temperatures.

He made a sound. Low. Not the controlled territorial sounds from the wedding night. Something rawer. Something that said I'd found a wire in his discipline and was pulling it.

We made it to the desk. His hands on my hips, lifting me onto the surface, the accounts scattering. My legs around his waist. The proximity detonated, weeks of corridor charges and doorway standoffs and the phantom pressure of his hand on my spine compressing into contact that was too much and not enough simultaneously.

"Move your hands."