Page 44

She kissed the edge of it, looking up at him. His gaze fell to her.

She kissed it again. Gently. R.A. She traced them with her finger.

She pressed her palm flat over the brand. Her hand covered it entirely. She felt his breathing stop and then start again, uneven.

"Kit." She looked up at him. "That is not your real name, is it?"

"No."

"Will you tell me?"

A pause. The longest she had known from him.

"Raphael."

She tested it in her mouth. "Raphael." Then, quieter: "Rafe and Audrey."

He set the hammer down on the windowsill. Slowly. He came towards her. Two steps. Three. She backed up and her hip met the edge of his desk. He stopped in front of her, close, the sunlight falling across both of them.

She put her hand on his chest. To push him away. Her fingers spread against his skin and she felt his heartbeat, fast beneath the calm of his face, and she did not push. Her hand stayed. Her thumb moved along the ridge of the scar below his collarbone, tracing the line of it, and he drew a breath and held it.

She kissed the scar. The way she had in the tunnel, except now she could see it. She pressed her lips to the raised white line. It was warm from the sun, salty from the work. She kissed along it, from his collarbone to his sternum, and she felt his breathing change and his hand came up and rested on the back of her head.

She kissed lower. The centre of his chest, his ribs, the ridges of them rising and falling under her lips. The burn.

He went still, absorbing it. Her fingers laced through his over the scar that was being rebranded. By her.

He did not speak. He did not need to.

She went lower.

His stomach contracted beneath her lips. She kissed the flat of it, the line of dark hair, the ridge of muscle above his hip. She could smell him: soap and sweat and wood and beneath it all just him. Her fingers found his waistband.

She looked up at him. His face was open in a way she had never seen it. He looked startled. He looked afraid.

"Tell me what you want, Rafe."

His name in her mouth undid him. She could see it happen.

"You. Just you."

"You already have me. What do you want at this moment?"

He held her gaze. Hesitated.

"If you insist.” He swallowed. “I need your mouth."

With a knowing smile, she unfastened his trousers. Her hands were clumsy with his buttons and her fingers were shaking.

He sprang free. She took him in her hand and looked at him in the daylight, properly, for the first time. The length and weight of him in her palm. The heat. The way he thickened further when her thumb moved across the head and his whole body jerked.

"Christ," he said. Barely a sound.

She lowered her mouth.

She took half of him, the rest held firm in her hand, and he made a sound she had never heard from him. Not a groan, not a gasp. A surrender. Short and sharp and torn from somewhere below speech. His hand found her hair and his fingers threaded through it.

She went slowly, learning him. The taste of salt and skin. The way his breathing fractured when she moved her tongue. The involuntary jerk of his hips that he tried to control and could not. She took him deeper and his hand tightened in her hair, and he said her name, ragged, wrecked, stripped of every pretence.