Page 80 of Orc'd At A Wedding
"Yes."
"Oh!"
"She was attempting to weaponize financial leverage to force your compliance." I set my jaw. "The behavior was unacceptable."
She makes a sound I cannot immediately categorise. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sob. Something torn directly down the middle between both.
Then she grabs my face with both hands and kisses me.
Not the soft, sleepy morning kisses from the kitchen counter. Not the fond, amused brushes against my jaw she deploys when I say something she finds endearingly unhinged.
This is something rawer. Something with teeth in it.
Her fingers curl against my jaw, dragging me down to her, and she kisses me like she is trying to communicate something that does not have words yet, like the feeling arrived before the language did, and she is bridging the gap with her mouth pressed hard against mine.
I respond immediately.
My hands find her hips, her waist, the bare backs of her thighs where my shirt has ridden up, and I pull her in one smooth movement directly into my lap so she is straddling me, her knees bracketing my thighs, her body warm and soft and already pressing close in ways that make my entire tactical framework begin to collapse in an orderly but rapid fashion.
"You're perfect," she says against my mouth. The words land unsteady, slightly breathless, fractured in a way that tells me she means it in a register well below the performative. "Absolutely perfect."
"My threat assessment was accurate," I murmur, my palms dragging slowly up the outside of her thighs beneath the hem of the shirt, skin warm and smooth under my hands. "The delivery may have lacked diplomacy."
"Shut up about the delivery." She pulls back just far enough to look at me, her dark eyes wet at the corners, her bottom lip faintly swollen. "She was going to make you feel like nothing. Like you were less than. And you just—" She exhales. "You just didn't let her."
"No."
"Nobody has ever done that before."
Something moves through my chest at that. Something slow and very heavy and not entirely comfortable, because it requires me to sit with the full weight of what she is telling me, all twenty-eight years of it, the galas and the inheritance leverage and the careful, surgical management of her daughter's affections.
I pull her closer instead of answering.
She comes willingly, her chest against mine, her forehead dropping to my shoulder, and I wrap both arms around her and hold her the way I would hold something I am not willing to lose under any tactical or financial circumstance on record.
Her breath hitches once.
Just once.
Then she tips her chin up and finds my mouth again, and this time the kiss changes register completely.
Slower. Deeper. Her fingers sliding up from my jaw into my hair, curling at the back of my skull, and I feel the deliberate shift in her, the decision she is making somewhere behind her sternum to put down the grief and pick up something else entirely.
I am very willing to assist with that transition.
My hands move under the shirt—my shirt, which she is wearing, a fact my hindbrain registers with enormous and disproportionate satisfaction—palming the bare skin of her waist, her ribs, dragging upward with unhurried purpose until I find the soft, unrestrained weight of her and she makes a sharp, involuntary sound into my mouth that travels directly down my spine.
"Olog," she breathes.
"I have you," I reply, quiet and certain.
She shivers.
I hold her closer, and the afternoon film continues entirely unwatched behind us, the tactically unsound protagonist making another poor decision every seven minutes, completely beneath our notice.
"Your family does not deserve you," I murmur into her hair. "But you are stuck with me now. And I do not tolerate anyone making you feel inadequate. Including your mother."
She pulls back, her eyes bright with unshed tears and fierce affection.
