Page 121 of In the Shadows
“I can’t pick up a glass.” Her voice was strange. Thin. “I watched a man get sentenced to life in prison, and I can’t pick up a glass.”
His hand covered hers. Lowered it from the cabinet. Closed the door.
“You don’t need a glass.”
“I need something. I don’t know what I need.” She turned around, and his chest was right there, solid and warm, and the distance between keeping it together and falling apart turned out to be about three inches. “I don’t know what?—”
The sound that came out of her was not crying. It was something deeper than that, something structural, as if a load-bearing wall inside her had finally given way and everything it had been holding was coming down at once. Five years of doubt. Five years of searching alone. Five years of wondering if she was wrong, if she was crazy, if her father had really just died the way the death certificate said and she’d built a conspiracy out of grief.
She wasn’t wrong. She’d never been wrong.
And the weight of being right was worse than she’d imagined.
Ronan caught her. Both arms, pulling her in, one hand at the back of her head and the other across her lower back. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t try to fix it or explain it or tell her it was over. He just held her while the sound kept coming, raw and formless, the kind of grief that had been stored so long it didn’t have words anymore.
She gripped the front of his shirt with both fists. Pulled him closer, which wasn’t possible because there was no closer, and pulled anyway. She wanted to climb inside his ribs. She wanted to disappear into someone who would let her stop being brave for five minutes.
His mouth found her hair. Her forehead. The side of her face. Not kisses—something else. Points of contact. Anchors.
“I’m here,” he said against her temple. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She tipped her face up. Found his mouth. The kiss was salt and heat and desperation, nothing like the careful tenderness of their first time on the park bench or the slow burn of the nights at the cottage. This was need—blunt, graceless, the kind of need that didn’t care about technique or timing.
She pulled at his shirt. He pulled at hers. Something tore—a button, maybe, or a seam—and neither of them stopped. His hands were on her skin, sliding up her ribs, and her back hit the kitchen counter, and she heard something fall and didn’t look to see what.
“Bedroom,” she said against his mouth.
“Here.”
He lifted her onto the counter. She wrapped her legs around his waist and felt him hard against her through his pants, and the sound she made was not the sound of a woman who’d just survived a trial. It was the sound of a woman who’d survived everything and wanted to feel alive.
He pulled back. His hands were shaking. She’d never seen his hands shake before—not after the Beach Road confrontation, the car hit, not at any point during the past three months when everything had been falling apart.
“Lila. Look at me.”
She looked. His eyes were dark, pupils wide.
“If we do this right now, it’s not going to be slow. It’s not going to be careful.” His thumbs pressed into the hollows of her hipbones. “And I need to know that’s what you want.”
She reached between them and undid his belt.
“I’ve been careful for five years. I don’t want careful.” She pulled the leather free from the loops. “I want to feel something that isn’t grief.”
That was the end of the conversation.
His mouth came down hard on hers. She yanked his shirt over his head while he unhooked her bra through the blouse she was already pulling off. His hands cupped her breasts, rough and possessive, and when his thumb dragged across her nipple she arched into the touch hard enough that her shoulder blades hit the upper cabinet.
He pulled her forward on the counter until she was barely sitting on the edge. Lifted her dress and dragged her panties down her legs, one leg freed, the other tangled around her ankle because neither of them had the patience to finish the job. His mouth found the hollow of her throat, her collarbone, the space between her breasts. He dropped lower, and she braced her hands on the counter behind her.
His knees hit the tile floor. His mouth found her center, and the sound she made filled the kitchen.
He didn’t ease into it the way he usually did. No slow build, no teasing. His tongue worked her with the same intensity he brought to everything—focused, relentless, specific. Two fingers slid inside her and curled, and her hips bucked hard against his mouth.
“God—Ronan?—”
He didn’t stop. Didn’t slow down. His free hand pressed flat against her stomach, holding her in place while his tongue circled and stroked and his fingers moved in a rhythm that had her climbing fast. Too fast. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and held on.
The orgasm tore through her. She cried out—his name, maybe, or just sound—and he kept going, kept working her through it until she was gasping, until her thighs were trembling against his shoulders.
