Page 93 of Reckless Heir
"I'm done pretending," he says. "That this is just a contract."
My heart is doing something unreasonable.
"I know," I say.
"I need you to be sure."
"I've been sure for weeks," I say. "I've been waiting for you to catch up."
Something in him releases. I watch it happen — a fraction of the tension in his jaw, the set of his shoulders, something structural letting go. The thing he's been holding for eighteen months, maybe longer, finding somewhere to put itself down.
He kisses me.
Slowly this time. Deeply, and slowly, and without the anger or the agenda — just his mouth on mine and his hands in myhair and the Las Vegas night burning gold and violet through the glass wall behind us.
I pull him closer.
The black shirt goes first — my hands at the buttons, working down while he watches with an expression I've only seen in pieces until tonight: open, unhurried, like a man who has finally stopped managing the room and is just in it.
"Let me," I say, the way he said it to me in November. His mouth curves — not the almost-smile, the real one, the small private thing that lives below the performance — and he lets me.
I push the shirt from his shoulders. He's been in this world so long that the body underneath surprises me anyway: the specific leanness of a racing driver, all function and no excess, the kind of physical form built entirely around what it can do rather than how it looks. There's a scar at his left ribs — old, well-healed, a white line I don't ask about yet. I file it. Later.
I run my palms down his chest. The muscle is there but it doesn't announce itself — it's the body of a man who has never needed to be seen using his strength, only to have it when required. His stomach tightens under my touch. His breathing changes.
He reaches for the zip at my back. No urgency. He draws it down slowly, mouth following the line of exposed skin — vertebra by vertebra, the heat of his breath arriving a fraction before his lips — and the dress falls and he catches it and sets it aside with the same care he gives to everything he has decided is worth keeping.
He looks at me the way he looked at the photograph. I know this now — I know the quality of that attention, what it costs him to let it show. He looked at a woman in a courtyard and couldn't look away, and he's looking at me now with the same expression and this time I'm here. I'm not in a photograph. I know he's watching.
I let him see me.
The bra goes next — his hands at the clasp, efficient, no fumbling. He draws the straps down my shoulders with the same deliberation he'd use to unwrap something valuable. His mouth finds the hollow of my throat and stays there long enough that my pulse beats against his tongue.
"Come here," he says, and his voice is low and entirely private, the register that belongs only to rooms with no audience.
He brings me to the bed with the Las Vegas skyline blazing through the glass wall behind us — the whole impossible glittering city, indifferent and brilliant, and he lays me down against it like I'm something he's been carrying for a long time and has finally found somewhere to put.
He takes his time.
This is the thing I couldn't have calculated — that under all the cold precision, under the methodology and the control, what exists is this patient, devastating focus. He moves down my body like he has hours and intends to use them, like learning this is the only task. His mouth traces my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder. He finds the places that make me catch my breath and stays with them, unhurried, until I'm pulling his hair to move him along and he simply holds position and waits for me to stop.
"Aleksei—"
"I have you." Against my ribs. "Let me."
His mouth finds my breast and I stop pulling his hair. His tongue circles my nipple — slow, deliberate — and when I arch into it he makes a low sound of approval and takes more of me into his mouth, and the combination of suction and the edge of his teeth and the way his free hand is doing the same work on the other side makes my hips lift off the bed without my permission. He presses me back down with a palm flat on my stomach andcontinues, unhurried, switching sides only when the first breast is too sensitive to bear and the second is aching for the same attention.
"You're—" I lose the sentence when his teeth graze.
"Yes," he says against my skin. "I know."
His mouth travels lower. The plane of my stomach. The crest of my hipbone, which he bites — actually bites, a sharp bright point of pressure that makes me gasp and then dissolves into the heat of his tongue soothing the mark. I will find bruises there tomorrow. I will find the shape of his mouth in purple on my hip and the thought does something to me that it probably shouldn't.
The swallow tattoo sits below my ribs, right under my heart. He finds it with his mouth and stops. Traces it once with his tongue and then covers it with his palm — flat and warm, the full weight of his hand. I watch his face while he does it. Something is happening in his expression that isn't clinical and isn't assessment. It's acknowledgment. The specific gravity of a man who knows exactly what he took and is choosing not to look away from that.
"I know," I say, though he hasn't spoken.
He lifts his head and looks at me and whatever the expression is, it doesn't have a word in any language I've learned so far.
