Page 102 of Caterina
“No, you don’t.” Her voice breaks just enough to make my chest tighten. “You don’t know what it was like to realize you had been hit before the stairs and kept going anyway.”
I do know, in a different way.
But I don’t say that.
Because she is too close now.
Close enough that the warmth of her body cuts through the antiseptic and pain and dark room. Close enough that I can see the fine tremor in her hand where it presses into the mattress.
“Don’t,” I say.
I don’t know whether I’m talking to her or myself.
Her gaze drops to my mouth.
That is all the warning I get.
Then she leans in and kisses me.
Her lips are soft and impossibly gentle, a stark, startling contrast to the memory of blood and concrete and gunfire from hours ago.
For a second, everything in me stops.
The pain in my side. The calculations about security. The running inventory of mistakes and contingencies. The hard line I have drawn between myself and this woman.
All of it goes quiet.
And I feel.
I feel the hesitance in her kiss. The desperate, searching edge of it. The way her breath trembles against my skin. The way she is using this to feel alive again after tonight.
She is terrified.
And she thinks this is the answer.
My hand comes up, not to push her away, but to cradle her jaw. My thumb strokes over her cheekbone, a gesture of comfort I have no business giving. For a moment, I let myself have this.
Just one moment.
Her kiss deepens, a little bolder now, a little more sure. She’s not hesitating anymore. She is looking for something solid to hold onto in the wreckage of tonight.
And I am letting her.
This is a mistake.
I know it with every fiber of my being.
A terrible, wonderful, catastrophic mistake.
My fingers tighten in her hair, and I kiss her back.
I forget about the pain. I forget about the Don in the room down the hall. I forget about the security protocols and the threat still hanging over this family.
All I know is the softness of her lips and the way she tastes, and the desperate, aching need to feel something other than fear and failure.
Chapter Sixteen
Caterina
