Page 67 of Irish Oath
Every one of those years went into it, and I tried to keep them out and failed. She made a sound against my mouth, low, and her good hand fisted in my shirt and pulled. I went. I'd have gone anywhere she pulled. I got my hands on either side of her face and kissed her the way you kiss the thing you'd stopped letting yourself believe in. She tasted like the whiskey she'd had downstairs, and under it like something I'd never tasted and somehow already knew.
"Ronan." My name in her mouth nearly took my legs.
"I have you," I said against her lips. "Whatever you need tonight. I have you."
"I don't want to think," she said. "For one hour I don't want to think about any of it. Make me not think."
That, I could do.
There was a fire still going low in the grate. I kept one most nights. The study held the cold worse than the rest of the house, and at one in the morning the embers were the only light in the room besides the moon off the water. I took her to it. Not to the desk. I'd spent too many years at that desk being the head of a family I thought was the only thing I'd ever be allowed to have, and I wanted her nowhere near it tonight. I brought her to the old rug in front of the hearth instead, the soft worn one my mother used to sit us on as boys when the storms took the power out, the one warm place in a hard room.
I lowered her down onto it, careful of the stitched arm, until she was lying back with the firelight moving over her and her dark hair spread against the wool.
"You keep looking at me like that," she said, "and I really will stop thinking."
"That's the idea."
That got a laugh out of her, low and surprised, the first real one I'd heard from her since she came. I decided then and there I'd earn that sound for the rest of my life if she let me.
I kissed her again, slowly, then less slow, working my way down her throat while my hand found the hem of her shirt and slid under it to the warm skin of her stomach. She arched into the touch like she'd been starved of an ordinary hand for years, which I supposed she had. I got the shirt up and off, careful over the bandage. Kissed the top of one breast and felt her breath stutter. Went lower. Her ribs, the soft of her stomach, the jut of her hip, and she was breathing hard by the time I reached the waist of her jeans.
"Tell me yes," I said.
"Yes." Barely a word at all. "Ronan. Yes."
I drew her jeans down and off, and what she wore under them, and I knelt back on my heels and took her in, laid out on my mother's rug in the firelight, flushed and wanting and so completely alive after a day that had spent itself trying to take the life out of her. For a breath all I could do was look.
"What," she said, gone self-conscious for the first time, an arm starting to fold across herself.
"Don't." I caught her wrist. Gentle. Moved it back down. "All those years I had a grave with your name on it. Let me look at the alternative a minute."
Whatever she meant to say, she let it go. She let me look.
Then I lowered my head and stopped letting either of us think.
I took my time. I'd had a long drought of no time and I wasn't going to rush the hour I'd been handed. I learned her slowly, with my mouth, the way I learned everything that ever mattered, by paying attention, reading the catch of her breath and the tightening of her thighs until I found the thing that undid her. When I found it I stayed, and stayed, until she had one handfisted in my hair and the other reaching blind across the floor for something to hold.
I gave it to her. The good hand. I laced my fingers through hers and held on against the wool, because this was not only my mouth on her. This was a man who'd buried the idea that wanting was even allowed, being let, for one night, to give. To the one person he'd been certain he would never get to give anything to at all.
"Ronan." My name, broken clean in half. "Ronan, I'm going to."
"I know," I said against her. "I've got you. Let go."
She came with my name in her mouth, her spine lifting off the rug and her hand crushing mine. I held her through all of it, gentling as the waves slowed, until she sank back into the wool loose and gasping with her free arm thrown over her eyes.
I was well past wanting her. I won't pretend otherwise. All those years had pressed it down into something with weight, and she was right there in the firelight, undone and willing, and it would have cost me nothing. A button. A breath. She'd have pulled me in and been glad of it.
I sat back on the rug. I drew her underwear and her jeans back up her legs, gently, and I did not take what I wanted.
She moved her arm and looked at me. Hazy, then less hazy as it landed.
"You didn't," she said.
"No."
"I wanted you to." Not hurt. Just knocked clean off her feet by it.
"I know." I stretched out beside her on the rug, up on an elbow, and brushed the damp hair off her forehead. I kissed her softly so she could taste herself on me, and felt the shiver go through her. "And you'll have me. All of me. But not tonight. Not on the worst day of your life, with the man you found out wasa ghost this afternoon still sitting behind your eyes, when you came in here to get an hour away from your own head." I held her gaze. "The first time I have you, you're going to be clear. Clear enough to know exactly what it is and exactly who I am, and you're going to choose it with the whole of your mind, not because grief made you want to disappear for an hour." I traced a thumb along her jaw. "You deserve to be a decision, Sienna. Not an escape from one."
