Page 115 of Boardroom Mask

I reach up and wipe the rain off his cheek with my thumb. He flinches at the tenderness but doesn’t pull away.

“That man in there was right,” Kir says. “If this keeps going, it can only end one way. It’s not happy. So if you’re in this fora happy ending, start fucking running and don’t stop until you can’t see me anymore, little fox.”

I scoff. “If I said okay, would you even let me go?”

Kir frowns. “I mean…”

“You’re a masked stalker,” I remind him. “You’re not exactly the ‘let her go’ type.”

There’s almost a smile there, hidden under the rain and the exhaustion. “No. I’m not.”

“So it’s death for both of us, then.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Yeah, it probably is.”

I nod. “Then let’s enjoy this while it lasts. Because I’m not going fucking anywhere.”

A beat.

A pause.

A cold, foggy, lonely, rain-soaked silence.

Then he’s kissing me, and I’m kissing him. We’re grabbing fistfuls of each other because close is not close enough. It’s the heat of our bodies against the chill of an uncaring world, but here in the darkness, we’ve found a place that’s safe.

“Take me home,” I pant between kisses. “I need you.”

He flags a cab down and we fall into it, kissing like teenagers, nestled close, tangled, torn up, tortured, totally lost in one another. We get out of the cab the same way, and we race up the stairs to my apartment, stumble through the door already half-undressed and find ourselves tumbling into my bed, still trapped in what’s left of our drenched clothing.

We manage to shuck it all off somehow, never separating our mouths for longer than is absolutely necessary. My skin has gone from goosebumps to flushed, and Kir’s is the same, hotter than ever. I’m surprised that the rain isn’t sizzling and boiling off of us.

But when we’re naked and he’s touching me and his hardness rises up as the perfect match for what I need so, so badly, I stop him for a second. I reach into my clutch where it landed beside my bed and pull something out of it.

Kir looks down at what I’m holding, then back up at me.

“Old habits,” I explain with a shy grin.

He takes the white mask he left behind in the alley and pulls it on. As soon as he does, this aching, delicious easing steals through my core. A deadbolt opening. A thrown-wide door beckoning for him to enter.

“Sometimes,” I whisper, “I can’t believe you’re real.”

“Likewise,” he agrees, and then he’s inside me, and we take each other somewhere way beyond where death or threats or rain could ever possibly touch us.

I jolt awake gasping, but the nightmare that woke me is already gone. The room smells like rain.Petrichor—that’s what that scent is called. I remember an English literature professor in college telling me how much they loved that word. I like it, too.Petrichor, cinnamon, and sex. It soothes me like nothing else in my life ever has.

But what soothes me even more is what happens next.

I reach out…

… and he’sthere.

He’s never stayed the night before, but here he is, real and in the flesh. My fingers graze his chest first, then travel up to his jaw, and I almost laugh, because the idiot fell asleep with the mask still on. It’s crooked now, twisted to one side, the elastic digging into the skin behind his ear. He shows no sign of it bothering him in his sleep.

I ease the mask off him as carefully as I can so I don’t wake him up. His face underneath is slack and young, unguarded in a way I’ve never seen it. The ever-present boiling rage is gone.

I press butterfly-light kisses to each of his closed eyelids, then I set the mask on the nightstand and watch him for a while. The bruise under his left eye. The faint scar near his lip. The long lashes fanned out against his cheekbones.

Love.