Her free hand comes up and her palm flattens against my chest, right over the center of it, feeling my heartbeat with the same steady attention she gives everything. First clinical. Then not.
"Ronan," she says.
I let go of her wrist.
My hand finds her jaw instead.
Chapter 9 – Harper
He doesn’t ask. He tilts my face up with two fingers under my chin and kisses me like a decision already made—no hesitation, no softness, just heat and pressure from a man who does nothing halfway.
I stop thinking.
His hands find my waist and he lifts me off the floor in one motion, effortless strength that doesn’t need to announce itself. I make a sound I’m not prepared for. He doesn’t react—just sets me across his lap like that’s exactly where I belong, dark eyes tracking me with an expression that isn’t soft and isn’t asking.
I wrap my legs around him.
His breath stays controlled. Everything about him does—jaw tight, hands precise, eyes cataloguing every response. It should feel clinical. It doesn’t.
"Bedroom," he says. One word.
Not a question.
He carries me like I weigh nothing, which I don't, and if Derek ever made me feel like my body was a problem to be managed, Ronan makes me feel like it's exactly the right amount of everything. He sets me down and his hands go to the hem of my shirt and he pauses there, the only pause he's made, and looks at me.
Checking.
Not asking. Checking. There's a difference.
"Yes," I say, because he needs to hear it and I need to say it.
He pulls the shirt over my head.
He is not gentle.
He's not rough either. He's… precise. Focused. The same way he handles an engine, the same way he rides, like every movement is intentional and nothing is wasted and he has all the time in the world but chooses not to waste any of it. His mouth at my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder, and I arch into him because there's nothing else to do.
"Ronan—"
"I heard you," he says against my skin.
He's still dressed and I pull at his shirt and he straightens and takes it off with the complete lack of self-consciousness of a man who stopped caring about being looked at years ago. The tattoos cover both arms and his chest, military ink, old and precise. The scar runs along his jaw but there are others, smaller, elsewhere. A map of where he's been written in skin.
I put my hands on him.
He goes very still. That controlled stillness of his, like the surface of something deep.
"You have no idea," he says, voice low and rough, "what you do to me."
He says it almost like an accusation. Like I've caused him damage and he's reporting the injury.
It might be the most honest thing he's said since I met him.
I pull him back down.
His mouth finds my throat and I close my eyes and the storm outside is just noise now, irrelevant, because there's only the heat of his hands and the low sound he makes when I run my fingers up his back and the very specific way he says my name when he's not trying to control how it comes out.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me.
