Rovin
It’s five days after the dinner and Claudia is in the kitchen making tea, wearing a silk robe over her pajamas. Her hair is loose around her shoulders, and I am done waiting.
I’ve been patient and given her space to become accustomed to her new normal. I have let her settle into my home, learn its rhythms, become familiar with her life here. She has explored the house, reorganized the bookshelves, started running in the mornings with the security detail trailing her at a respectful distance. She has had dinner with my brothers and the varying women they found at the auction dinner. She has spoken to my household staff with the quiet authority of someone who was born to manage people, and they respond to her already as though she belongs here.
She does belong here. That is no longer a question. The question is how long I can sustain this controlled distance between us before I break apart.
The answer is: no longer.
"Claudia."
She turns from the kettle. The robe is deep blue, catching the warm light. Her collarbones are bare where it peels open against her skin, and the silk moves against her body when she breathes.
"Come here."
She reads something in my voice, in my face. I see the recognition in her eyes, the way her pupils dilate, the way her lips part on an inhale. She sets the kettle down.
She walks to me.
I take her face in both hands. She is looking up at me with those gold eyes, and I can feel her pulse fluttering against my palm where it rests at the side of her neck.
"I told you that when I took you to my bed, it would be permanent," I say.
"Yes."
"I'm taking you to my bed, now."
She rises on her toes and kisses me, and the kiss is different from the one on the sofa. This one has no patience in it. Her mouth is hot and open and demanding, and her hands grip my shirt, pulling me down, pulling me closer, and I let her. I let this woman pull me off my foundation because I have been waiting for someone strong enough to do it.
I lift her. Her legs wrap around my waist and the robe falls open, and I carry her to my bedroom. My room. The room she hasn’t been inside, the room I haven’t let her enter because I knew that once she was in it, I would not be able to let her leave.
The bed is large and dark and made with military precision, and I lower her onto it and follow her down. Her hair fans across my pillows, dark against white, and reverence surges through me.
"I need you to hear me," I say. I am above her, my weight on my forearms, my body between her thighs. The silk of her robe has parted and I can feel the heat of her skin through the thin fabric of her sleep clothes. "What happens in this bed is not a negotiation. It's not a transaction. When I'm inside you, youare mine, completely and permanently, and I need you to want that."
"I want that." Her voice is barely above a whisper, but it has steel in it. "I have wanted that for six years."
There it is again. Six years.
“What’s six years?” I ask as I move my lips from her mouth to her jaw, her earlobe.
I kiss her throat. I find the place where her pulse is strongest and I press my mouth against it, and I feel her heartbeat against my lips, rapid and fierce.
She moans before answering me. “The first night I met you. I knew I wanted you to be my everything.”
I unwrap the robe from her body slowly. She is wearing a thin top and shorts underneath, and I remove both with a deliberation that makes her arch beneath me. Her skin is smooth and golden in the dim light, and I put my mouth on every inch of it I can reach, her collarbone, the space between her breasts, the soft plane of her stomach.
“Everything?” I ask.
She nods in response, pulling at my shirt. I let her strip it off. Her hands find my chest, my shoulders, the hard ridges of my abdomen, and she touches me with the focused attention I've come to recognize as uniquely hers, as though everything she touches is being memorized.
"You're extraordinary," she says, and the way she says it, reverent and hungry, makes my blood run hot.
I kiss my way down her stomach. Her muscles tense and release under my lips. When I reach the waistband of her shorts I pull them down, and she lifts her hips to help me. I look at her, all of her, laid out on my bed, bare and willing and watching me with eyes that hold no fear.
"Tell me what you want," I say against the inside of her thigh.
Her breath shudders. "You know what I want."
