Close. Close enough that he could smell the lemon soap and the burnt risotto and the shampoo that had been in his lungs all day. Close enough that if he reached out, his fingertips would brush the bare skin of her shoulder.
He didn't reach out.
She did.
Her hand rose. Slow. She pressed her palm to the side of his face, and the touch was so light it barely registered, and his eyes closed before he could stop them.
Alexei Almazov hadn't been touched with tenderness in twenty-two years.
Not since his father. Not since the phone call from the prison guard, the one that had ended his childhood and started the engine that drove everything after. His brothers loved him, but the Almazov men didn't touch each other. They didn't hold or comfort or reach across the distance. They texted good and it's over and tell me you're coming home, and the words carried the weight of all the things they couldn't do with their hands.
And now a girl was standing in front of him with her palm against his cheek, and the warmth of it was searing, and his body didn't know what to do with gentleness, and the sound that came from his chest was barely human.
"It's okay," she murmured. "I've got you."
His words. His words, from that morning. I've got you. She was giving them back, and the echo of it broke something in him that he didn't know was holding.
Her thumb traced his cheekbone. Her other hand came up, and both palms were on his face now, and she was tilting his head up to meet her eyes, and the reversal of it, the sheer inversion of their positions, him sitting and her standing, her hands on his face and his hands in his lap, undid him more completely than any kiss.
"Let me," she whispered.
He didn't ask what she meant. He knew. His body knew before his brain caught up, because his hands were trembling, and she could see it, and he couldn't hide it, and the inability to hide was its own surrender.
She leaned down and kissed him.
Not how he'd kissed her. Not desperate, not explosive, not the collision of two years of denial. She kissed him like someone who wasn't afraid of losing him, slow and warm and sure, and her fingers slid into his hair, and the sound he made against her mouth was the sound of a man giving up.
His hands came up. They found her waist, and his grip was too tight, he knew it was too tight, but his fingers wouldn't obey, because they'd spent twenty-two years gripping steering wheels and desks and the edges of his own control, and they didn't know how to hold something gently.
"You're shaking," she murmured against his mouth.
"I know."
"Let me take care of you."
He pulled back. Just enough to see her face. Her eyes were brown and bright and full of something so fierce it wrecked him, and he should have refused, he should have closed the door, he should have done any of the things that the man he'd built himself into would have done—
"Yes."
One word. The most terrifying word he'd ever spoken, because he had given orders that moved millions and made decisions that ended careers, and none of them had cost him what this single syllable cost.
She kissed him again. Deeper this time. Her hands in his hair, her body leaning into him, and the chair scraped back and he pulled her down onto his lap, and her knees were on either side of him and her weight settled against him and a groan tore from his throat that he couldn't have stopped if his life depended on it.
"Mia—"
"Shh." Her mouth was on his neck. His collar. The hollow of his throat where his pulse was hammering. Her fingers worked the buttons of his shirt, and every brush of her knuckles against his chest sent a tremor through him that he felt in his spine.
He gripped the edge of the chair with one hand. His other arm was around her waist, and his face was pressed against her shoulder, and he was breathing hard, and the control was gone, and the wall was gone, and there was nothing left between them but the thin fabric of his open shirt and the warmth of her hands on his skin.
She touched him like she'd been studying him. Like the mental spreadsheet of his tells extended to this, to the places that made him seize, to the spot below his collarbone where her fingertip traced a line and his entire body locked.
"Tell me if this is okay," she breathed.
"It's—" His voice was gravel. He couldn't finish the sentence because her palm was on his chest, over his heart, and she held it there, and the simple act of feeling his heartbeat under her hand was more intimate than anything they'd done that morning.
"Your heart is so fast," she whispered.
He couldn't answer. Her hand slid lower. Over his ribs. Along the ridge of muscle at his stomach, and his body reacted before his mind could intervene, his hips pressing upward, and the contact tore a sound from both of them.
