"Not like this." His voice was raw. "Never like this."
The dress slid from her shoulders. She let it fall. And the sight of her, bare except for the thin fabric beneath, lit gold by the Mediterranean sunset through the windows, hit him in the chest like a fist.
He had seen beautiful things. He owned a casino full of them. Crystal and marble and art that cost more than buildings. None of it had ever done what her bare shoulders did to his ability to breathe.
She shivered. Not cold. The shiver of a woman standing in front of someone for the first time with nothing to hide behind.
"Don't look at me like that," she managed.
"Like what?"
"Like I'm— like I'm something."
"You are something."
"I'm a girl in her underwear in a penthouse. That's a very specific category of something and it isn't the category you're implying."
He pulled her against him. One arm around her waist, his other hand cradling the back of her head, and her body pressed against his chest and the contact, the full-length warmth of her against him with the silk gone and only the thin cotton of his shirt between them, tore a sound from his throat that he didn't recognize.
She made a sound back. Small. Startled. Her face was in his neck and her fingers were gripping his shirt and she was trembling, and the trembling wasn't fear, it was everything, the accumulated weight of two years and a closed door and an opened one and a chair in the dark and a kitchen counter and a proposal that stopped the world.
He lifted her. Carried her down the hall. Not to the guest room. To his room. His door, which had been the first wall between them and was now the last threshold, and he carried her through it and set her on his bed and the click of the door behind them was not a closing.
It was a beginning.
She reached for his shirt. Her fingers found the buttons, and she couldn't get them open, her hands were trembling too hard, and the frustrated sound she made was so perfectly Mia that something behind his ribs cracked. He covered her hands with his. Helped her. One button, then the next, their fingers working together the way they'd worked together on the counter when she'd lifted her hips to help him, and the cooperation was its own intimacy, the language of two people who had been learning each other's bodies in pieces and were finally allowed to learn them whole.
The shirt fell. Her palms pressed against his chest, and the touch of her hands on his bare skin sent a tremor through him that he felt in his teeth. She traced the lines of him the way she'd traced his collarbone on the kitchen counter, the way she traced everything, with the diligence of a woman who kept a mental spreadsheet and was adding a new column.
"Your heart is fast," she whispered.
"I know."
"Faster than in the kitchen."
"I know that too."
He lowered her to the bed. Slowly. His hand cradling the back of her head, her hair fanning across his sheets, his sheets, not the guest room's, and the sight of her there, in his bed, in his room, in the space he had kept empty for twenty-two years, was more than his composure could hold.
He traced her. Collarbone. The line of her shoulder. The curve of her waist. Everywhere his fingers went, her skin rose to meet him, and the sounds she made were small and continuous andwrecked, and each one was a confession she couldn't have held back if she'd tried.
"Alexei—"
"I'm here."
"I know you're here, I can feel you everywhere, that's the problem—"
He kissed her throat. The hollow where her pulse hammered. The soft skin below her collarbone where his mouth had been before, in the kitchen, except this time there was nothing between his lips and her skin, and the heat of her, the taste of her, the way her back arched when his mouth found the places that made her gasp, turned the room into something airless and burning.
Her fingers were in his hair. Holding him where she wanted him. Not gentle. The grip of a woman who had chased him for two years and had finally caught him and wasn't letting go, and the fierceness of it, the absolute refusal to be tentative, was so brave it made his eyes sting.
He moved lower. Her ribs. The soft plane of her stomach. She shivered and her hands tightened in his hair and the sound she made was his name, broken in half, and he pressed his mouth to her hip and felt her whole body tense.
"Please." Her voice was a ruin. "Alexei, please."
He came back up. His body over hers. His weight settling against her, and she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down and the press of his body against the full length of hers, nothing between them, skin against skin, tore sounds from both of them that filled the dark room.
Her hands found his face. Both palms. The same way she'd held him in the kitchen when she'd said I've got you. She held him now and her eyes found his and in the dark they were black and bright and trusting in a way that leveled every wall he'd ever built.
