He kissed her as though the world were ending.
There was no gentleness in it, no measured exploration—only urgency. A man attempting to outrun time by refusing to waste a single moment of it.
She met him with equal fervour. Her fingers tangled in his hair, drawing him closer. Her back met the door, and she welcomed it—the solid certainty of something unyielding behind her, of him before her, of heat and closeness and the fierce refusal to let this slip away unmarked.
This is what four weeks feels like, she thought.This is what borrowed time tastes like.
“Hurry,” she breathed. “Dominic—”
He lifted her, and she wrapped herself around him as he carried her to the bed. They fell together, the narrow frame protesting faintly beneath them, wholly unequal to the urgency it was asked to contain.
His hands moved with intent—less careful than before, but no less knowing. He traced the lines he had already learned, as though committing them anew, as though memory might preserve what time threatened to take.
“I cannot lose you,” he said against her throat, the words roughened by strain. “Lorraine—I have tried to find a way, but there is none—the law—”
“Not now.” She drew him back to her, steady despite the tremor in her breath. “Tell me tomorrow. Tonight—stay.”
He made a sound—half-groan, half-sob—and kissed her so deeply she forgot where her body ended and his began.
She was golden in the candlelight.
He had seen her like this before—unclothed, flushed, her hair loose and wild across the pillow—but tonight the sight struck him with a force that bordered on violence. Because tonight he saw her through the lens of loss. Every shadow sharpened by the knowledge that there were only so many nights left, and he was spending them, and there was no way to slow time except to fill each moment so completely that it could not pass unfelt.
He kissed the hollow of her throat, where her pulse raced. Her collarbone. The soft curve of her breast. When his mouth closed over her, she arched from the mattress, her fingers threading through his hair, a broken sound escaping her as his teeth grazed the sensitive peak.
Remember this,he told himself.The way she tastes. The way she sounds. The exact shade of pink that spreads across her chest when you touch her here—and here—and here.
Remember everything. Because you may not be allowed to keep it.
He moved lower with an attention that was part reverence, part desperation. Her ribs—where she was ticklish and tried to hide it. Her navel. The soft, vulnerable skin of her inner thigh, where her breath caught and her hips shifted restlessly, her hand finding the back of his head and urging him closer.
“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t tease. Not tonight.”
He did not tease.
He settled between her thighs and gave her his mouth with a hunger that left no room for patience or artistry—just the urgent, consuming need to feel her come apart against his tongue, to hear the sounds she made when she stopped being careful, to taste the evidence of her wanting and know that whatever else the world took from him, this—this—was real.
She crested with his name on her lips, her hand fisted in the sheets, her back bowed like a drawn bow. He held her through it, hands gripping her hips, mouth relentless, drawing it out until she was shaking and spent and pulling at his shoulders with fingers that could not find their grip.
“Come here,” she breathed. “Come here—I need—”
He rose over her, bracing himself on shaking arms. He looked down at her—flushed, luminous, undone—and something in his chest gave way.
Then he moved into her in one slow, devastating stroke.
The sound that left him was not a sound he recognised. It came from somewhere below language, below thought—a raw, animal acknowledgement of being inside the woman he loved while the clock ticked and the ship sailed and the world conspired to tear them apart.
“Look at me,” Lorraine whispered.
He did.
Her eyes—storm-dark, deeper than he had ever seen them—held his with a ferocity equal to the way her body held him.
“I’m here,” she said. “Right here. Don’t go anywhere else.”
I’m not, he thought—and began to move.
Over the weeks, she had learned the different versions of him.
