"I thought you were dead!"
She froze.
Every plan she'd had, every speech she'd rehearsed in eight years of imagining this impossible moment, every wall she'd built brick by brick by brick, all of it simply stopped, because his arms were around her too hard and his heart was slamming against her cheek and his voice had come apart on the last word in a place where voices don't pretend.
He pulled back just enough to cup her face in both hands.
"All these years, Aislinn."
His hands were shaking. She could feel them shaking, this man who'd emptied a ballroom with two fingers, and she shook her head against his palms, no, no, because this wasn't the script, he wasn't allowed to be the wounded one, and she pushed at his chest and twisted and tried to be free of him.
He wouldn't let her go.
"I thought you were dead," he said again, wrecked, final, like a man laying down evidence.
And Aislinn looked up into his eyes and found the one thing she had never once, in eight years, allowed herself to imagine there.
Pain. Old pain, the load-bearing kind, the kind you build a life on top of because there's nothing else to build on. No man alive could counterfeit that. No dead man could carry it either. Whatever story she'd survived on for eight years, whatever had kept her walking, working, hiding, breathing, it just broke. Straight down its spine.
He wasn't joking.
He wasn't lying.
So when he pulled her in again and kissed her, grief and fury and eight lost years all at once, Aislinn stopped being sensible for the first time in nearly a decade, and kissed him back, and let the world rearrange itself around that, too.
He kissed her like a man correcting the record.
There was nothing polished about it, nothing that belonged to the creature who'd emptied a ballroom with two fingers. This was clumsy and starving and it kept breaking apart, because he kept pulling back half an inch to look at her, just look, as if she might have been swapped for someone else in the second his eyes were shut, and every time he did it he said her name.
"Aislinn."
Not a question. A roll call. A man checking, again and again, that the one name that mattered still answered.
"Aislinn."
"I'm here," she heard herself say, and her voice broke on it, because she was, she was here, and being here was the one thing she'd sworn on everything she had that she'd never be. Eight years of never driving past this part of any city. Of leaving rooms when certain names came up. Of building a life out of distance, brick by patient brick. And all of it had just come apart with one kiss, from a man who was supposed to have broken her heart.
She was crying again. He kissed that too, both cheeks, slow and thorough, like tears were simply another thing of hers he'd been starved of.
Then he picked her up.
He did it the old way, the remembered way, one arm and no visible effort, like she'd never weighed anything in her life, and her body, her traitorous, unsentimental, thirty-minute-lunch-break body, recognized it instantly and completely, the way you recognize your own front door. Her arms went around his neck without consulting her.
"You bought a hotel," she said against his jaw, somewhere between a sob and a laugh, because it was that or shatter.
"It was in the way."
And that, that, was what finally undid the last of her, the dry unbothered arrogance of him, unchanged across eight years and a mezzanine and a small boy with his face, and she was laughing and crying at the same time in the arms of a man carrying her through a hotel suite the size of her entire apartment, and neither of them could have said which of the two she was doing more.
He set her down like something that had been recovered rather than won.
And then he slowed down.
That was the part she hadn't braced for. The fury she could have withstood, the hunger she could have matched, but he took her hands, both of them, and turned them over, and stopped.
Her palms. The callus at the base of every finger. Eight years of double shifts and industrial cleaners and other people's furs, written where it couldn't be laundered out.
She watched him read them. She watched the most dangerous man she'd ever known bow his head over her working hands like a man at an altar, and press his mouth to one palm andthen the other, and she understood that she was watching an apology from someone who'd never learned the words for one, an apology for every year of it, every shift, every coat, every single hour he hadn't known she was alive to be tired.
