She took it.
I drew her up out of the chair, and then she was close, in the firelight, near enough that I stopped being able to pretend at distance. And God. Up close she was something else. The line of her jaw. The heat coming off her skin. The quality of her attention that made you the only thing in the room.
"Still time to change your mind," I said.
"I know."
She didn't change it.
I brought my hand up and cupped her jaw, and she let me, and I kissed her slow. She'd been in a hurry for years. This wasn't a thing that needed hurrying.
She kissed me back.
Her hands fisted in my shirt. She kissed me back like someone who'd kept herself under hard lock a long time and just turned the key. I got an arm around the small of her back and pulled her flush, and there was no resistance in her anywhere, only a sound against my mouth that did away with most of my remaining thoughts.
"Tiernan," she said against my lips.
"Still here."
She made a sound that was almost a laugh. I pulled back just far enough to take her in, flushed, breathing harder than a minute ago, and I grinned, because I couldn't not.
"Don't smile like that," she said.
"Can't help it."
"It's very..." She stopped.
"Very what?"
"Tiernan," she said, with a warning in it.
"Sienna," I said back, with none.
Something broke open in her face. Not the management. Not the careful read. The thing underneath, the one she'd kept behind everything.
She pulled me back down by the collar. I went.
I kissed her the way I hadn't let myself since Chicago, one hand in her hair and the other flat between her shoulder blades, holding her to me like that was the entire point. The warm room and the low fire and the black night outside were all still there and none of it mattered. She had her hands knotted in my shirt and she was making sounds against my mouth I planned to spend a long time learning by heart.
I pulled back.
She made a sound of protest.
"Not here," I said. "Not like something we have to keep quiet about at two in the morning. You've had years of quiet. Not for this."
Her face opened on something warm and complicated, a thing I didn't have a name for yet and meant to learn.
"Tiernan," she said.
"Sienna."
She took my hand and led me upstairs.
Her room waswarm from the fire Cormac had laid, dark but for that and the gray sea-light in the window. I had about four seconds to take it in before she turned, pulled her shirt over her head, threw it somewhere, and stood there daring me to do something about it.
I did something about it.
I crossed the room, got my hands on her waist, and walked her back toward the bed. She went, her fingers already at my shirt buttons, working them with a focus that made me want to laugh and made it very hard to think at the same time. She shoved the shirt off my shoulders, ran her palms up my chest, and took inventory of what she'd uncovered with that same directness she brought to everything.
