Page 47 of Curvy Sold Mate

“You’re using the wrong knife,” she said.

Viktor turned. She was leaning against the door frame with her arms loose at her sides, the armor off, which was a version of Olivia he’d seen three times in the weeks since their names were drawn.

“Elena would kill you,” she said.

“Elena isn’t here.”

“Elena is always here. She’s omniscient. She knows you’re mutilating her sourdough right now, and she’s furious about it from wherever she is.”

His mouth moved at the corner before he could stop it, and she saw it—he watched her see it, watched the way her eyes tracked the movement and the way something in her face softened in response.

She crossed the kitchen. The room was large—the largest in the compound, in fact—but the distance between the doorway and the counter was twelve feet, and she covered it in a way that made twelve feet feel like a corridor that was narrowing with each step. She reached past him for the serrated blade on the magnetic strip, and the reaching brought her close enough that her shoulder grazed his chest. The scent of her—soap, the herbs from the garden, the clean, sharp warmth that was just her—settled into the air between them with an intimacy that had nothing to do with proximity and everything to do with intent.

She set the bread knife down on the counter and turned to face him. Her back was against the edge, and he was close, and neither of them was pretending the closeness was accidental.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“About bread knives.”

“About the ritual. The one I helped build.” She held his gaze, and what was in her eyes carried the same quality of focus she brought to the investigation—thorough, steady, aimed at a conclusion she’d already reached and was now delivering. “I spent eight months writing a framework designed to give women a choice. And then the magic chose me, and I spent the next month being furious about it, because I thought the choice had been taken away from me—the kidnapping, the ransom, the marriage, all of it stacked on top of each other until the choice felt like a joke.”

He didn’t speak. The kitchen was quiet around them, the day’s last light coming through the high windows in amber panels that lay across the flagstones and climbed the far wall.

“But the choice wasn’t taken from me,” she said. “It was delayed. The magic drew our names before any of the rest happened. The bond existed before Marcus, before the shard, before you stood on a trail and told me I was marrying you with the emotional delivery of a man reading a terms-of-service agreement.” Her mouth shifted—wry, self-aware, the expression she wore when she was being honest about something that also happened to be funny. “The magic didn’t steal my agency. It just got there first. And I’ve spent weeks being angry at the order of events instead of looking at the event itself.”

The bond between them was doing something he hadn’t felt before—a widening, a deepening, as though the channel that connected them was being cleared of debris he hadn’t known was there. He could feel her through it with a clarity that made his hands want to move. He kept them at his sides, because this was hers, and the choosing had to be hers, and if his hands moved before she finished, he would be taking something she was trying to give.

“I’m choosing this,” she said. “You. The bond. The whole of it. And I need you to understand that I’m choosing it freely, with my eyes open, because the magic was right, and I was running from what it gave me, and the running is done.”

Viktor looked at her. At the dark hair against the green shirt, the brown eyes holding his with a steadiness that would have been impossible from the woman who’d stood in this kitchen weeks ago with a mug she didn’t want and a wound she couldn’t name. She was the same woman, and she wasn’t—the architecture hadn’t changed, the sharpness, the capability, and the mind that ran circles around his own. But the foundation underneath had shifted, and what she was standing on now was her own ground, not the scaffolding she’d built over the absence of it.

“You’re sure,” he said, and the roughness in his voice surprised him.

“I’m terrified,” she said. “Sure and terrified. Both. I’m told that’s how it’s supposed to feel when it matters.”

Viktor reached for her, and the reaching was slow, deliberate. His thumb traced the line of her jaw, and his fingers curved into the warmth behind her ear. His palm settled against her face, and she leaned into it.

He kissed her with his full attention, unhurried, as though the only thing in the world that required his competence was the feel of her mouth against his and the shudder of her breath when he caught her lower lip and the small sound she made that he would be replaying behind his eyes at three in the morning for the rest of his life.

She took his hand and led him from the kitchen.

***

She undressed herself.

He watched; she saw his eyes catalog every movement she made as she slowly pulled her shirt over her head.

He swallowed, and she lifted her chin. His eyes made it clear that she was beautiful. Perfect, and she was not going to let anything convince her otherwise. Not again.

She looked at him. Her hands went to her waistband. She unzipped her trousers and stepped out of them and folded them—folded them, the way he folded things, and the echo of his own habit aimed back at him made his chest do something complicated—and she stood in front of him in her bra and underwear and the body she’d carried for twenty-six years, and she didn’t cross her arms.

She didn’t angle her hips away. Didn’t reach for the lamp. Didn’t make the joke that would have redirected his attention from the soft curve of her belly to the sharp edge of her wit.

She stood still, and she let him look, and the letting was the bravest thing he had ever seen.

He crossed the room to her. His hand found her waist—the curve of it, the yielding place where hip met stomach and his thumb traced a slow line across her skin, following the curve, learning the give of it, and his other hand came up to her face, and he held her there—jaw and waist, the two points of contact grounding them both—and he kissed her again, slower, deeper, the kind of kiss that had nowhere to go because arriving was the point.

Her hands found his shirt. She undid the buttons one at a time—unhurried, precise, her fingers working down his chest with the focused attention she brought to archive files and investigation timelines, and the incongruity of it—Olivia’s meticulous, procedural thoroughness applied to the removal of his clothing—sent heat through him with a force that made his hands unsteady against her skin.