Claimed as the Wrong Bride

Chapter 10 Part 6: First Catch

Bastien did not sleep immediately.

He stood at the window for a while after Adler and Rook had gone, which was not unusual. He often stood at windows. He found the city useful to look at when he was thinking, the specific pattern of it, the logic that became visible from above that was invisible from inside.

He was thinking about Octavia Maddox.

Not about the marriage. Not about the territory or the commission or the twelve months or the Maddox family's possible sabotage or any of the other pieces of the situation that had legitimate professional claim on his attention. He was thinking about her specifically, the particular texture of her, and he was doing it with the uncomfortable clarity of a man who had noticed something and could no longer unnotice it.

She was beautiful. He had registered this at the gallery the way he registered things that were relevant and had set it aside in the professional category, which was where he put information that was present but not immediately actionable. He had been setting it aside since then and it had been declining to stay set aside, and the performance tonight had made the declining considerably more emphatic.

He had watched her on that stage and he had not looked away once, which was information.

He thought about the courtyard. About the specific sounds she made. About the way she had looked at him when he told her to look at him and she had held his gaze and moved her hips and the combination had produced something in him that he was still dealing with three weeks later in the specific way a man dealt with an unsatisfied want, which was not well.

He was hard. Had been since the performance, if he was being precise about it, and he was always precise about things. He had managed it through the conversation with Adler and Vex and Rook with the particular controlled patience he applied to most inconveniences, but the room was empty now and patience had limits and his body had been making the same extremely specific suggestions since the gallery.

He stayed at the window.

He looked at the city below, the specific pattern of it at this hour, and he let his hand do what it had been waiting to do since eleven-forty-five on Crane Street when she had caught his wrist and looked at him without flinching and then walked into a crowd and disappeared.

He thought about her sounds. The specific ones, the ones that had started as controlled and became something else entirely, something that came from underneath the control, the sounds a woman made when her body was being too thoroughly attended to for composure to hold. He had catalogued them with the same attention he gave to everything and he retrieved them now with the specific clarity of a man who had paid close attention to what mattered.

He thought about her on that stage tonight. The unhurried precision of her, the complete ownership of a woman who knew exactly what her body could do and was choosing to demonstrate it, and the specific moment she had looked at him mid-set, direct and without breaking, and looked away again as though he were simply information being filed.

He thought about the courtyard wall. The cold stone and the specific sounds she had made as he worked her open with his fingers. The full weight of her taking him in the first time, that particular sound, that particular grip of her hands in his shirt. How loud she had been. How unashamed. How she had said look at me and then held his gaze with those grey-green eyes while everything unraveled and had not looked away once.

He stroked himself harder. He thought about her mouth. About what he intended to do with that mouth when he had her close enough to act on what his body had been suggesting consistently for three weeks. He thought about being inside her again, not in a gallery courtyard with four minutes and a stone wall, but properly, with time and intention, with her entirely his and nowhere to run to.

He came against the window glass with the city spread out below him and her name in his mind and the specific and driving awareness that his hand was not what he wanted and would not be what he settled for.

She was somewhere down there. In a parking structure or a doorway or one of the grey zone buildings she knew how to find, without a hat, in the cold, while he stood at this window forty floors up with her file on the legal pad behind him and her gym membership frozen and her storage unit on a feed he could pull at any time.

He had her name.

He was going to have everything else.

He cleaned up. Looked at the city for another moment.

He did not sleep immediately.