The Bride He Didn’t Choose

Chapter 6: Run It Again

Mia

He doesn't kiss me that night. He wants to — I can see it, plain as anything, in the way his eyes drop to my mouth and then away, in the muscle that jumps in his jaw when he makes himself step back instead of closer — and the not-doing-it somehow undoes me faster than if he had.

"Get some sleep," he says, low, rough.

"Tomorrow we start making sure Kieran Ashford regrets ever deciding you were a door worth using."

He leaves before I can answer, and I lie awake long after, replaying the particular restraint in his hands, the specific discipline it must have cost a man like Damian Cross to walk out of a room he clearly didn't want to leave.

It takes three more days for that restraint to break.

It happens after a security briefing goes badly — a name surfaces, an associate of Kieran's inside Damian's own security team, and I watch Damian go somewhere cold and lethal I haven't seen from him before, dismissing his whole team with four clipped words and rounding on me the second the door shuts behind them.

"You should not have been in that room," he says. "If this goes as badly as I think it might—"

"I'm not going anywhere," I say, cutting him off, done, entirely done, with being managed. "You can be furious. You can lock every door in this house. But you don't get to decide how much of this I'm allowed to be part of, Damian. Not anymore."

Something in him finally, fully breaks.

He crosses the room in two strides and kisses me like a man who has spent four days rationing himself and has simply run out of reasons to keep doing it — one hand fisting in my hair, the other splayed hot against my lower back, hauling me against him like he needs the proof of me being solid and here and choosing this, and I kiss him back with everything I've been holding since the church, since the boathouse, since every careful, furious, charged moment between us that led here.

"Tell me to stop," he says against my mouth, voice wrecked, "and I will."

I don't tell him to stop.

What happens after that happens slowly, and then not slowly at all — his control finally, entirely gone, mine right behind it, two people who have spent a week circling each other with warnings and weapons finally choosing, in the dark, to stop being careful with each other in every sense but the ones that matter. It is not gentle. It does not feel, in the moment, like either of us wants it to be.

I wake the next morning wrapped in his arms, his heartbeat slow and steady under my ear, and understand, with a clarity that terrifies me more than any assassination plot could, that somewhere in the last week I have stopped being the woman who was shoved into someone else's wedding dress.

I have become, entirely and without permission, a woman in love with the man everyone wants dead.