HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

He found me in the library at midnight.

I wasn't hiding. I hadn't returned to my room yet, and the library was the only room in the compound that did not seem to be holding its breath around me. I had a book open on my lap that I didn't read a word of, my legs folded under me, and the lamp in the corner did just enough.

When the door opened, I knew it was him before I looked up.

I always knew. That was the problem.

"You should be sleeping," he said.

"You should mind your business."

He came in anyway. Closed the door. Didn't explain himself. He looked at the chair across from mine and didn't take it—just stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching me the way he'd been watching me since I came back. Like he'd already made a decision and was simply waiting for me to arrive at the same one.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing."

"Then stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

I didn't answer. Answering meant naming it, and naming it meant I'd have to do something about it.

He crossed the room. Without asking, he took the book from my hand and put it spine-up on the windowsill. I raised my eyes to the sky to say something about this, and there he was, so close that I could see the light glinting on his jaw, and whatever it was dissolved.

"Raze."

"I know," he said.

His fingers came to the side of my face. Not grabbing, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw, slow, as if he were rememorizing something that he had memorized. My breath came out unsteady, and I hated it, hated the way my body had never once had the decency to pretend with him.

This is a bad idea," I said.

"Probably."

"I mean it."

"I know you do." He pressed his thumb to my lower lip, just enough to part my lips, and they opened on their own. "Tell me to stop."

I didn't.

He pulled me up from the chair by my jaw, unhurried, certain, and when his mouth came down on mine, it wasn't what I'd expected—not the aggression from the study, not the possessiveness from three years of wanting turned to fury.

I gripped his shirt with both hands.

“Three years,” I spoke into his lips.

"Don't count." His lips kissed my throat, the tender spot under my ear, the curve of my shoulder. "Not tonight."

His hands undid the bottom of my shirt and pulled it over my head and his mouth was on mine even before I could finish breathing out. I was fumbling with his buttons with not the strongest of my fingers and he let me, keeping his lips picking at my collarbone while I pushed his shirt off his shoulders. Before I could think it through, my palm found the scar—that long, thick ridge on his left shoulder healed hard.

I felt him go still.

I put my hand on it, and he raised his head and looked at me.

We didn't talk.

Then he reached behind me and unclasped my bra, and the moment passed.

He laid me down on the settee and took his time, and that was his own particular destruction. His mouth moved over me without urgency—the curve of my breast, the soft skin beneath it, the plane of my stomach—each place deliberate, like he was settling a debt he'd been carrying for a long time. When he reached my underwear, I was already holding on to the armrest with one hand and his hair with the other.

He looked up at me once.

Just once. The look wasn't a question.

Then his mouth was on me, and I began to think no more.

He knew things. Specific and particular things — the exact pressure, the exact pace, when to be patient and when to take that patience away. His tongue worked against my c**t with a precision that made my hips lift off the cushion, and he let them, his hands spread across my thighs, reading every sound I made and adjusting without stopping.

"Raze—" His name came out broken.

He didn't answer. He slid two fingers inside me, slow and deep, and curled them in a way that made my spine arch completely off the settee. He didn't let my c**t out of his mouth. His fingers moved like a rapid heartbeat, increasing, increasing, and never reaching anything that could be considered "peak" until I was shaking and my thighs rested against the sides of his head and my hand was clenched in his hair, enough to hurt him.

It was like the orgasm came down from a high altitude.

I gripped my free hand tightly to my lips. It was trying to come out of me, but it was going to wake the east wing.

He stood. Pressed his lips to my temple. My cheek. The edge of my mouth. I tasted myself on him and felt nothing resembling shame.

I reached for his belt.

He let me. While I was at work working it open, while I was at work freeing him, while I was at work wrapping my hand around the length of him and feeling him breathe slowly out of his nose like a man knowing he must exercise control he doesn't trust. He was thick and warm in my hand, and I stroked him once, twice, and the sound low in his throat was the first unguarded thing I'd heard from him since I came back. It ran in me like electricity.

"Come here," he said.

He lifted me and settled me back against the cushions and came over me, one hand braced beside my head, the other guiding himself to my entrance. He pushed in slowly, and I felt each inch of him, the stretch, the fullness, the satisfaction of a body remembering something it'd been trying to forget for three years.

"Look at me," he said.

I did.

He started moving, and I fixed my eyes on him, and it was the most exposed I had been since I got back—not the way he was moving, not anything that he was doing, just that. He was in me, his eyes in mine. How he didn't do anything. How he was looking at me like the only thing that was important in the room.

He reached between us and found my c**t again, and I made a sound I couldn't suppress.

"Quiet," he said, mouth at my ear, hips steady.

“So stop doing that.”

He pressed harder, and I bit into his shoulder to keep from being loud about it.

The second time, it was with my nails in his back and my face pressed into his neck, and I felt him follow me out over the edge, his rhythm breaking at last, his grip on my hip tightening until it would leave a mark, his breath against my hair in a long, slow exhale that was the nearest he had ever come to being undone.

He stayed after.

That was what I hadn't let myself expect. He pulled my shirt back over my head with both hands, smoothed it down, and then sat on the floor with his back against the settee. I slid down beside him. The library was silent, the lamp still lit in the corner, the book still face down on the windowsill.

He didn't speak.

Neither did I.

We remained like this until I became drowsy; then he walked me to my door and gave me that same look he gave me when I first got here before I closed it.

As if he had made up his mind.

Like he was just waiting for me to stop pretending I hadn't.