Page 8 of Ruin
Doesn't speak.
Just watches me walk toward him, and the weight of his gaze is a physical thing.
Pressure against my skin. Heat pooling low in my stomach. Every nerve ending firing awake after twelve months of hibernation.
I stop three feet away.
Close enough to see his pupils dilate.
Close enough to smell him—sandalwood, smoke, and something underneath that's just danger wearing cologne.
"You kept it on." His voice is low. Unhurried. It rolls through me like thunder.
I touch the collar with two fingers. "Did you think I wouldn't?"
His jaw clenches. Barely. "I thought you might surprise me."
"Oh, I will."
I close the distance and straddle his lap.
My knees sink into the leather on either side of his thighs, my dress riding up, and he hooks his fingers through the collar and pulls my mouth to his.
He tastes like whiskey and control.
I take both.
The kiss isn't tender. It isn't a reunion.
It's a declaration—teeth against his lower lip, my tongue past his, my hand fisted in the front of his shirt.
I kiss him like I've spent three hundred and sixty-five nights imagining exactly this.
Because I have. Every night.
In every empty bed that smelled nothing like him.
Through every polished dinner and careful performance of the woman I was becoming, underneath it all was this—the ache of his absence and the knowledge that I would come back to this room, this man, this darkness that fit around me like skin.
His hands find my hips.
The grip is immediate.
Bruising.
Fingers digging into flesh hard enough to leave marks I'll find tomorrow, but he doesn't direct.
Not yet.
He's letting me lead. We both know that's new. I pull back.
His eyes are black. Not gray—black.
The steel swallowed by dilated pupils and something raw and starving he's not bothering to hide.
"I'm not the girl you sent away," I tell him.
His thumb presses into the hollow of my hip bone, hard enough to hurt. "Then show me who you are now."
