Page 104 of Dark Billionaire Predator

Then his hand comes up. Slowly. Not reaching for my waist or my throat or any of the places his hands usually go—the possessive places, the claiming places. His hand comes up and touches my face. Just touches it. Fingertips on my cheekbone, light, almost uncertain. The touch of a man who is not taking something but receiving it.

"I don't know how to do this," he says. His voice is rough. "I know how to want you. I know how to watch you and follow you and break into your apartment and memorize the side of the bed you sleep on. I know how to need you in ways that would fill a chapter of your next paper. But this—the part where I say it back and mean it and stay—I don't know how to do that. No one taught me."

"I know."

"I love you." He says it like he's testing the weight of it—feeling the words in his mouth for the first time, the unfamiliar shape of them. "I love you and I don't know what to do with that. I've never—it was never—" He stops. Starts again. "My mother was the last person I said that to. I was fourteen. She died and I stopped saying it because there was no one to say it to, and then there was you, and I still didn't say it because I thought if I said it you'd see how much of me is missing. How much of what's supposed to be inside a person just isn't there."

"It's there," I say. "Benedict. It's there."

He leans forward and puts his forehead against mine. Breathes. The breath is unsteady—the first time I've ever felt his body do something uncontrolled, something not calibrated or calculated or managed. His forehead against mine and his breath shaking and his hand on my face and we stay like that for a long time, breathing together in the cold apartment, and I think:this is what it feels like to hold someone's pain. This is what it feels like to have someone let you.

He kisses me. Or I kiss him. It doesn't matter who started—it's the kiss of two people who have survived the worst of each other and decided to stay. Not hungry, not desperate, not the consuming fire of the choir loft or the car or any of the places where we burned. Something quieter. Something that has roots.

I pull back. Look at him.

"I need you to know something," I say. "What happened tonight—Caspian, the house, the knife—I'm not choosing you because of that. I'm not choosing you because you rescued me. I'm choosing you because I see you and I'm not looking away."

"I know," he says.

"Good." I take his hand. Bring it to my mouth. Kiss his knuckles—the knuckles that held the Benchmade three hours ago, the knuckles that are scarred from oak beams and from other things he doesn't talk about. I kiss each one. "Now stop being careful with me."

Something shifts in him. I feel it happen—the way a current changes direction, the way the air in a room rearranges when a door opens. The uncertainty leaves his body. The tenderness doesn't—it stays, underneath, the foundation—but what builds on top of it is something I recognize. Something I've been missing for six days in my bed that was too empty and too quiet and too safe.

His hand comes up from mine to my throat. Not squeezing. Resting. The weight of his palm against my pulse—measuring, feeling, claiming. His other hand finds my hip, pulls me against him, and I feel the shift complete itself. The man who touched my face like he was receiving something is gone. The man who is here now is the one who takes.

"Six days," he says against my ear. His voice has dropped to the register that does something specific to my nervous system—the register that bypasses every clinical framework I possess and speaks directly to the part of me that wants to be held down and taken apart. "Six days without you. Do you know what that was like?"

"Yes," I say. "I do."

"Then you know I'm not going to be gentle."

"I don't want gentle."

His hand tightens on my throat. Not enough to restrict—enough to feel. Enough to sayI'm here and you're mine and the separation is over.He walks me backward until my legs hit the edge of the bed. I sit. He doesn't—he stands above me, looking down, and in the blue glow of the charger, his face is the unperformed version, the one that wants things it doesn't know how to ask for except like this.

"Lie back," he says.

I lie back.

He follows me down—not rushing, not slow. Deliberate. The way he does everything. His knee between mine, spreading them, his weight settling over me, and the feeling of him—the full, pressing, inescapable weight of Benedict Ambrose on top of me—is the answer to every question I've been asking myself for six days. Every clinical framework. Every diagnostic criterion. Every careful taxonomy of what's wrong with us.

Nothing is wrong with us.

His mouth finds my neck. Not kissing—tasting. Teeth grazing the place where my pulse hammers, his breath hot against my skin, and I arch into him because my body has been waiting for this the way his body has been waiting, and the waiting is over, and what replaces it is hunger.

"Tell me again," he says against my throat. His hand sliding under my shirt, up my ribs, his touch proprietary in a way that should trigger every alarm in my professional training and instead triggers something deeper, something that has no clinical name. "Tell me what you said on the sofa."

"I love you."

His hand closes around my breast. His thumb finds the nipple through the fabric of my bra and presses, and I gasp, and he makes a sound against my throat that I've never heard from him before—not the controlled sounds of the choir loft or the car, not the calculated escalation of a man who knows exactly what he's doing. A raw sound. The sound of a man who has been given something and is overwhelmed by it and is expressing the overwhelm the only way he knows how.

"Again," he says, and pulls my shirt over my head.

Chapter 34 - Benedict

I pull her shirt over her head and she lets me—arms rising, back arching off the mattress, the movement fluid and willing in a way that undoes something in my chest. Six days. Six days of the church and the cold bed and the wall and the absence of her, and now she's beneath me in the blue glow of the charger with her skin bare and her eyes open and the wordsI love youstill hanging in the air between us like something I can almost touch.

I've had her before. In the choir loft—rough, urgent, the first time, her back against the railing and my hand over her mouth. In the car—confined, frantic, the gearshift digging into my thigh while she moved on top of me. At this apartment—mornings, evenings, the accumulating geography of a man learning a woman's body the way he learns everything, through repetition and attention and the refusal to stop until he's mapped every response.