Page 54 of Heat Unscripted

His jaw clenched. The hand over my heart curled. Not a fist, but close. Like he was trying to catch the heartbeat instead of just feeling it.

“I was so careful,” he said. “So careful not to want this.”

“I know. I was careful too.”

His eyes opened. The brightness had won. A single tear tracked down the sharp plane of his cheek and caught the lamplight. He didn’t wipe it. Didn’t seem to know it was there. His attention was fixed on me, all of it, my face, my eyes, my mouth shaping words in the voice he’d been falling asleep to for years.

“Say something else,” he breathed. “Please. I need…” His throat worked. “Anything. Your voice. I need to feel it while I’m touching you.”

Something gave way inside me when he asked. Not a tear, a release. The freedom of being asked for the exact thing I’d spent years hiding. The most dangerous thing about me was handed back not as a weapon, not as a liability, but as something someone actually wanted. Something he was starving for the same way I’d been starving and calling it discipline.

I took his face in both hands. Drew him down until our foreheads touched, until the peppercorn and the honey shared the same inch of air between our mouths.

“Bram,” I said. Low. The voice opened into its warmest register, the one that lived just above a whisper, the full weight of an Omega voice with nothing held back. “I performed for millions of people for eleven years. This voice…” I let it drop lower, felt it travel from my throat through every place we touched, forehead and hands and the brush of his shirt against mine. “…was never theirs. It was never an audience’s. It was always waiting for someone who’d know what to do with it.”

Whatever was left of his control, the last wall of a thing he’d been tearing down since dawn, came apart.

His mouth found mine.

Not Tuck’s desperate, freight-train urgency, not that long-overdue collision of two bodies kept apart too long. This was different. This was Bram. And Bram, it turned out, kissed the way he built a story, one considered weight at a time. One beat, then the next. His lips moved on mine with a slowness that was nearly worship, not tentative, just unhurried. Like we had all the time that had ever existed and he meant to use every second of it.

His mouth was warm and precise, the angle shifting by tiny degrees, finding the exact configuration that made my breath catch and then holding it there, learning the response before he moved on to find another. His lower lip dragged over mine and the sound I made was involuntary, a whine that melted down into something lower, a purr that hummed between our mouths.

He swallowed it. Drew back a fraction. Came back with the smallest increase in pressure, treating every increment like information, building the whole picture from the ground up because anything short of understanding it completely was unbearable to him.

The kiss deepened by degrees too small to see one at a time. His tongue traced the seam of my lips, surveying ground he meant to know better than anyone alive. When I opened for him, the sound he made went quieter, deeper.

His hands moved off my waist. Up along my ribs, his thumbs counting the bones under my shirt like he was reading braille. Every rib noted. Every dip between them given its due. When his palms found my shoulders, he broke the kiss and just looked at me with those dark gray-green eyes, breathing unsteady, his face holding something very close to awe.

“You’re real,” he said. Years of falling in love with a voice through speakers sat behind it. He was still catching up to the fact that the voice had a body, and the body was here, and it was warm and willing and reaching for him.

“Real,” I said. “Present. Staying.”

His hands slid to the collar of my blouse. His fingers found the top button. Paused.

The pause stretched. In it I watched Bram St.James make a decision. Not with the clean certainty he brought to logistics, but with the slow, shaking nerve of stepping off a ledge he’d stood on his whole life.

His fingers opened the button.

One. Then he waited. Checked. Not my willingness, I’d made that clear, but his own. His own readiness to cross a line with no way back over it.

Second button. His knuckle grazed my collarbone. The contact was nothing, light, the barest brush of skin, and it senta visible shudder through him. The peppercorn surged and he breathed through it, taking the flood one slow inhale at a time.

Third button. He stopped with his hands on either side of the parted fabric and just looked at the skin underneath, pale, flushed warm where the scent gathered, the pulse visible under it.

“I need you to talk to me,” he said. His voice was almost gone, ragged, barely a breath. “I need the sound of you. While I do this. I need to hear you.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Anything.” His thumb pressed a slow line along my collarbone, and my breath snagged. “Everything. Whatever comes. I just need…” He pressed his thumb into the hollow at the base of my throat, where the scent pooled warmest, and his eyes closed. “I just need your voice.”

I let my hand find the back of his neck. Drew him down until his forehead rested on mine again, our faces close enough that every word would travel through his skin before it reached his ears.

“The first time you read my script back to me,” I said, low and warm, pitched for inches instead of audiences, “I forgot where I was. I forgot the booth. I forgot the camera. I forgot there were millions of people listening. There was just your voice turning my words into more than I wrote them to be.”

His fingers trembled on the fourth button.

“And I thought…” I nosed against his temple. Let my lips brush the silver-threaded hair there, softer than I’d expected. “I thought, this is the most dangerous man I’ve ever met. Because he makes me want to mean what I say.”