Page 55 of Heat Unscripted

The button opened. The shirt slid off one shoulder. Bram caught the fabric before it dropped and held it, the way he’d guarded the gate between his control and what he wanted for years. Still negotiating terms with himself, even now.

“I couldn’t tell the difference,” he said, his eyes following the line of my bared shoulder, the skin going pink under his attention. “Between wanting your voice and wanting you. For years. I thought they were two separate things. The professional admiration and the…” His hand let go of the fabric. Let it slide. His fingertips traced the path of it, collarbone to shoulder to the top of my arm, every point of contact leaving heat behind. “The wanting. I thought I could have one without the other.”

“You can’t.”

“No.” He breathed the word against my skin. He’d lowered his mouth to my shoulder without quite deciding to, following the trail his fingers had left, swapping touch for the warmth of his breath, then the brush of his lips. Hovering there, learning a new territory a fraction at a time.

“Because the voice is the body,” I said. My own voice had dropped lower, not a performance, not a choice. The biology answering the closeness, the peppercorn wrapping around me, the devotion of his mouth on every inch of bared skin. “It always was. That’s what the industry never got. That’s what I hid all those years. Not just the designation. The fact that the voice they loved couldn’t be pulled out of the body that made it.”

His lips found the curve where my neck met my shoulder. Pressed there. Stayed. The scent gland under that skin answered, a fresh wave of honey and milk I felt more than smelled, spreading out from the spot like ink dropped into warm water.

Bram inhaled. Deep. Drinking in something he’d been dying of thirst for.

“What I never said in the kitchen,” he said against my skin. The low remains of the baritone vibrated against the gland and the feeling was so sharp, so exact, that my knees nearly went. “Every single night. I’d lie in the dark and listen to you readother people’s love stories, and I’d think, I wish someone spoke to me like that. I wished…”

His arms wrapped around me. Pulled me flush against him. The whole length of us pressed together for the first time with no coat, no distance, none of the careful discipline of not touching. His chest on mine. His hips on mine. The warmth of him all down my body with nothing between us but the thin cotton of his shirt and what was left of mine.

“I wished the voice was talking to me,” he finished. “Not to an audience. Not to a recording. To me. Just me.”

“It is now.” I pulled back enough to see his face. Cupped his jaw in one hand, felt the fine grain of his skin, the sharp angle of bone underneath. “It’s yours now. Do you hear me? This voice is yours.”

The sound he made was broken. The last thread of his stoicism snapping under a weight it was never built to carry. His mouth found mine again and this time the method cracked at the edges, still slow, still thorough, but shot through with something desperate that turned careful exploration into something closer to worship. His hands moved with purpose now, drawing my shirt off my other shoulder, letting it fall, his palms following the fabric down my arms like he was filing each sensation away against some future loss.

I stood in front of him in the amber light, bare from the waist up, and watched him look at me.

Bram looked at me the way he looked at a scene he’d built right, with total, consuming attention, like some things only exist while they’re being watched and deserve nothing less than all of you. His gaze moved from my collarbones to my breasts to the curve of my waist, unhurried, like he was reading a passage he meant to come back to many times. No rush. Nothing that could override the need to see. To know.

His hand lifted. His fingers found the center of my chest, between my breasts, over the breastbone, in the exact place where the whine had started. Where the mate-call was born and the secret got loose.

“Here,” he said. “This is where it started. In the booth.”

“Yes.”

He spread his palm flat. His eyes closed. And he just felt. The beat of my heart. The warmth of my skin. The hum of a body built to call to his, finally given permission after years of silence.

“Speak,” he said, eyes still closed, palm still pressed to me. “Please. I want to feel it here. Against my hand.”

I covered his hand with mine. Pressed it in closer. Let the voice find its lowest register, the one that lived in the chest more than the throat, the one that ran through bone and muscle and skin.

“I’m here,” I said, and felt it travel through his palm, up his arm, into whatever part of him was still learning to believe this. “I’m not performing. I’m not behind a screen. I’m not coming through speakers in the dark of your flat. I’m here, and I’m speaking to you, Bram, and you don’t have to let go.”

His breath fractured. His head dropped forward, forehead to my shoulder, the weight of him settling against me like relief. The bone-deep exhale of a man setting down something heavy. Something he’d hauled around so long his body had forgotten how it felt to stand up straight without it.

“I don’t know how to let go,” he whispered. “That’s the problem. Once I hold something…”

“Then hold me.” I turned my head. Found his ear with my lips. “Hold me the way you hold your scripts. The way you grip your pen. Like something you mean to come back to. Like something worth being careful with.”

His arms tightened. Slow. Sure. The hold shifted from holding me up to wrapping me whole, his hands moving over mybare back with the same patience he’d given my front, learning the line of my spine, the wings of my shoulder blades, the warm place where the scent pooled at the base of my neck. Every vertebra got its moment. Every inch of skin got acknowledged.

Then his mouth moved.

Down from my shoulder. Along the ridge of my collarbone, both sides, each one traced with lips that pressed and stayed before moving on. The hollow of my throat, where he paused and breathed me in again, the honey-scent filling his lungs in a way I felt through his chest expanding against mine. Lower. The center of my breastbone, over the warm print his palm had left, his lips on the bone like he could reach the heartbeat through it.

I made a sound. Small and involuntary. Rawer than the musical scraps of the last two days. The noise a body makes when it’s being touched so carefully the care becomes its own kind of intensity.

“Tell me if…” he started, lifting his head.

“Don’t stop.”