Page 57 of Heat Unscripted

The mask was gone. The stoicism. The careful blankness that had defined every single thing between us. What was left was a man feeling, openly, with the full force of whatever lived insideBram St.James under all the structure he’d spent a lifetime building to keep it down.

It turned out there was a lot of it.

“I heard you,” he said. His voice was wrecked, barely above a breath. His forehead found mine, close enough that I could see each lash framing his dark eyes, the fine lines at the corners, the warmth that had taken over from the cool entirely. “Every sound. Every one. I heard you.”

I kissed him. Tasted myself on his lips, honey and warmth and the sharp counterpoint of his peppercorn, the two of them threaded together until they didn’t feel like a collision anymore. Like two things that had always been meant to sit side by side.

“Stay,” I said against his mouth.

“I’m staying.”

I drew him toward the sofa. He came, led instead of leading, finding something unfamiliar and necessary in handing over the direction. When we reached the leather, I turned. Found the buttons of his shirt. Opened them with less finesse than he’d given mine, my hands still unsteady, my body still ringing with what he’d just done, but he didn’t seem to notice the clumsiness. He was watching my hands like the sight of them on him was the thing he’d wanted all along.

His shirt opened. Fell away. Underneath was the frame I’d imagined and never seen. Lean, kept that way by habit more than vanity. A narrow chest dusted with dark hair. His collarbones, sharp and prominent. The flat plane of his stomach, the muscles there quiet rather than built.

I pressed my palm over his heart.

His hand covered mine right away. The same gesture I’d made with him, the mirror of it automatic, two people finding out they already shared a language of touch.

“I can feel it,” he said. “Your voice. In my chest. Even when you’re not speaking.”

“That’s the bond.”

“No.” He shook his head. “It’s been there longer than the bond. Years. Every time I listened to your recordings at night, something here…” He pressed my hand harder to his breastbone. “Something here went quiet. Settled.”

I guided him down onto the sofa. He went, choosing for the first time to hand over control, his back meeting the leather, his eyes never leaving mine as I followed him down. When I settled over him, the whole length of us aligned, it felt new and old at once. Weight and warmth and skin and the plain, leveling fact of nothing between us.

His hands found my hips. Settled there. Didn’t push or pull or demand. Just held.

“I’m terrified,” he whispered.

I lowered myself until my lips brushed his. Close enough that the words would move through his mouth as much as his ears.

“I know. That’s the bravest thing about you.”

He kissed me. Deep and slow and thorough, his hands traveling the length of my spine with that careful attention, each vertebra touched, each muscle acknowledged. His peppercorn surrounded us, the sofa, the air, the space between our bodies dense now with the scent of an alpha in full response, no longer contained, no longer controlled. Just present. Filling the room.

When I took him inside me, it was slow. His choice and mine in equal measure. We’d waited too long to treat it as anything less than what it was. His hands gripped my hips with a pressure that climbed by degrees, and his eyes, those gray-green eyes that had spent years assessing and refusing to admit what they saw, stayed open. Stayed fixed on my face. Watching every reaction the way he watched every scene he ever directed.

“Talk to me,” he breathed.

So I did.

I spoke to him in the voice he’d fallen asleep to for three years. The low one, with honey in its bottom and warmth at its top. I told him things that weren’t scripted and weren’t fiction, small true things about how it felt to be held by someone who gave every inch of you the attention most people save for sacred texts. About the years of wondering what lived under his composure. About the penthouse, the honey jar, the moment his fingers brushed mine and the floor tilted.

He moved under me with the same unhurried thoroughness he brought to everything, each motion weighed, each angle adjusted, building something from the ground up and refusing to set a single stone without knowing what it had to carry. And with every word I gave him his control thinned out. The careful rhythm faltered. His grip tightened. His breathing went ragged. The measured pace gave way to something still Bram, still present, but desperate now.

“Isobel…” His voice cracked. My name in his mouth, broken open, no longer a professional address but a prayer. His hands pulled me closer. His hips rose to meet mine with more and more urgency, the last of the stoicism burning off like fog in the morning.

I leaned down. Pressed my lips to his forehead. His temple. The corner of his eye where the wet had gathered.

“Let go,” I whispered. “I’ve got you.”

The sound he made when he came apart was one he’d never made before. Raw, wrenched out of the very bottom of him, below language, below thought, below every framework he’d ever built. The alpha answer to my mate-call. The sound of a man finally, completely heard.

I held him through it. The way he’d held me. Through the shaking and the aftermath and the rawness of a body that had just done something the mind hadn’t signed off on and was still catching up to.

We lay tangled on the leather, breathing. His face was buried in my hair. My cheek rested on his chest where his heart hammered, fast, then settling. Settling. Coming home.