Page 79 of Heat Unscripted

I stood in the middle of the floor and looked at them.

Three men. Three different shapes of caring about the same person.

“I need to say something before we…before anything.” I took a deep breath. “This morning I almost signed a thing that would have erased all of us. Then I sat in a kitchen full of your scent and chose to stay instead. Both of those are going to live inside me for a long time. The reflex and the choice. The mask and the face.”

I looked at each of them. Cillian, steady. Bram, careful and shaking and open. Tuck, just warm.

“I don’t want to perform tonight. Not for any of you. Not even for myself. I want to be exactly where I am, with exactly who I’m with, and I want none of us to pretend we know what we’re doing.”

Tuck’s laugh was quiet and real. “Iz, I haven’t known what I’m doing since the axe-throwing place.”

“Welcome to the last few years of my life,” Bram said.

Cillian didn’t say anything. He crossed the room and kissed me.

It was slower than the studio. Deeper. None of the careful, reading-you-through-touch precision he usually led with. His hands found my waist and his mouth found mine and the sandalwood opened up like a door into a room I’d only ever seen through glass.

His fingers moved along my jaw. Down my throat. Over the spot where the honey pooled warmest, and his thumb settled there, light, like he was easing something up by a fraction.

“I can feel your heartbeat here,” he said against my mouth.

“Cill—”

“Keep talking.” His lips moved down to my throat. The cold ring in his ear brushed my cheek. “I’ve been listening to pieces of your voice through equipment for years. I want to hear it from here.”

My breath caught. Not a gasp. Something lower, a hum I didn’t decide to make.

Behind me, Tuck’s hands found my shoulders. He’d crossed the room without me hearing it, the quiet movement ridiculous in a man that size. His palms were warm through my shirt, broad and sure, and the cedar rolled down my back like heat off a stove. Not too much. Just grounding. The weight of a body that knew exactly how to carry itself and was choosing to lean it into me.

His mouth found the place where my neck met my shoulder, the opposite side from Cillian. Two points of contact, and being held between them undid something low at the base of my spine for the second time in a week.

My knees gave a little. Tuck caught me before I’d finished registering it, his arm sliding around my waist, fast and certain, the way other people flinch at a loud noise.

“I’ve got you,” he said against my skin. The low rumble came through where his chest met my back and settled into my spine.

Cillian’s hands moved lower. Not rushing. Mapping. The same considered attention he’d given the kiss, working now down past my collarbones like a man set on learning everything this body could do.

“Tell me what you feel,” he said.

“Both of you. I feel both of you.”

“Be specific.” His thumb traced the line of my collarbone. “I’m an engineer, Gretan. I work in specifics.”

A laugh came out of me, half-swallowed by Tuck’s mouth moving along my shoulder. “I feel Tuck’s hands on my waist and his mouth on my neck and his scent in my hair. And I feel your fingers on my collarbone and your breath on my throat and I feel?—”

My voice broke. Not the trained instrument failing. The real one, catching on something too big for words. The whine started low in my chest before I could stop it, the private one, the one that happens between lovers instead of for a room, winding up two notes and settling into something warm and held.

Both men answered it. Tuck’s arm tightened. Cillian’s breathing went quicker, lost its even count. Their scents met across my body, somewhere between my shoulder blades, cedar and sandalwood touching for the first time after years of circling each other and never quite making contact.

Bram watched from the edge of the bed.

I found him through the haze. His gray-green eyes caught the lamp, and his face had the look of a man who couldn’t take part and couldn’t look away either. His hands were in his lap. The tremor was there, faint but it wouldn’t quit, and the peppercorn had gone dark and sweet, the smell I’d learned meant wanting something so badly you’ve run out of places to put it.

“Come here,” I said.

Two words in the real voice, low and honeyed, the one that had quieted his nervous system through speakers for three years. They landed on him like a hand. His throat worked. His careful fingers came unlocked from each other.

He stood. Crossed the room. Stopped at the exact line where Tuck’s arm and Cillian’s hands marked the edge of the space I stood in. Two men’s reach, a little circle of warmth and scent they’d drawn around me without saying a word about it.