Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
He holds the lace up. The spotlight catches the pattern and throws tiny shadows across his hand, across the scars on his knuckles, and he turns it, examining it, and I crane my neck to see his face in profile. The focused expression. The one I glimpsed through the gallery glass when he was working with Mila. Except this is different. Softer. He's holding the handkerchief exactly as I was holding it. Like it matters. Like hands matter. Like four hundred years of surviving means something to him too.
"You're right," he admits. "It should be held."
He lowers his hand. The handkerchief rests on his open palm, and I reach for it to put it back and my fingers close on his instead.
Neither of us moves.
My fingers on his palm. The lace between us. The gallery is silent except for the hum of the display lights, and I can feel his pulse through the pad of my ring finger where it's resting against his wrist, and it's fast, faster than his body would ever admit, faster than his face would ever show, and I know this because I've spent three weeks learning the difference between what Artem Almazov's body reveals and what his face conceals and his pulse is telling me everything his expression won't.
He turns his hand over. Closes his fingers around mine.
His hand. The one he pulled away from me that first session, the one he tucked against his body before I could touch it and murmured not the hands in a voice that drew a line he expected me to stay behind. And now his fingers are closing around mine over a four-hundred-year-old handkerchief, and his grip is firm and warm and his scarred knuckles press against my fingers, and the lace threads are caught between our palms, and I tip my head back to see his face.
He's already there. Already looking down at me with those eyes that are iron in daylight and something darker at night, and his jaw is tight and his breathing has changed, gone ragged at the edges, and he's holding my hand and the lace and his own restraint all at once and I can see them fighting in his face, the want and the wall, and the wall is losing.
"Star," he breathes.
And then he kisses me.
His free hand comes up to my face, my jaw, the same spot, always the same spot, because he decided weeks ago that this is the part of me he's claiming first and he's never wavered, and he tilts my head back and his mouth finds mine and it isn't soft and it isn't tentative and it isn't the careful testing kiss of a man who's unsure. He kisses me like a lock breaking, like something that's been held shut too long finally giving way, and his hand tightens on mine and the lace crushes between our palms and his other hand slides from my jaw into my hair and I'm not thinking about anything, I'm not thinking about the gallery or the handkerchief or the four-hundred-year-old English bobbin lace that is currently being destroyed between the interlocked fingers of a massage therapist and a billionaire and is probably very upset about it and I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but his mouth is hot and sure and tastes like coffee and salt and the sound he makes against my lips, low, barely there, a vibration more than a voice, is a sound I'm going to carry inside me for the rest of my life and possibly into the next one.
I kiss him back. I don't know what I'm doing. I've been kissed before, twice, badly, by boys who didn't know what they wanted and definitely didn't know what I wanted and I didn't know either until right now, this second, with his hand in my hair and his mouth on mine and his scarred fingers holding mine so tight the lace threads are pressing patterns into my skin. THIS is what I wanted. This. Him. A man who knows exactly what he wants and has been not-wanting it for weeks and has run out of room not to, and the way he's kissing me right now, thorough and devastating and slightly desperate, tells me that the room ran out a while ago and he's been standing in the doorway trying to talk himself back inside and he can't, he just can't, and neither can I.
His mouth opens against mine and I let him in and his hand in my hair tightens and I make a sound I've never made before, something between a gasp and a whimper that I'd be mortified about in literally any other context except that I FEEL him react to it, a shudder that moves through his chest and transfers into mine because we're pressed together now, my back against the display case, his body against the front of mine, and the heat of him is everywhere. His chest, his hands, his mouth. I can feel his heart through his shirt. Hammering. Hammering like his body never, ever lets on, like his face would never admit, and that knowledge, that he's as undone as I am, that his composure is a lie and his pulse is telling the truth, does something to me that is beyond crushes and beyond planner entries and beyond anything I've filed in any cabinet.