Chapter 115: Slow kiss

~ Camilla

Two days.

Forty-eight hours.

It’s strange how a stretch of time so small can feel like a lifetime, or a hallucination, or a hole you stumble into and suddenly don’t know how to crawl out of. The outside world felt unreal now, like something happening underwater. The firm, Alex, Isabella, the police reports, the godawful minutes… all of it had been swallowed by this enclosed space, this penthouse that felt more like a very elegant cage than a home. Some things were exactly as they had always been. The cold, quiet aura of this room. The perfection of the sheets, the scent of expensive colognes, the architectural arrogance of the furniture.

And me, I was still pregnant, still the woman who somehow managed to fall between his moods like a coin tossed into a storm drain.

But Stephano… Stephano wasn’t the same. And dear lord help me, that was more terrifying than any cruelty he had shown me before.

The last two nights had been a maze, and not the kind you find in children’s books. It had been a real one, the type that keeps shifting when you look away. Normally, when he reached for me in the dark, when his breath hit the back of my neck, it was a warning. It was a signal that he wanted to fuck. A promise that he would take what he wanted and I would take whatever was left of myself and sweep it into a corner until morning.

But not this time. The first night… he asked me for something he never asked for. A soft, sinful request. I repeat, a request, not a command. And after, when I braced myself for the inevitable roughness, for the moment he’d slip his fingers under my panties and remind me I was the woman carrying the Maddens heir… he stopped. He didn’t push. He didn’t try to take more. He just pulled me close like a tired man looking for warmth and fell asleep with his nose tucked into my hair.

And I lay awake for hours afterward, not knowing what to do with a version of him that had softness in it.

Last night was the same strange, disorienting dance. The hunger was there, I felt it in every careful touch, every quiet breath, but he didn’t act on it. And that terrified me far more than his usual dominance ever had.

Which is why I was awake now, in the sepia glow of pre-dawn, my head resting against his shoulder as I traced slow, secret patterns on his chest. My fingertips skimmed the warm skin over his heart, the rhythm steady and almost shockingly human. His chest rose and fell beneath my hand like the tide. Gentle. Predictable. Peaceful.

Stephano Maddens. Peaceful. It felt like two words that had no business sharing a sentence.

I studied his face. I admired the sharp, sculpted lines that always looked like they were carved from winter itself. But sleep stripped all that arrogance away. His mouth was relaxed, not pressed into its habitual thin line of irritation. His brow was smooth, no tension, no calculation, no silent judgment. Just… rest. Innocent wasn’t the word. He could never look innocent. But he looked unguarded and exposed. And that made something twist sharply in me, something I didn’t want to name.

I kept tracing the contours of his chest, telling myself it was mindless, involuntary, just something to focus on instead of the relentless cyclone of thoughts in my head. But it wasn’t mindless. I knew that. Every slow glide of my fingertip over his skin pulled me deeper into a place I shouldn’t be. It pulled me into a place where I remembered the warmth of his body instead of the coldness of his decisions. Where I remembered the way he’d said my name last night in the dark. Softly. Almost like it mattered to him.

Stop it, Camilla. You’re romanticizing scraps.

I told myself that, but the logic didn’t stick. My hand drifted to the curve of his shoulder, brushing the faint stubble that dusted his skin there. And for one light moment, I let myself imagine that this was a world where tenderness wasn’t a trap. Where he held me because he wanted me, not because he had put a child inside me and now needed to protect his reputation.

My gaze dropped to his lips. Kissable lips on a man who weaponized them. Lord, it was a God awful contradiction that had ruined me more times than I cared to count.

And then, like a cruel magician snapping his fingers, his eyes opened. There was no warning. No stirring. Just instant awareness.

My breath caught in my throat. Panic shot through me like cold lightning. I yanked my hand back so fast it was almost funny, fingers trembling as I tucked them against my side like I’d been caught doing something obscene.

God. God, he saw.

He must think I’m pathetic. Weak. Clinging.

You idiot, Camilla, why did you touch him?

Why did you ever…

The silence stretched. It was so thick and suffocating. Then something happened I didn’t expect. Something that felt like a glitch in the universe.

He lifted his hand, slowly, deliberately and reached for mine. His fingers wrapped around my shaking hand, not with dominance, but with a shocking gentleness that made my pulse stumble.

He didn’t yank it. Didn’t pin it. He didn’t assert anything. He just guided my hand back to his chest, laying it right over his heart. And then he lifted my palm to his lips and pressed a soft kiss there. A kiss that melted right through me, leaving my entire body suspended between instinct and disbelief.

I stared at him. Who was this man?

He didn’t say anything. Didn’t smirk. Didn’t make it a game or a power play. His eyes was still heavy with sleep and it  held something quieter. Something warmer. Something that made my chest tighten in a way I wasn’t ready to feel. Before I could gather the breath to speak, he leaned in, hesitating for half a second, that hesitation was what shattered me, and kissed me.

Light.

Slow.

Barely there.

It was kiss so gentle it almost didn’t feel real. A kiss that asked instead of took. A kiss that felt like the whisper of a secret.

I didn’t know what to do with it.

My eyes fluttered closed. My fingers curled against his jaw before I could stop myself. The kiss deepened just a fraction, enough to steal the edges of my breath, and then he pulled back, his forehead resting lightly against mine.

Still, he didn’t speak. He just looked at me, breathing slow, eyes open and unguarded. Something inside me cracked in a way that terrified me to my core. Because I knew with awful certainty that if he kept looking at me like that, I wouldn’t stand a chance at hating him the way I needed to. And hate was the only thing that had kept me alive. Now, I wasn’t sure what I had left to hold on to.