Chapter 58 I Won’t Ne Nice
His hands touched her waist.
Just that. Just his palms settling against her skin like he hadn’t fully decided to do it yet, like some part of him was still running the calculation of whether this was worth the aftermath. But his hands were there and they were warm, so warm it felt like pressing against an open flame, and Grace exhaled shakily at the contact like she’d been holding that breath since the tribunal room.
“You’re going to regret this in the morning,” Enzo said. His voice was rough and barely above a murmur.
“I know,” Grace said.
“And you’re going to blame me.”
“Probably.”
His jaw tightened. His thumbs pressed slightly harder against her hip. “So tell me to leave. Tell me not to toss you down and bury my cock deep inside that pretty little cunt of yours.”
“I… can’t…”
She couldn’t. They both knew she couldn’t.
He made that sound again, the one that lived somewhere between frustration and surrender, and then his mouth came down on her neck. Not the marked side. The other side, where the skin was unmarked and unbearably sensitive, and Grace’s fingers dug into his shoulders as his lips dragged slowly from her pulse point to her collarbone like he had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it.
“Enzo—”
“I know,” he said against her skin.
His hands slid up her back, warm and sure, pulling her harder against him, and Grace could feel exactly how thoroughly he had lost his own argument with himself pressing against her through the fabric between them.
She shifted against him instinctively and heard his breath catch, felt his grip tighten in response.
“Don’t do that again,” he muttered, “unless you mean it.”
“I mean it.”
He pulled back just far enough to look at her face, searching it with an intensity that made her feel more exposed than the fact that she was already half undressed. Whatever he found there must have satisfied him because he reached up and gripped her jaw, tilting her face up, and kissed her properly this time.
It was nothing like the brief press of lips she had initiated a few minutes ago. This was firmer. This was Enzo deciding to do something and doing it thoroughly, his mouth moving against hers with a kind of focused patience that made her knees genuinely unreliable. One hand stayed at her jaw, fingers splayed against her cheek, tilting her exactly where he wanted her. The other slid down the curve of her spine and settled at the small of her back, pressing her flush against him until there was no space left between them at all.
Grace kissed him back and stopped thinking about the cold entirely.
He walked her backward toward the bed without breaking the kiss, unhurried, like he was navigating by memory. The backs of her knees hit the mattress and she sat down hard, and Enzo followed her down, bracing himself above her, his forearms bracketing her head. He pulled back and looked at her for a moment, chest rising and falling unevenly, hair slightly disheveled, and Grace thought distantly that he was unfairly beautiful when he looked undone.
“Last chance,” he said.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I keep meaning it.”
Grace reached up and pulled him down by the back of his neck and he stopped offering her last chances after that.
He kissed down the line of her throat and across her collarbone, taking his time in a way that felt specifically designed to make her lose her mind. She felt every point of contact like her nerve endings had been rewired, everything heightened and electric in a way it hadn’t been before, and she suspected the mark had something to do with that. Whatever the bond between them was doing to her body, it had apparently decided that half measures were no longer acceptable.
She got his shirt off with fingers that weren’t entirely cooperative, and he let her, sitting back briefly to pull it over his head and drop it somewhere on the floor before returning his attention to her like she was something he had been waiting to get back to. The bandaging across his ribs was still there and Grace’s hands stilled when she touched it.
“You’re still hurt,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“Enzo—”
He caught her hands and pressed them back against the mattress above her head, holding them there lightly, not forcefully. His mouth brushed against the corner of hers. “I’m fine,” he repeated, quieter. “Stop looking for reasons to stop.”
Grace searched his face for a moment then let her hands relax under his and stopped looking for reasons.
He released her wrists and let his hands travel instead, slowly, thoroughly, like he was learning the geography of her by touch alone. Grace arched into him when his fingers found the clasp of her bra and he paused.
“Yes,” she said before he could ask.
He unclasped it and she felt the cool air hit her skin for half a second before his warmth replaced it, and she stopped being cold entirely after that. The chill that had been lodged in her chest since the tribunal room dissolved like it had never existed, replaced by something so opposite it was almost dizzying, heat pooling low and insistent as his hands and mouth moved over her with an attention to detail that made thinking in complete sentences basically impossible.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” Grace managed breathlessly.
“Doing what?” he said against her ribs, clearly fully aware of what she meant.
“Being insufferably—” she lost the end of that sentence when his mouth moved lower and replaced it with something wordless instead.
His hands hooked into the waistband of her jeans and paused, waiting. Grace lifted her hips in answer and he pulled them off, sitting back to look at her in a way that made warmth rise in her cheeks despite everything else happening, despite the fact that she had been the one to take her shirt off first.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re trying to decide where to start.”
The corner of his mouth curved. Not the guarded, closed-off expression he wore most of the time. Something smaller and realer than that. “I’ve already decided,” he said, and lowered himself back over her before she could respond.
What followed was not rushed. That was the thing that surprised her most, because Enzo in every other context operated like a man who moved fast and thought about consequences later. But here he was patient in a way that felt almost like punishment, and absolutely certain of what he was doing, and Grace stopped trying to anticipate him and just let herself be taken apart piece by careful piece.
By the time he finally settled between her thighs, she was gripping the sheets and not entirely sure of her own name.
“Enzo,” she said, and it came out embarrassingly desperate.
“I know,” he said quietly, and finally, finally stopped making her wait. “But Grace?” He looked down at her with vengeful eyes. “I won’t be going easy on you…”