The Bride He Stole For Christmas by Caitlin Crews

CHAPTER NINE

CRETEFOUNDITsomewhat lowering that Timoney had actually fallen asleep beside him. He rather felt she should have been wide awake and on tenterhooks for the whole of the drive back into town, if only because he felt shot through with adrenaline.

As if he might never sleep again.

Still, when they arrived at his flat in London, he waved off the attendants in his garage and carried her into his private elevator himself.

And though her eyes fluttered open, he did not set her down until the lift delivered them into the stone foyer of his penthouse.

He opted not to examine the way he seemed to settle only when he carried her over his threshold, such as it was.

Then he found himself watching her as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes. Without looking back at him, she crossed the foyer and walked deeper into the flat. She didn’t stop to turn on any lights and for some reason, Crete did not do it as he followed her. He was too busy watching her as she went. She dragged the bright red cloak behind her as she moved to the great wall of windows that looked out over giddy London, laid out bright and gleaming before them.

He was growing tired of the way it hurt him to gaze upon her when she was not even looking at him in return. She stopped at the windows and raised the hand that wasn’t clutching the cloak to her. He watched as she pressed her fingertips to the glass, let out a sigh, and only then turned to look at him over her shoulder.

“This must be the most beautiful view in all of London,” she said quietly.

Though it felt far more portentous than a simple comment on the view.

And Crete felt that it was some kind of surrender on his part to walk to her, still shrouded in the darkness—or revealed by it—but it was as if his feet did as they liked.

Or as if he could not stay away, a voice in him suggested.

Then, either way, he stood with her at the glass.

“Of course it is the best view of London,” he said. “Do you imagine I would tolerate anything less?”

He was looking at her as he said that, not at the view. And not because he was stunned by her beauty, though he was. But because she smiled then, and it was a sad, small curve of her lips that he could not say he liked at all.

“I’m sure it cost you a lot of money,” Timoney said softly. She turned to look at him then, and there was a starkness in that sea blue gaze of hers that brought that same ache on again, harder this time. “But you don’t ever look at it, do you?”

They were no longer in the car, so he did not have to pretend that the road held his attention. He reached over and hooked one hand around her neck, tugging her closer.

“Is this another metaphor, Timoney?” Crete kept his voice far softer than that ache in him, or the drumming noise of his own pulse. His own need. “I’m growing tired of all these games you wish to play with words. Both you and I know what is between us. It is a mystery to me why you would pretend otherwise, but I have solved it for you. It is already Christmas. You are here. And if I have to tie you to the bed to keep you from racing back to your wedding in a few hours, I will. Happily.”

He was fairly certain that the reason she glanced away was to disguise the flash of heat he’d seen in her gaze. But he thought it proved how magnanimous he was that he did not tip her chin up. He did not force her to show what he knew was there.

Crete only waited.

As he waited for nothing and no one else.

“You don’t have to tie me up, Crete.”

He couldn’t read the tone she used then. He couldn’t parse it, and that was unusual. Crete had long prided himself on being able to see beneath the words people used. To see to the heart of things, where most people were usually hiding their true motivations.

But this woman confounded him. If he was honest, she always had.

“Are you sure?” he asked, silkily. Because he could think of any number of reasons that tying her up seemed like a fantastic idea, and not a single one of them had to do with the vile Julian.

Or that abomination of a wedding that he would not allow her to go through with.

The lights of the city outside seemed to play in her hair the way the moon had out in the countryside. And he found himself toying with the thick silk of it, without even meaning to. Without knowing what he was doing until he was curling it around his fingers and letting it spill through. While the hand that cradled the nape of her neck seemed to absorb nothing from her but heat.

Crete told himself that she was a provocation, that was all. And he was a man who had never allowed a provocation to go unanswered.

Why stop now?

“You have me here now,” she said after a moment, with a certain directness that pricked at him. Perhaps because it did not whisper to him of tying her up in a bed and making them both wild. “You’ve made it clear that I’m not to leave. At least, not until you’ve made certain that my wedding is called off. I could try to run but, chances are, you would catch me. Or have your security team do it.” She lifted her chin. “What now?”

His thumb moved on her nape, up and then down. Again, of its own accord. And he felt how she shivered, though he wouldn’t have known it to look at her, so well did she hide what he could feel with his own flesh.

And Crete could not help but feel a powerful sense of loss, because once she would not have hidden her responses from him. Once, she had been all untutored enthusiasm, artless and sweet, running through his hands like sunshine.

He knew full well what had changed. And more, who had changed her.

But he concentrated on the heat instead. “Surely you and I can find a way to entertain ourselves, can we not?”

Again that smile, too sad for his tastes. “Is that what you want?”

Once more, Crete knew this was some kind of test. Like the stories she had demanded he tell her before. The answers she had needed him to give. Only this time, he had the distinct impression that this was not a test he could master.

And having her here again, in this space that he had always kept pristine, crisp, and utterly devoid of anything soft or even comfortable, brought it all back.

All of it, like a good blow to the head.

“You broke all the rules,” he found himself saying, though he knew he should keep such things to himself. He had done his best to keep from saying such things for half a year while she’d lived here. He stood there, half in the dark and half lit up from London below, but all he could see was Timoney. “I do not indulge in public displays of passion in clubs. There’s too much risk that it will all end up in the tabloids. But one look at you and it was as if I had no choice.”

Her lips moved as if she meant to speak, but no sound came forth.

That was just as well, because Crete could feel a storm in him, gathering force. Driving rain, booming thunder.

Or maybe it was only his voice, telling her the things he had not told her the last night she’d been here. The things he’d had no intention of ever telling her.

The things he barely admitted to himself.

“There is an extensive vetting process,” he told her as if he couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t. “But I moved you in within the week. And the purpose of allowing a woman here is to make my life easier. So that I can concentrate on my work, give my all to my many business concerns, and have a woman here to fulfill my needs when and if I have the time. But you did not slot neatly into place here, Timoney. You...took up space.”

This time her smile seemed something like rueful. “I suppose I did,” she told him, her voice light but that intensity in her gaze. “But I had no choice. This flat is grotesque.”

“I think you will find it is one of the most sought-after properties in London.”

“It is grotesque,” she said again, very distinctly, though her blue eyes gleamed. “Not only because of the fingerprints of too many mistresses before me, but because it might as well be a prison. Too much steel and concrete. Too many angles and cold expanses.” She looked away as if she could see all the sharp corners and deliberately empty spaces without the lights on. “It’s inhospitable to human life, Crete. I assume that’s by design.”

She was obliquely calling him an alien now, and it was astonishing to him, how deeply he disliked it. The whole world could line up to tell him how unnatural he was. How little he fit in. He took that as encouragement. As a challenge.

But it was different when it was Timoney.

Still, she needed to understand. Somehow, he needed to explain all of this to her. What it had really been like, those months she’d lived here. How he had felt so unlike himself. Careening from one meeting to the next and yet hardly paying attention. Instead of feeling pleasantly set, all of his needs taken care of in their appropriate compartments, he had rushed home whenever he could. He had changed his schedule so many times his secretarial staff had been driven round the bend.

Crete had changed his whole life. Worse, he had been aware of it while he was doing it, aware of every step away from the man he had always been before her—but he hadn’t been able to stop. He hadn’t wanted to stop.

Still, he had been horrified that last night, when she’d told him that she loved him—when she’d cried it out in bed as if she couldn’t keep it in another moment—that his first reaction had been a kind of mad thrill.

Because he could not seem to get enough of this woman. Of the total disregard with which she treated this ascetic sanctuary of his. How she left her clothes scattered about, so that he found buttery-soft scarves in improbable pastels lying about on his cold marble, his brutally minimalist steel. She was fluffy and bright, and seemed hell-bent on leaving her careless mark everywhere she went. She left dirty dishes by the sink. She plopped down mugs of tea wherever she happened to find herself, wholly and utterly heedless of any rings of moisture she left behind.

His housekeeping staff had been relieved when she’d gone.

But he had discovered quickly that without her, this luxurious, aspirational flat felt more to him like a tomb.

“I don’t like mess,” he said darkly now, to her claim that this place was designed to be inhospitable. “I don’t like complications.”

“And yet you were singing the praises of war earlier, weren’t you?” she asked, lightly enough. Though her blue eyes seemed dark. “I have yet to hear tell of any clean and uncomplicated wars, Crete.”

“That very much depends on whether or not you are winning it, I think.” His hands had moved now, without his knowledge. He was gripping her shoulders, holding her there before him, and he really could not have said if he meant to push her away or draw her closer.

He had never known.

“The trouble with you,” he managed to grit out at her, though it seemed far harder than it should have, “is that you never fit here. You never slotted into place.”

“I think I will take that as a compliment,” she replied, as her chin inched upward. And the way her eyes flashed made him think he’d hit a nerve. “I was far too besotted with you to point out that no one particularly likes being slotted into place as mistress of the month. You do know how to make it all feel like a bit of an assembly line, don’t you?”

“I do not recall you complaining about it.”

She sighed. “I didn’t, did I? But then, I knew I didn’t fit in here, Crete. Much as I take that as a badge of honor, it only goes to show what I’ve been saying all night. Nothing has changed, or will. I guarantee that you will walk in here and find me far less elegant than required. Too messy. Too determined to not slot nicely into the little box you set out for the woman in your life. Eventually this will lead us right back to where we found ourselves two months ago. Why put ourselves through all that again?”

“I wanted to end things with you almost from the start,” he told her, as if the words were being pulled out of him, backward. “Every day I would come home to you, determined that I would draw a line under it. Be done with it. Get my life back at last, so that everything might run smoothly again. That’s how I like it, Timoney. Smooth, unchallenging, predictable in every way.”

Her eyes glittered. “I can see why you stormed the family estate to abduct me away from my own wedding, then.”

“And yet I didn’t do it,” he continued on, almost harshly. “Night after night, I didn’t.” He shook his head, almost as if he had lost this battle. When he did not lose. “Don’t you understand, Timoney? You broke all the rules.”

When all she did was present him with that smile again—so bittersweet that it made him wonder if he’d had a heart all along, for what else could ache like that—he did not wait to hear what other arguments she might mount.

Because there was only one argument that had ever mattered. Only one argument that ever could.

He swept her up into his arms again and this time got his mouth on hers, and he kissed the ache away. Again and again.

Until it made a new one.

Crete carried her over to the low, long sofa that she had often complained was the enemy of comfort and sitting of any kind. He broke the kiss, his chest working as hard as if he’d gone for a run, but he refused to analyze why it was he was so desperate tonight when he had already won.

He had won, damn it.

And this time, when she smiled at him, it was filled with heat and need, passion and longing.

Crete felt it echo in him like relief.

He set himself to the critical task of removing her clothing, at last. Finally, he tossed that cloak aside, with all of its yards and yards of fabric that had concealed her from his view on the drive here. Then he tended to the dress she wore. It was a pretty enough garment, but there was nothing on this earth as pretty as what he uncovered.

Timoney George, naked before him.

The way he always remembered her. The way he always wanted her.

“You, too,” she murmured, sounding impatient enough to make the fire in him blaze higher.

Her hands moved to his coat and then the two of them worked together, with what he was certain was the same sense of urgency, to strip him, too.

And when they were finally skin to skin, he tumbled her down on that couch she’d always hated and exulted in the feel of her. Here where she belonged, after the longest two months of his life.

Naked in his arms, at last.

Naked and wrapped all around him, and the singular joy of it was nearly enough to send him catapulting over that edge.

For another truth he had not told her was that the mistresses of the month had never been like this. None of them could hold a candle to her. He barely remembered them. Sex had always been a pleasant release, but Timoney was something else again.

It was the way her body fit to his, as if they were a set of interlocking parts that only made sense when they were together. It was her scent like honey. It was the way she smiled at him, hot and knowing, when he groaned. It was the way she traced her fingertips down his back, as if making certain he was okay. It was a thousand little things and only one thing, in the end.

It was her.

He wanted to take it slow, but it was impossible. There was a storm between them and Timoney liked nothing better than dancing in that rain.

While he liked nothing more than watching her dance them both into pieces.

They rolled, this way and that, until eventually she climbed astride him and took him deep into her body.

“Epitélous,”he gritted out. At last.

The perfection of it. The slickness. That snug fit, so tight that everything else he was and all he felt seemed to expand in response.

She set their pace, taking him and teasing him in turn. Bringing them both to the edge, then retreating, until he couldn’t tell if it was a game, or revenge, or some glorious combination of both.

And he couldn’t care, not while he was inside her again.

Everything in him urged him to throw her over on her back and ride them both into oblivion.

But instead, Crete filled his hands with her round breasts. He pulled her face down to his to sample the bow of her mouth. He gripped her hips. And all the while he let her do as she would, drawing it out until it seemed the knife’s edge they balanced on cut them both.

Deep.

And when he felt her go over, he watched it move through her. Timoney arched back, her hair all around her, beautiful beyond measure as she shook and shook and cried out his name to the steel beams far above.

Only when she slumped down against him, her open mouth to the crook of his neck, did Crete wrap his arms tighter around her and find his own, hard finish.

And it still wasn’t enough. He was deep inside her, her wildflower honey scent all around him, and it still wasn’t nearly enough.

When he could move, sometime later, he lifted her up again and carried her across the length of the penthouse toward the master suite. He ran her bath, then joined her in it.

And he took her there, too, sitting there behind her. It was a sweet, shattering joining in all that heat.

But that, too, wasn’t enough.

Later, after he’d finally taken her back to their bed and tied her to it—as much to make a point as because it was fun—he gathered her in his arms when they had both finally exploded, and held her there while she fell asleep.

It still didn’t feel like enough, but he let her sleep. He let her burrow her face against his shoulder and murmur what sounded like his name in her sleep.

Such provocation, but all Crete did was stay awake.

He didn’t dare take his eyes from her. There was some part of him that worried that this was some rare dream. That he had never left the flat tonight. That Christmas morning was coming up fast and she would wake in that cursed old house, pull on a white dress, and marry that horrid old toad.

He stayed awake because he wanted this to be real, not a dream.

Because he was beginning to understand that when it came to Timoney, he would never, ever get enough.