Assassin Bride of the Mafia Heir novel · Chapter 4 of 9

Chapter 4: Steam

The bed was empty.

Celia opened her eyes to a room she could not immediately place, and then she could, and the remembering came with a pulse low in her stomach that had nothing to do with fear.

Her body ached. Not the clean soreness of training, not the deep bruise of a fight gone wrong. This was something else, a hollow heat that sat between her thighs and climbed every time she shifted against the sheets. She was still in her clothes from the night before, her jeans unbuttoned, her shirt twisted around her ribs. He had left her like this. He had touched her until she was shaking and then he had stopped, and she had let him stop, and she had spent the whole night burning.

She pressed her palm flat against her stomach and breathed out slow.

So this was what it did to her.

The sound of water running reached her from somewhere beyond the bedroom wall. The bathroom. He was in the shower. She lay still for a long moment, listening to the steady hiss of it, and she could see him in her mind without wanting to: the water cutting down his back, the black hair slicked dark against his skull, the steam rising around him like something out of a film.

She should stay in this bed. She should get up, button her jeans, walk out of this safe house and never look back. She had one day. One day she had given him, and she could spend it anywhere.

Her body was already swinging her legs off the mattress.

She crossed the bedroom barefoot, her boots abandoned by the door, and the floor was cold under her feet. The bathroom door stood half open, steam spilling through the gap into the hallway. She pushed it wider and stepped inside.

The room was full of fog. The mirror over the sink had gone blind with it, and the air was so thick she could feel it settle on her skin, warm and wet. Through the glass of the shower she could see him, a dark shape moving behind the steam, and for a moment she just stood there, watching the blur of him, the broad lines of his shoulders, the way his head tipped back under the spray.

He had not heard her. Or he had, and he was waiting.

She pulled her shirt over her head and let it fall to the tile. Her jeans came next, and she stepped out of them without looking down, and then she was crossing the room in only her underwear, and her hand was on the shower door, and she pulled it open.

He turned.

For one long second neither of them moved. He stood under the water with his hair black and streaming, droplets running down his chest, down the flat plane of his stomach, and his eyes found hers through the steam and held. He did not look surprised. That should have told her something. It did not.

'You're awake,' he said.

'You left.'

'I thought you'd want space.'

'I don't.'

She stepped into the shower and the water hit her all at once, hot and hard, and she gasped with it, and then his hands were on her waist and she was against him, the wet heat of his chest pressing into hers, and she kissed him the way she had wanted to all night, open-mouthed and furious.

He kissed her back like a man who had been waiting for permission.

She got her hands into his hair and pulled, and he made a sound against her mouth, low and rough, and that sound went straight through her, straight down, and she thought: I am going to wreck this man.

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